Amid the uproar over designer Juozas Statkevičius’s remarks about Lithuania, in which, among other things, he complains about allegedly constant “Russia is attacking us” propaganda, the media monitoring and analysis company “Mediaskopas” looked into how firmly the topic of the Russian threat is actually established in the Lithuanian media. Over the past two years, 5,123 media mentions related to the threat from Russia have been recorded. Is that a lot or a little? Knowing that other topics that scare Lithuanians are the financial crisis or the real estate bubble, we can compare and say that the threat of a financial crisis is more heavily escalated in the media — during the same period, 6,598 mentions related to a financial crisis in Lithuania were published, while only 1,322 mentions of the real estate bubble were recorded.
When analyzing month by month, it can be seen that as the topic of the financial crisis gains momentum, the threat from Russia is often pushed to the side. Perhaps this shows that we simply want to be afraid of something, and what exactly it is does not matter all that much. Just so that we do not lose our self-preservation instinct? Especially since scientists recently confirmed that, for example, fear of spiders and snakes is the result of millions of years of evolution: https://www.15min.lt/mokslasit/article/technology/on-the-question-of-whether-fear-of-spiders-and-snakes-is-innate-scientists-answered-by-scaring-babies-646-871422
The uproar sparked by Juozas Statkevičius was unexpectedly eclipsed by Rūta Vanagaitė’s statements about partisan leader Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, our October trend analysis showed.
At the end of the month, after the scandal broke, R. Vanagaitė was mentioned in 414 media reports, while J. Statkevičius appeared in 188.
