Positioning of facts, meanings and terms in the media: theoretical approaches and practice of covering the problems of terrorism

The interpretation and interrelation of the concepts of “fact”, “meaning”, “term” throughout the 20th–21st centuries were constantly in the zone of interest of researchers: sociologists, philosophers, cultural scientists, linguists, lawyers, as well as writers and journalists. At the same time, this connection, outwardly understandable and logical, was understood as an increasingly complex composition, depending both on the peculiarities of human perception and on the social modeling of various kinds of messages to target audiences. This article examines the dynamics and current state of these ideas, connected, on the one hand, with the internetization and mediatization of society; and, on the other, motivated by the presence and strengthening of the global socio-political conjuncture at the interstate and other levels. The author’s research focuses on the problems of terrorism as the most acute and revealing. There is no unified internationally accepted definition of terrorism. To an even greater extent, this applies to social practice, in the process of which the perpetrators and customers of terrorist attacks are determined by interested parties in different ways, up to the complete opposite. The immediate facts of terror are interpreted in the same way, when the fixation of a real event is supplemented or completely replaced by a demonstration of its meaning. The article examines the prerequisites and modern practice of creating and subsequent application of factual, meaning and terms elements in the compositions of published messages. By analyzing the materials of Russian and Western mass media, the author explores the dynamic change in the goals and roles of these elements in influencing target audiences. In the course of the study, the hypothesis is put forward and confirmed that reports of acts of terror turn into an instrument of information warfare, and their semantic part acquires a dominant character. Technologies are being developed to verify the facts for authenticity and identify the primary goals of the authors of the messages. However, the priority form of counter-actions is the formation of stereotypical attitudes among target groups to the rejection of events, statements and their content designations in the media, qualified by the state as terrorist.