Towards a Bourdieusian sociology of self-censorship: What we can learn from journalists adapting to rapid political change in Crimea after 2014

Abstract

This article explores self-censorship among journalists by drawing on Bourdieusian field theory and New Censorship Theory. The article analyses the experiences of local Crimean journalists in the period following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, and during the rapid increase of Russian state control over local media. The analysis presented here draws on 70 biographical interviews conducted with local journalists who worked in Crimea for a period of at least 1 year between 2013 and 2017. In the first part of the article, I propose a Bourdieusian approach to self-censorship. In the second part of the article, I focus on illustrative examples of journalists who have risen to prominent positions in new post-2014 Crimean media, and detail three self-censorship practices: (1) governing ‘the other’ (a journalist engages in self-censorship only when it comes to ‘the ethnic other’: they refuse to practice self-censorship when working for Moscow-based Russian language media, but agree to self-censorship in local media targeting Crimean Tatars); (2) alerting the authorities (a journalist strikes deals with local politicians by not reporting on local infrastructural problems, instead directly asking the local government to fix them in return for favourable media coverage); and (3) self-censorship as patience (a journalist oversees positive reporting of local news and avoids negative topics as they wait patiently for Crimea’s growing pains to pass).

Self-censorships in Ukraine: Distinguishing between the silences of television journalism

“…This is journalists’ socially structured subjective expectation of (dis)incentives for reporting within the social field they navigate. Pierre Bourdieu (1991; see also Zeveleva, 2020) called the force of such incentives, and the effect it has on linguistic production, ‘censorship of the field’. ‘[I]nherent in particular relations of linguistic production’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 79), such censorship does not need to be explicit and directly prohibitive.…”

“…Pragmatic self-censorship is a major form of journalistic self-censorship in Ukraine, whether it is the result of arrangements between politicians, media owners, managers and editors, as Nadia suggested; or of direct commands and lists of prohibited topics and personalities; or of implicit understandings of the ever-changing conjuncture of political or commercial interests and relations. It responds to, and is shaped by, the dynamics of power and control within particular organisations, which might be sufficiently predictable for it to develop into established ‘rules of the game’, as described by Schimpfössl and Yablokov (2017, 2020) and Zeveleva (2020), or remain more fluid, requiring a constant interpretation of contextual cues and situated expectations as to what should and should not be reported. This suggests that variations in the practices of pragmatic self-censorship correspond to particularities of hierarchical relations that journalists have to navigate within media organisations.…”

“…This Special Issue is a case in point: individual contributors vary in their conceptualisations of self-censorship, its causes and mechanisms (e.g. compare the approaches of Zeveleva (2020) and Rožukalne (2020)). The differences stem from distinct, not entirely reconcilable, analytical positions on self-censorship taken by the authors; within each of the studies, however, self-censorship is understood as a phenomenon with a singular logic.…”

A brief history of news making in Russia

“…Her work marks the start of yet a new generation of young scholars investigating post-Soviet journalism. Examples are Zeveleva (2018Zeveleva ( , 2020, Malyutina (2019) and Fedirko (2020), who illustrate on the cases of Ukraine, Russia and Crimea how journalists adapt to changing regimes and new restrictions in their freedom of speech.…”

Self-Censorship among Journalists in Tatarstan and in Crimea, a Comparative Analysis: Pierre Bourdieu and New Censorship Theory

“…Неудивительно, что исследователи чаще всего изучают именно цензуру и концентрируются на эмпирических кейсах, в которых можно четко определить цензора Zeveleva 2020). Но есть и не очень четко очерченная группа подходов, исследований и теорий, которая выходит за пределы либерального понимания «цензуры» как внешней репрессивной практики и обращается к тому, как формируются границы возможных высказываний в обществе в целом, без явного внешнего цензора.…”