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This study examines how news media conditions civic (dis)engagement by investigating the news ecosystem as an emotional and informational environment that shapes what citizens feel they can do about their reality. Using a mixed-methods study of the Armenian post-war news ecosystem, we combine structural topic modeling, reflexive emotional coding, and focus groups to examine how news media configure socio-political reality through thematic and emotional patterns, and how citizens navigate this complex mediated environment. The findings reveal a news landscape heavily saturated with security concerns, dominated by themes of war and geopolitics, and characterized, at the level of readers' lived experience, by emotional flatness, ambiguity, and withdrawal. While war coverage elicited intense negative emotions, much of the news landscape failed to maintain affective clarity or engagement. Meanwhile, domains of civic life where citizen agency might be more readily exercised, such as education, healthcare, local governance, remained underdeveloped both narratively and affectively. Focus group results corroborated these findings, reporting deliberate avoidance strategies, like filtering sources, using social networks as buffers, or disconnecting entirely, as responses to overwhelming content that fails to address their actual informational needs. Drawing on complexity theory and critical realism, we conceptualize these patterns as forms of situated agency rather than passive withdrawal under conditions of uncertainty, information overload, and limited perceived efficacy. Our integrated approach, combining computational analysis with reflexive attention to emotional experience, illuminates how post-war news ecosystems create conditions that constrain rather than enable civic engagement, and suggests a methodological approach for nuanced analyses of media–citizenship relations in other contexts.
Manusyan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.