Broadcasting agitainment: a new media strategy of Putin’s third presidency

ABSTRACT

This article argues that accounts of the Russian media system that tend to view the time from Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000 as a single homogenous period do not capture major qualitative shifts in state-controlled media coverage. By analyzing the output of Russia’s two main television channels during Putin’s third presidential term, we identify a range of distinctly new features that amount to a new media strategy. This involves a significant increase in the coverage of political issues through the replacement of infotainment with what we term agitainment—an ideologically inflected content that, through adapting global media formats to local needs, attempts to appeal to less engaged and even sceptical viewers. Despite the tightening of political control over the media following the annexation of Crimea, the new strategy paradoxically has strengthened the constitutive role played by the state-controlled broadcasters in the articulation of official discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian media system
• Putin’s third presidential term
• agitainment
• neo-authoritarian regime

Notes

1. The project for which the systematic monitoring of the two main Russian television channels was conducted is “Mediating Post – Soviet Difference: An Analysis of Russian Television Representations of Inter – Ethnic Cohesion Issues.” For additional details, see the note on funding immediately above. The entry on funding is below, not above.

2. The Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTSIOM) study was commissioned for the Kremlin’s 2013 Valdai Discussion Club session fully dedicated to exploring Russia – related identity issues, thus revealing the Kremlin’s concern with the subject.

3. Interview with Dmitrii Kiselev on 17 March 2013, within the framework of the “Mediating Post – Soviet Difference” project (see note 5).

4. For a description of the show on Channel 1’s website see: http://www.1tv.ru/shows/politika/o-proekte.

5. See note 3.

6. Interviews with a Rossiya journalist, 29 March 2013, and with a Channel 1 journalist, 3 April 2013.