Two in a room. (с) Pavel Lisitsyn / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.Today, many researchers agree that the influence exerted by television on Russia’s citizens is an important source of power for Putin’s regime. But this idea is more of a political statement than an established fact. For media researchers, how a viewer perceives what is broadcast to them is a “black box” — in order to understand exactly how this process works, qualitative empirical analysis is required.
Preliminary results of research I’ve conducted at the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European University at St Petersburg suggest that the way people consume television news is far from a simple process, and that, when they have the opportunity to do so, viewers are capable of engaging in complex critical analysis.
My study’s primary focus is on Russian television viewers’ perception and analysis of news broadcasts regarding the situation in Ukraine. Eight focus groups were held in St Petersburg (November 2016) and Moscow (March 2017). These focus groups revolved around coverage of three main events broadcast by Russia’s Channel One: the Kiev protests of 2013; the 2014 referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk; and the armed clashes that took place in eastern Ukraine over the course of that same year.
