Political communications in the post-truth society: citizens and trust in information sources

The article considers trust in media as an important issue of political communication in Russian society. The author provides empirical evidence that trust in media is low. Citizens tend to distrust TV, the press, and radio more than the Internet. The most reliable source of information is interpersonal communication. The research results confirmed that trust in Russian media is determined by a number of factors: attitude to socio-economic problems; trust in key power institutions and the political system as a whole; evaluations of media social functions performance. The author argues that current transformations of global capitalism bring additional complexities for media trust building. These include: fundamental technological changes in the field of communications; an increase in the level of constructability of «pictures of the world» in conditions of a postmodern political-economic and socio-cultural environment; changing global liberal information order; the dominance of the economic imperative in media activities and the erosion of the role of media as the «fourth power»; transformation of rational discursive practices and introduction of search algorithms as fundamental features of the digital Internet environment.