Culture and entertainment in Russian and German media discourses

Abstract

The paper deals with the problem of culture-forming function in media. Currently, more and more studies show that culture in media ceases to be a value-oriented tool for the audience. The entertainment function prevails over the culture-forming one, which belittles the significance of culture and cultural journalism in general. The author reflects on the question: is it true that culture in the media has completely transformed into an entertainment segment and has only a hedonistic effect? The topics of media publications of the culture section are diverse and include general cultural issues, famous dates, and cultural events. The range of cultural facts and events in media is quite wide. Among them are literature, fine arts, music, film art, etc. The purpose of this study is to establish how the culture section is presented in modern media and what are its specifics on the materials of Russian- and German-language online platforms and to find out whether the culture-forming function is preserved or the cultural content is rather aimed at entertainment. For this purpose, the author analyzed Russian and German online media in terms of the organization of cultural content (presence/absence of the culture section), as well as studied the semantic structure of the lexemes Entertainment and die Unterhaltung, identified the main features of the culture section and the presence of a culture-forming function in online materials when alternative titles are used in it (Entertainment in Russian media publications / Unterhaltung in German media publications).