Making Sense of the News
in a Hybrid Regime: How Young Russians Decode State TV and an Oppositional Blog –Florian Teopfl - Journal
of Communication – 2.011
The
first paper I chose is a case study using in-depth interviews of 20 students from leading
universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. There’s been an increasingly intense
debate on how the rise of Internet mediated communication has impacted politics
in (semi) authoritarian regimes. This study focuses on how citizens in Russia are
making sense of political messages they encounter online in a more
fragmented media environment than the traditional media typically offer. It’s and exploratory study
that compares how young Russians make sense of a liberal-democratic blog entry
and by contrast, a news broadcast from state-controlled TV.
The interviewees are classified into three groups of decoders: affirmative, oppositional and negotiating. Interviewees were presented with Russian news segments about an
election, where affirmative decoders were the once who agreed with what was
presented to them in the news, oppositional decoders were critics of the news
content and the objectivity of the channel, and negotiated were kind of in the
middle agreeing that the channel is a power source, not creating un-biased
content being oppositional but adaptive.
I
learned a couple of new terms like criterion sampling and maximum variation
sampling, that is used when picking a group of people for interviews. In this
paper maximum variation sampling was used to get individuals differing widely
in terms of their political worldview, age, gender, and course of study. The
interviewees differed a lot in sense of political stance from “no political
view” to “liberal”, and if this sampling method wouldn’t have been applied, the
results of the study could have been misrepresented. Another thing I learned is
to be careful about self-identification when getting information in qualitative
studies. For example, in this study a student could claim to be “democratic”
but at the same time being straightforward supporters of Putin, since they
understood the self-identification of the party as “democratic” literally. Other
students who claimed to be “democratic” were clearly opposing Putin, so
self-identification is a topic that has to be considered.
The
study is using unstructured interviewing. For example interviewees were
presented video content form both traditional Russian media, as well as liberal
blogs with a video showing a leader of a liberal-democratic oppositional
movement being arrested, and then got to voice their opinions in a free form
until they had no more to say about it. Unstructured interviews may have some
initial guiding questions or core concept to talk about, but there is no formal
structured protocol. The interviewer is at liberty to move the conversation in
any direction of interest, and is useful for exploring a topic broadly. It
prioritizes validity and the depth of the interviewees’ answers, but falls
short on reliability at the same time. Since each interview tends to be unique
with no predetermined set of questions asked for all respondents, it’s more
difficult to analyze the data, especially when synthesizing across respondents,
which make it difficult to find patterns.
The
topic is mainly unexplored and I think that this study is important for future
research in the area. However, the study is conducted only using 20
interviewees, they are all university students from only two universities which
ignores other major and important citizens groups.
Media Coverage of Women
in Politics: The Curious Case of Sarah Palin
Philo
C. Wasburn and Mara H. Wasburn - Media, Culture & Society (1.092)
Comparing
this research paper with “The Process of Building Theories from Case Study
Research”, the paper has a good start off point defining what the purpose of
the study is, comparing the usual media coverage in general for female
politicians as well as this specific case of Sarah Palin. The study chose analyze
media coverage of Sarah Palin with respect to her democratic opponent Joe Biden,
using both Newsweek and Time magazine to represent the mainstream news coverage,
which I think are viable sources for the specific topic at hand, avoiding
random sampling. Since those magazines are parts of major media corporations
that have several other news companies within their corporations, such as CNN, I
think that the way Palin is portrayed is probably applicable to other news
platforms as well. Moving on the paper does a good job in many other areas such
as searching evidence for “why” behind relationships. For example why Palin got
so much media coverage where usually female politicians in America doesn’t, and
what effect that gave in this specific case. The study does a good job in comparing with both conflicting and similar literature, trying to explain causes and reasons in the case of Palin.
Case Study
Case study refers to the collection
and presentation of detailed information about a particular participant or
small group. It's a form
of qualitative descriptive research that draws conclusions only about the specific participant or group and only in that specific context. Case study researchers do not
focus on the discovery of a generalizable truth, nor do they
typically look for cause-effect relationships but instead emphasis is placed on
exploration and description.
I had not heard about the problem of self-identification before I read this blog post. It is an important issue to remember (also in daily life). It is easy to declare yourself as a democratic, a vegetarian, or an environmentalist, but who knows what that persons definition is of that terminology. A person can also have a strong desire to, for whatever reason, want to be or belong to something even though they are not.
SvaraRaderaIt must have been an interesting article. I have a lot of experience with Chinese people in China, and they are experts at reading between the lines, listening to gossip, and things that are NOT said. I assume the Russian people, who live under the same lack-of-real-news situation have a similar experience.
Hey Oscar!
SvaraRaderaI found your second article to be very interesting, and I believe that the usage of media channels for politics is a sensitive subject. The was Sara Palin for example is portrayed in media can affect her whole election process, the line between winning and loosing can be extremely thin, and the difference between winning and loosing is huge. What was the key findings in the paper? Did the authors come up with a strategy how to handle these questions or what was the end result?
Hello Mr Friberg,
SvaraRaderaI love the titles of both articles that you chose, it is tempting to take a closer look at both of them. However, my question is here about the first one - the young Russians and their relation to those media channels. I wonder if they contrasted these young Russians and compared them to some other study, perhaps a similar one conducted somewhere else? Because I guess it is hard to state what types of insights you gain if you just look at the spectrum of these young Russians and do not compare them to people from another culture and whatnot, right? Perhaps that is the main point of a qualitative study though, that it is hard to quantify and generalize globally. What do you think?