The imbalance between editorial practices of mass media and personal perceptions of legal values (based on a survey of Siberian journalists)

In the context of implementing Presidential Decree No. 809 of the Russian Federation dated November 9, 2022, which defines the strengthening of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values as a strategic state task, the scientific understanding of the role of media in the processes of legal education and the formation of legal culture acquires special significance. The subject of the study in this article is legal values, while the object is the legal consciousness of the media community. The media are analyzed as an independent subject (due to editorial policy), as well as a tool for legal education implemented by the state and society. The key problematic situation lies in identifying the dissonance between the high significance of values declared by journalists and their subjective assessment of their representation in media discourse, as well as between those assessments and the results of content analysis of Russian media. The study is conducted at the intersection of legal and philological sciences, using the principles of historicism, systemicity, and complexity. The methodological toolkit includes a systemic approach, factual, comparative, and historical analysis, content analysis, as well as a sociological survey (questionnaire) using the non-parametric Wilcoxon T-test. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the application of a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative data from a sociological survey of Siberian journalists with qualitative analysis of professional assessments and objective data from the author's content analysis of federal media (2010-2024). A statistically confirmed imbalance between the perception of the importance of legal values and the assessment of their coverage in the media indicates a discrepancy between editorial practices and the personal attitudes of content creators. A matrix model has been proposed and tested to visually interpret the discrepancies. It has been identified that the most critical situation (yellow zone) exists around human life, rights and freedoms, dignity, justice, and humanism, where the gap between importance and coverage reaches 28-45 percentage points. The high declarative significance of values is not supported by the personal involvement of journalists, especially regarding dignity and human rights. A low level of recognition of axiological content has been identified (6% of respondents were able to name specific memorable materials). The declared redundancy of coverage of patriotic themes (red zone) is presumably related not to the number of mentions but to the genre and stylistic uniformity of the presentation. Based on empirical data, recommendations have been formulated to improve editorial policy, including organizational and substantive measures.