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 statecontrolled media strategies and in the nature of ideological messages disseminated by the media. By analyzing the output of Russia's two main television channels, Pervyi Kanal and Rossiya-1, during Putin's third presidential term we identify a range of distinctly new features that amount to a new media strategy. In particular, the amount of coverage of political issues has increased significantly through the replacement of infotainment with what we term agitainment-an ideologically inflected political coverage that, through adapting specific global media formats to local needs, is packaged in a way that is able to appeal to less engaged and even sceptical viewers. Our findings challenge existing literature on neoauthoritarian media systems. They show that when struggling for control over the public agenda, neo-authoritarian regimes start employing extensive and intensive ideological messaging, rather than preferring a largely de-politicized content. In the Russian context, despite the tightening of political control over the media, particularly 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.
This article analyzes an anti‐immigration campaign evident in 2012 and 2013 on the two main Russian state‐aligned television channels, Channel 1 and Rossiia. This campaign marked a significant departure from the earlier coverage of migration‐related issues by these broadcasters and, surprisingly, contradicted the federal government's position on migration and on “the national question”, which was authorised by Vladimir Putin during his presidential election campaign. Most significantly, in contrast to earlier approaches to covering migration, during the campaign, Islam was identified in news reports as the main marker of the migrant identity and a threat to Russian and European cultures and societies. The article explores what facilitated this shift in reporting and what this campaign tells us about the relationship between the Kremlin, state‐aligned broadcasters and the public, as well as about the fluctuations in the official narratives of Russian nationhood, during Putin's third presidential term. The article argues that several factors converged to trigger this campaign, including the radicalisation of a tendency to unite Russian society around the government through the dissemination of frightening images of external and internal “enemies”; the authorities' greater attentiveness to public concerns; and the perceived need to mainstream and co‐opt Russian ethnonationalism. We further demonstrate that the anti‐immigration campaign was part and parcel of the construction of a new ideologically charged narrative about Russia as Europe's last bastion of traditional, conservative values. The article concludes that public intellectuals and television personalities, rather than the Kremlin, were the main agents in the construction of this narrative. It, therefore, appears that, in the first eighteen months of Putin's third presidency, contrary to what one would expect, a greater responsibility than before for the ideological directions of the regime was ceded to prominent media figures.
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