Natalia Mirimanova - Pluralism in Television News on State Formation Conflicts and Pluralism of “Imagined Communities”

Mass media interventions into protracted conflicts are based on two assumptions: 1. greater proportion of private and other non-state media ensures pluralism in the conflict reporting, and 2. supply of pluralism of perspectives on the conflict in media entails pluralism of opinions and attitudes in the society. The present dissertation explored whether institutional pluralism among television news channels of national outreach translates into pluralism of news frames on a state formation conflict that own society is a party to, on the one hand, and whether pluralism in the national television news coverage of the state formation conflict fosters pluralism of “imagined communities” among the audience. These two sets of relationships were tested within a new interdisciplinary analytical framework in the case of the Russian television news coverage of the conflict over Chechnya in 2000-2001 and in the case of Serbian national television news coverage of the conflict over Kosovo in 2001-2002. Russian television channels of varying degrees of institutional autonomy demonstrated consistent differences in their framing of Chechnya conflict. Distinct “imagined communities” accurately mapped onto the audiences of institutionally distinct channels in Russia. In Serbia no pluralism of framing Kosovo conflict was discovered among institutionally diverse television channels. No pluralism of “imagined communities” was elicited in Serbia. Configuration of the “imagined communities” may surmise to conflict transformation workers what are the limits and possibilities in changing the state center’s self-understanding, i.e. the prospects for the “re-imagining” of the nation, which was proposed as a necessary condition for finding a mutually acceptable and lasting solution to a protracted state formation conflict. In the realm of mass media interventions ambiguous support for the hypothesis about correspondence between institutional pluralism and pluralism in a state formation conflict reporting means that systemic and multifaceted analysis that embraces institutional determinants of mass media operation, journalistic practices and audience’s readiness to open itself to alternative “imagined communities” is required at the design stage.

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