| Abstract [eng] |
Public opinion researches and their results are becoming an increasingly important part of public discourse in Lithuania. This is greatly influenced by the media – the choices of journalists determine which polls attract more public attention and the way they are presented. The perceived accuracy of these researches depends on this. For this reason, it is important to understand how journalists estimate public opinion researches in Lithuania and what impact on publishing of these polls in the media it has – this is the aim of the thesis. The paper discusses the concept of public opinion and the development of its researches in Lithuania, the peculiarities of publishing these polls in the mass media. It is also reviewed how national and international laws, agreements, codes of professional ethics regulate journalists’ work on public opinion researches and their results. Moreover, the paper discusses the concept of trust and the factors determing its formation. Theoretical approaches are based on the insights of scientists Vladas Gaidys, Denis McQuail, Michael Schudson, Johan Galtung, Niklas Luhman, Piotr Sztompka and others. In order to determine whether journalists trust the public opinion researches in Lithuania and how they use them in creating media content, articles which review the results of these surveys in online news media – delfi.lt, 15min.lt, lrt.lt, from January to June, 2019 are analyzed. Theoretical (analytical, analogy, generalization, genetic and induction) and empirical (document analysis, content analysis and expert interviews) methods are used to achieve the goal of the work. It has been established that journalists generally trust public opinion researches in Lithuania, but the attitude strength and resistance to change differ. Journalists who rely more on these surveys are also more likely to use the results in their work, while journalists who rate public opinion polls as only partially reliable are more skeptical, most often republish news agency reports or use the results as contextual material. Despite the level of trust, journalists do not always follow international guidelines to ensure the reliability of surveys. |
