Effective media representations

“A central medium for (territorial) ideologies is the control of publicity.

Thus, publicity is inextricably bound up with power.” (Paasi 1996, 91)

In reaching ever-wider audiences faster than ever, the media can provide publicity, visibility, and authority to representations of socio-spatial identity.

The mass media possesses significant power in public agenda setting (less in how people discuss these topics), and it can affect its audience’s cognition through sheer volume and repetition (Entman 1991; Castells 2009; Paul &

Matthews 2016). Moreover, mediated images entail a visual power-knowledge regime on socio-spatial thought, identifications, naturalised assumptions, and imaginations (Gregory 1994, 33; Ek 2006, 46; Anderson 2007, 229–246).

For example, this is instrumentalised in claims about the legitimacy of political movements through aesthetic representations of “the common people”

(Moffitt 2016, 103).

Besides the possibilities of manipulating impressions, mediated representations have several limitations. Still images cannot communicate situations, abstracts, creative contexts and relationships, plots, negations, or lingual particularities (Hahn 2008, 194). In particular, mediated communication lacks much of the situationally bound context of presence (where and how representation is engendered), giving them more ontological characteristics of artefacts than performances (Hogan 2010, 380–382). The mediation of apparently objective images is especially prone to failing to capture the situated meanings in translations of intercultural communication. In this framework Oliver Hahn (2008, 194) emphasises that discourses do not travel with images.

It is a well-established thesis that rhetorical persuasion is effective when the audience identifies with narrated representations, shares their values, and positions itself as a participant on the rhetorician’s side. Effective communication therefore benefits from the adoption (and amplifying repetition) of the value-embedded signs to which the audience relates (Burke 1969, 55–59: Madianou 2005; Nooteboom 2012). Accordingly, journalists do

ask questions and make judgements, positioning themselves as representative proxies of their audience and claiming their “voice” (Moffitt 2016, 108). For example, journalists on Russian federal television channels regularly narrate divisions between “Us” and “Them”. Here, “Us” consists of the authorities and the audience with whom they have a paternal relationship, whereas “Them”

consists of ad hoc facets of both the domestic and international opponents of the Russian authorities (Novikova 2014, 154–155; Zvereva 2007; Tolz 2017;

see Chapter 3.3).

Definitions of “normal” or “appropriate” media use are value-laden, often implying efforts to establish an attractive “our” communication or news culture.

Castells’ (2009, 54) definition of communication as the “sharing of meaning through the exchange of information” notably resembles the controversial concept of culture. Its definitions usually embed the embodied symbolism of collective belonging and historical legacy (Brah 1998, 18), which therefore overlap with discourses and subjectivities related to nation-ness (see Sections 2 and 3). Concerning news culture, Michael Schudson has argued that:

It is impossible to separate “news” from “culture”; (what journalists) produce and reproduce is not information – if there is such a thing; it is what is recognized or accepted as public knowledge given certain political structures and traditions. (Schudson 1995, 31)

Similarly, the national media discourse produces nationally bound cultures of mediated communication. Generally, television has been an important field of post-Soviet identity subjectification, in which commercial entertainment has been equated with the Western and Western-associated globalised culture vis-à-vis the traditional Russian high culture (kul’turnost’). Moreover, the globalised commercial culture has been associated with Western imperialism, partly on the basis of the historical background of the Soviet Union’s global ideological influence (Hutchings 2004, 153–173). However, the aesthetic presentation on Russian national TV has clearly followed the example of companies like CNN and the BBC (Pomerantsev, 2013). While light entertainment still prevails in Russia, there is great power in the attractive definitions and ideals of the kind of information sources media users should

choose. This becomes increasingly important with media users’ limited attention spans in dealing with the abundance of information available to them (Floridi 2015b, 12).

The media may imply that it shows the world “as it is”, but these representations in critical interpretation always embed the relational elements of framing choices, false immediacy, and claims of how things should be. In this regard, journalists tend to conform with expected audience values in their news framing (e.g. Entman 1991). In the Russian context Sarah Oates (2009) has concluded that the Russian television audience acknowledges and accepts that media information is politically filtered. Oates characterises this norm as a “neo-Soviet media model”, because:

It is most useful in thinking about the nature and role of the audience.

The Soviet audience understood that the news was meant to be inspi-rational, rather than informational. Russians report some frustration with that, but a surprisingly large number also recall it with affection and nostalgia. There is nothing so frustrating as a barrage of bad news which one has no ability to counteract or address. This comprehensi-on of the Russian audience allows us to better understand the lack of concern and outcry over the narrowing of media freedom of Russia (Oates 2009, 54).

The appealing self-presentation of audiences was apparent with the peaking popularity of Russian TV following its representations about Ukraine, and especially the annexation of Crimea in 2014. This is interpretated as reflecting how the audience embraced the emotional gratification, and that issues were presented in accordance with the audience’s wishes rather than on the basis of the representations’ information accuracy and public accountability (Lipman, Kachkaeva & Poyker 2018: 168; Babayan 2015).

Experts argue that Russian journalists and media personalities practise conformist but creative and even self-fulfilling self-censorship to present what they understand as appropriate in the context of the Russian media.

As much of its content can be classified as entertainment, commercial

sometimes overridden by political motives (Pasti & Paloposki 2011; Vartanova

& Kolomiitsa 2015; Yablokov & Schimfossl 2014; Bordunova, Litvinenko, &

Nigmatullina 2020).

Regarding Russianness in Finland, the fall of the Soviet Union is seen as having “liberated” the Finnish media discourse from the previous self-censorship to publicly criticise Russia. During the 1990s news about Russia followed discussions about immigration and the “multiculturalisation” of Finnish society (Raittila 2004: 163), before the emergence of the beneficial Russian tourists discourse in the 2000s. In the early 2010s interviews with Finnish newspaper editors-in-chief manifested expectations of their readerships’ negative images of Russia (Ojajärvi & Valtonen 2011: 27, 49).

Ojajärvi and Valtonen highlight the contrast in the pronounced mission of Finnish newspaper editors to make Russia more understandable for their readers and the constant frame of Russian illegibility in their publications (ibid. 36, 43–45). While researchers have rarely criticised the validity of portrayals of Russia and Russians in the Finnish media, many have criticised the production of the overall view of Russia, and the unbalanced overall picture the scandal-driven news agenda may provide (Vihavainen 2013: 285;

Pietiläinen 2011; Laine 2015).