journalism

Humour is located in the sensitive areas of the two basic human freedoms: the freedom of expression and the freedom of belief. The paper is focused on humour in media discourse on religion as a factor of conflict and examines important factors underexposed. According to the results of the pilot project, conducted in Russia, the approaches and attitudes towards humour as a well as a will for compromise and consensus differ in Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant communities. Authors suggest the mapping the “zone of mutual responsibility” of journalists and religious leaders will lead to elaborating the “pact on humour” between them. For the future research authors propose to analyse the religious and ethnic factors in the formation of a sense of humour and culture of laughter in general in order to have more detailed picture on strictly religious sensitivity towards humour.

The relativisation of truth and the blurring of the boundaries between truth and falsehood in the public sphere are nowadays positioned in media discourse and academic literature as a normal historical process and described by the term “post-truth”. The author proposes to subject its correctness and heuristic value to careful critical analysis. “Post-truth” according to the author denotes a fundamentally important essential substitution: truth in it is stripped of its absolute status and placed in the same line with things temporary, finite, conventional – post-communism, post-totalitarianism, post-modernism, post-secularism, etc. Therefore, the author calls to avoid the term “post-truth” since it contains not only a logical, but also an ontological error.

Предметом исследования является восприятие в российском обществе образа России, созданного британским писателем С. Грэхемом в годы Первой мировой войны. Он отстаивал самобытность России, а ее силу видел в сохранении религиозно-консервативных устоев. Подобный подход вызвал серьезную критику со стороны представителей буржуазно-демократических кругов, которые считали, что такой образ России не только не соответствует действительности, но и вредит союзническим отношениям. Вредным такой взгляд для самой России считал известный писатель М. Горький.