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

Vera Tolz and Yuri Teper

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2018, vol. 34, issue 4, 213-227

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.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1060586X.2018.1459023 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpsaxx:v:34:y:2018:i:4:p:213-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rpsa20

DOI: 10.1080/1060586X.2018.1459023

Access Statistics for this article

Post-Soviet Affairs is currently edited by Timothy Frye

More articles in Post-Soviet Affairs from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().