Jakub Walczak

In the article the author has analyzed the presence of the religious topic in the tabloids. The author diagnoses a part of the Polish and Russian society that is the recipient of this kind of media. First of all, it must be noted that the Polish and Russian tabloids are similar regarding their form and content. Presenting the spirituality is included into the narrative scheme in which are used the oversimplified criteria of the reality assessment. This simplification consists in the radical sharpening of the assessments and using the pragmatic ethic that is based on the situation ethics. The recipient is fairly alert and at the same time susceptible to the mechanisms of such influence. On one hand they receive superficial religiosity, lacking in the theological nuances, and on the other they get the identification mechanism with defined attitudes that confirms the validity of their beliefs. Ironically, the recipients of extremely divergent views will find the confirmation in such tabloids, each one for their own beliefs. When it comes to the issues regarding ethics and culture that are related to the religiosity topic in a natural way, the tabloids present the noticeable tendency to justify the infringements of the representatives of the group “us” and strong stigmatization of the group “them”. However, what is the most important, the dispute on the fundamental issues, axiology and the universalities of the tabloids fall into the trap of the entertainment; such discussion is supposed to be of deep content, spiritual and constitute the counterweight to the “vanity fair”, but it becomes a cheap sensation instead. This process, that one might call tabloidization, oversimplifies the medial communication, eliminates the need of intellectual effort within the process of media content reception and at the same time oversimplifying the value system.