Wasburn and Burke (1997)

[杉森 典子]

Wasburn and Burke (1997) analyzed 1995 Vremya (Russian
national television) newscasts and found that few traces
of the cold-war framework in them. The authors wrote:

To Vremya viewers, the political world must have seemed
much more complicated than before the end of the cold war.
It was now harder than previously for them to make sense
of daily happenings in domestic and international
politics. What had changed was the political spectacle
offered by Vremya. As the philosopher of science Abraham
Kaplan (1964) once pointed out, simplicity and complexity
are not qualities inherent in a subject matter. Rather,
the terms refer to the matter in which a subject matter is
treated. The principle is consistent with the contention
of Edelman (1988), and other s that media news accounts
evoke a spectacle that is an ideological product, not a
set of facts (p683)

This article is clearly written and easy to read. It was
easy for me to read probably because what the authors
wrote was predictable from the viewpoints of most students
of critical discourse analysis. But is it really true that
it is harder for Russian people to make sense of daily
happenings after the cold-war era? I wonder if it is also
an image constructed by the media. Last year a Russian
friend of mine said that Russian people did not believe
what they had read in newspapers [during the cold-war era]
because they had known they were full of propaganda. I don
’t know whether what she said was really true in the
1980s. This article has motivated me to look into some
research on people
’s perception of the media on the spot rather than
assumed reflections.

Best, 

Noriko