The election news story on Russian television: A world apart from viewers

Slavic Review

Volumn 65, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-23

  Mickiewicz, Ellen ^a,b,c  

^a DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy   (United States)

^b DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c CARTER CENTER   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33744525880     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/4148520     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Ellen Mickiewicz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (Durham, 1999).
2. Maksim Meier, "Prezident v 1996 godu: Stsenarii i tekhnologii pobedy," Fond effektivnoi politiki, lecture 1 (March 1996) and "Epilogue" (July 1996): 44.
3. Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 19.
4. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C., 2003), 100-101.
5. For these ratings, see http://www.tns-global.ru/rus/data/ratings/tv/ russia/top_100/_20051010_20051016/index.wbp (last consulted 11 November 2005)
6. Paul Beck, Russell Dalton, Steven Greene, and Robert Huckfeldt, "The Social Calculus of Voting: Interpersonal, Media, and Organizational Influences on Presidential Choices," American Political Science Review 96, no. 1 (March 2002): 61.
7. W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler, Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning (Chicago, 1992), 88-89.
8. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 117. Emphasis in the original.
9. Ellen Mickiewicz, "Excavating Hidden Tradeoffs," Political Communication 22 (2005): 355-80.
10. See the extensive studies by J. A. Ferejohn and J. H. Kuklinski, Information and Democratic Processes (Urbana, 1990);
11. D. C. Mutz, P. M. Sniderman, and R. A. Brody, eds., Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (Ann Arbor, 1996);
12. Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Samuel L. Popkin, eds., Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (Cambridge, Eng., 2000);
13. R. McDermott, "Arms Control and the First Reagan Administration: Belief-Systems and Policy Choices," Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 29-59.
14. Mickiewicz, "Excavating Hidden Tradeoffs."
15. Shanto Iyengar, Mark D. Peters, and Donald R. Kinder, "Experimental Demonstrations of the 'Not-So-Minimal' Consequences of Television News Programs," American Political Science Review 76, no. 3 (September 1982): 855.
16. Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago, 1991), 133.
17. Shanto Iyengar and Stephen Ansolabehere, Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (New York, 1995).
18. Fritz Strack, Norbert Schwarz, Herbert Bless, Almut Kübler, and Michaela Wänke, "Awareness of the Influence as a Determinant of Assimilation versus Contrast," European Journal of Social Psychology 23, no. 1 (January 1993): 59.
19. Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 74.
20. Ellen Mickiewicz, "Does 'Trust' Mean Attention, Comprehension, and Acceptance? Paradoxes of Russian Viewers' News Processing," in K. Voltmer, ed., Mass Media and New Democracies (London, forthcoming).
21. In 2004, REN-TV, a Moscow-based network with less than 50 percent penetration, drew ratings for its independent news coverage that made it number one in Moscow. That was not true of any of the other cities to which it broadcast truncated headline-type news. With Moscow always the center of the political universe, however, this development made REN-TV especially vulnerable, and plans were developed to remove it from its owners' hands by redirecting 70 percent of its stock and to warn the owner that entertainment should be substituted for news. In 2005 Irena Lesnevskaia and her son, founders of REN-TV, sold their shares in the station and exited the market.
22. Mickiewicz, Changing Channels.
23. Doris A. Graber, Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (Chicago, 2001), 50-51.
24. Gamson, Talking Politics, 192. Emphasis in the original.
25. Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone, "Rethinking the Focus Group in Media and Communications Research," Journal of Communication 46, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 79-98.
26. I thank Danielle Lussier for her very knowledgeable observations on these regional features and Robert Orttung for his expert assistance.
27. Russian Regional Report, various years;
28. Obshchestvennaia ekspertiza: Anatomiia svobody slova (Moscow, 2000);
29. Julia Wishnevsky, The Evolution of the Russian Communist Party: The Regional Focus, ed. Elizabeth Teague (Washington, D.C, 1999).
30. As commercial channels, I am counting those channels that broadcast entirely on a channel or share the broadcast time with another channel and whose audiences are large enough to get reasonable ratings. Regional television is overall in a difficult position. Some notable exceptions exist, such as independent television in Tomsk, but, in general, as one study concluded: "Companies as a rule engage in media business as business by other means using the mass media to advance it. Individually standing TV-companies are already becoming a rarity for the market." R. Kriazhev, "Regional'noe televidenie v razreze: Obshchestvennost', struktura, upravlenie, strategii," Sreda 1 (37) (January 2002): 19. Emphasis in the original.
31. For a demographic and media-use profile of the focus groups, see the appendix.
32. The full transcript of the news stories may be requested from the author.
33. Channel 1 did not cover the election that day. In any case, its stories were usually considerably shorter and the government view was better developed on Channel 2.
34. Lunt and Livingstone, "Rethinking the Focus Group," 91.
35. Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections without Order: Russia's Challenge to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 175-76. Private television stations have a lower penetration than state television stations. Reception for private stations can vary from 30 percent (for REN-TV) to about 64 percent (for NTV). Thus, for purposes of comparison, it is helpful to look at the choices made by viewers who have the given option available.
36. "On basic guarantees of electoral rights and the right of participation in referendums for citizens of the Russian Federation," 11 December 2004, para. 1.4. For this citation, I thank one of the anonymous referees.
37. Derek Hutcheson, "Disengaged or Disenchanted? The Vote 'Against All' in Post-Communist Russia," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20, no. 1 (March 2004): 99, 103.
38. Aleksandr Khramchikhin, "We the Non-Undersigned," Profil, 25 August 2003, from wps.ru/e_index.html and Johnson's List, 4 November 2003, no. 7399, art. 8 (www.cdi.org; last consulted 11 November 2005).
39. See, for example, Patrick Armstrong, "Against All - A Popular Candidate," Johnson's List, no. 13 (21 January 2004), no. 7476;
40. Hutcheson, "Disengaged or Disenchanted?" 105;
41. Julie A. Corwin, "Russia Bids Farewell to Regional Elections," RFE/RL NEWSLINE 9, no. 2, pt. 1 (5 January 2005);
42. Stephen White and Ian McAllister, "Voting and Nonvoting in Postcommunist Europe" (paper presented to the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2004).
43. A. Oslon and E. Petrenko, Parlamentskie vybory i voprosy obshchestvennogo mneniia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine 1993 goda (Moscow, 1993).
44. The Public Opinion Foundation survey was fielded 18 December 1993, with a sample of 1,593 Russian citizens and was conducted in large, medium, and small cities and in rural areas in ten regions of Russia.
45. William Crotty, "Political Participation: Mapping the Terrain," in William Crotty, ed., Political Participation and American Democracy (New York, 1991), 1-22.
46. The points I make here and the reaction of the focus group participants bears a superficial resemblance to American research on negative advertising. Among political scientists in the United States, there is a vigorous debate about negative political advertising and its role in depressing turnout, and the findings are still quite mixed. Thus, even in the U.S. literature, the association between negative ads and voter turnout is still unclear. In addition, it would be a further error to layer onto the Russian electoral scene what is very distant from it: American voting behavior.
47. In the short supplementary questionnaire, I used news of Chechnia for several reasons: the issue is of importance to all regions; Chechnia is geographically much closer to Rostov-on-Don and even Volgograd than to the other two cities, and I wanted to see whether that made a difference in media consumption patterns; it was - and remains - an issue about which views differ significantly. Thus, although Chechnia was not a subject specifically brought up with respect to elections, it was an important cue for information consumption. Moreover, Chechnia did come up spontaneously in conversations about the oil pipeline in terms of its likely vulnerability to terrorism.