This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.
The 2018 Skripal poisonings prompted the heavy securitisation of UK-Russian relations. Despite the ensuing tight coordination between the Russian government and state-aligned television, this article argues that in today’s mediatised environment – in which social and political activities fuse inextricably with their own mediation – even non-democracies must cope with the shaping of global communications by media logics and related market imperatives. With a range of media actors responding to events, and to each other, on multiple digital platforms, no state could assert full narrative control over the Skripal incident. Counterintuitively, Russian journalists’ journalistic agency was enhanced by mediatisation processes: their state sponsors, seeking to instrumentalise reporting, delegated agency to journalists more attuned to such processes; yet commercial imperatives obliged them to perform independence and professional credibility. These competing forms of agency clashed with one another, and with that of the audiences engaging in real time with the journalists’ outputs, ultimately undermining the Russian state’s efforts to harness news coverage to its political and security goals. The article concludes that in today’s global communications environment, mediatisation substantially constrains the ability of non-democracies to micro-manage journalists’ treatment of major events relating to national security.
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