ABSTRACT

Although Lithuania is rated “Free” in “Freedom in the World 2023” and scored 89 points out of 100 in the index, trust in the media in Lithuania fell from sixth place in Europe to record lows during the pandemic (Vilmorus, 2023), when the wave of misinformation and fake news was so huge that the World Health Organization declared that the world was also facing an “infodemic” (Richtel, 2020).  

This research has the purpose of studying how journalists in Lithuania perceive how journalism was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and how they perceive their role in fighting fake news and regaining the trust of the public. It also aims to figure out what professional roles journalists in Lithuania identify themselves with the most and what influences from the Hierarchical Influences model of Shoemaker and Reese have the biggest effect on them. The study is based on the questionnaire completed by 51 journalists from the main newsrooms in Lithuania. 

In the paper, a model called the “model of influences to roles of journalists” was developed to demonstrate how the various influences can interact with each of the normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles of journalists which were described by Hanitzsch. A central finding is that there is no big difference between journalistic role perception and their declared measures in fighting fake news and trying to regain the public‘s trust in the media. As it is shown in the Analysis chapter, all six dimensions of journalistic role performance, introduced by Claudia Mellado, are influenced by all five levels of influences from the Hierarchical Influences model.