Following the uproar over designer Juozas Statkevičius’ comments about Lithuania, in which, among other things, he rails against the supposedly constant propaganda that “Russia is attacking us,” the media monitoring and analysis company “Mediaskopas” looked into how firmly the topic of the Russian threat has actually taken root in Lithuanian media. Over the past two years, 5,123 media reports 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 escalated more in the media — 6,598 reports related to the financial crisis in Lithuania were published over the same period, while only 1,322 reports about the real estate bubble were recorded.
Looking at it month by month, it is possible to notice that when the topic of the financial crisis gains momentum, the Russian threat is often pushed aside. Perhaps this shows that we simply want to be afraid of something, and what exactly it is is not so important. Just so that we do not lose our self-preservation instinct? Especially since scientists recently confirmed that, for example, the fear of spiders and snakes is the result of millions of years of evolution: https://www.15min.lt/mokslasit/article/technology/to-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 drowned out by Rūta Vanagaitė’s statements about partisan commander Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, our October trend analysis showed.
By the end of the month, after the scandal broke, R. Vanagaitė had been mentioned in 414 media reports, while J. Statkevičius had appeared in 188.
