Legal values of "humanism" and "justice" in the discourse of contemporary Russian media

Mass media play a significant role in shaping legal culture, the core of which consists of legal values. Subject of the research is the discourse of Russian mass media as a space for the representation of legal values; the topic includes the substantive and quantitative characteristics of the representation in the legal context of the values of humanism and justice in the leading federal media – "Kommersant," "Rossiyskaya Gazeta," and "Vesti Nedeli" in 2010 and 2024. The study is significant for the development of the legal culture of society and the resolution of the state task of preserving traditional Russian values. Humanism and justice are considered fundamental principles for the functioning of the legal system and moral benchmarks in demand by the audience, the effectiveness of which directly depends on their media representation. Recommendations for improving legal education through media are substantiated. The results expand the theoretical apparatus of media linguistics and the theory of state and law. The research was conducted at the intersection of philological and legal sciences, utilizing content analysis (complete sampling of media texts mentioning values in a legal context), comparative and historical analysis, and elements of stylistic analysis. Reliability is ensured by checking inter-expert reliability (Cohen's kappa 0.9 and 0.82). For the first time, an analysis of the representation of humanism and justice in the legal context during the period of 2010-2024 has been conducted; a content analysis codifier has been developed, and a classification of information triggers has been proposed. It has been established that despite the increase in the number of materials mentioning values, their share in the overall volume of texts does not correspond to the scale of the state task, confirming the hypothesis of a gap between the declared significance of values and their actual media representation. A shift from a moral-philosophical representation of values to an instrumental-explanatory one has been identified (the share of the information trigger "offense" increased in "Kommersant" from 30.3% to 40.2%, in "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" from 11.1% to 24.2%; the share of "norm creation" increased from 12.1% to 30.4% and from 4.8% to 26.6%, respectively), accompanied by a loss of emotional dimensions (the share of personal information triggers decreased in "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" by 70%, in "Kommersant" by 62%, in "Vesti Nedeli" all materials in 2024 are dedicated to norm creation). It has been demonstrated that 4 out of 5 identified types of information triggers are related to the state, while initiatives of civil society remain outside the federal agenda, narrowing the spectrum of transmitted meanings.