This study focuses on Soviet television audiences and examines their watching habits and the way they made use of television programs. Kirsten Bönker challenges the common misconception that viewers perceived Soviet television programming and entertainment culture as dull and formulaic. This study draws extensively on archival sources and oral history interviews to analyze how Soviet television involved audiences in political communication and how it addressed audiences’ emotional commitments to Soviet values and the Soviet way of life. Bönker argues that the Brezhnev era influenced political stability and brought an unprecedented rise of the living standards, creating new meanings for consumerism, the idea of the “home,” and private life among Soviet citizens. Exploring the concept of emotional bonding, this study engages broader discussions on the durability of the Soviet Union until perestroika.

When Nikita Khrushchev visited Hollywood in 1959 only to be scandalized by a group of scantily clad actresses, his message was blunt: Soviet culture would soon consign the mass culture of the West, epitomized by Hollywood, to the "dustbin of history." In Moscow Prime Time, a portrait of the Soviet broadcasting and film industries and of everyday Soviet consumers from the end of World War II through the 1970s, Kristin Roth-Ey shows us how and why Khrushchev’s ambitious vision ultimately failed to materialize. The USSR surged full force into the modern media age after World War II, building cultural infrastructures—and audiences—that were among the world’s largest. Soviet people were enthusiastic radio listeners, TV watchers, and moviegoers, and the great bulk of what they were consuming was not the dissident culture that made headlines in the West, but orthodox, made-in-the-USSR content. This, then, was Soviet culture’s real prime time and a major achievement for a regime that had long touted easy, everyday access to a socialist cultural experience as a birthright. Yet Soviet success also brought complex and unintended consequences. Emphasizing such factors as the rise of the single-family household and of a more sophisticated consumer culture, the long reach and seductive influence of foreign media, and the workings of professional pride and raw ambition in the media industries, Roth-Ey shows a Soviet media empire transformed from within in the postwar era. The result, she finds, was something dynamic and volatile: a new Soviet culture, with its center of gravity shifted from the lecture hall to the living room, and a new brand of cultural experience, at once personal, immediate, and eclectic—a new Soviet culture increasingly similar, in fact, to that of its self-defined enemy, the mass culture of the West. By the 1970s, the Soviet media empire, stretching far beyond its founders’ wildest dreams, was busily undermining the very promise of a unique Soviet culture—and visibly losing the cultural cold war. Moscow Prime Time is the first book to untangle the paradoxes of Soviet success and failure in the postwar media age.

This authoritative and comprehensive survey of political communication draws together a team of the world′s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study. It is divided into five sections: Part One: explores the macro-level influences on political communication such as the media industry, new media, technology, and political systems Part Two: takes a grassroots perspective of the influences of social networks - real and online - on political communication Part Three: discusses methodological advances in political communication research Part Four: focuses on power and how it is conceptualized in political communication Part Five: provides an international, regional, and comparative understanding of political communication in its various contexts The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication is an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of politics, media and communication, sociology and research methods.

Gerald Sussman offers a detailed critical analysis of the political dimensions of 21st century communication/information technologies, mass media and transnational networks.

From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.

How could an undemocratic regime manage to stabilise Russia? What is Putin's success formula? What are the symbolic and discursive underpinnings of Russia's new stability? Many outside observers of Russia regarded the authoritarian tendencies during the Putin presidency as a retreat from, or even the end of, democratization. Rather than attempting to explain why Russia did not follow the trajectory of democratic transformation, this book aims to attain an understanding of the stabilization process during Putin's tenure as president. Proceeding from the assumption that the stability created under Putin is multi-layered, the authors attempt to uncover the underpinnings of the new equilibrium, inquiring especially about the changes and fixations that occurred in the discourses on political and national identity. In doing so, the authors analyse the trajectories of the past years from the traditional perspective of transitology as well as through the lens of post-structuralist discourse theory. The two approaches are seen as complementary, with the latter focusing less on the end point of transition than on the nature of the mechanisms that stabilize the current regime. The book focuses on how nationalism became an increasingly important tool in political discourse and how it affected political identity. "Sovereign democracy" is seen by many contributors as the most explicit manifestation of a newfound post-Soviet identity drawing on nationalist ideas, while simultaneously appeasing most sectors of the Russian political spectrum.

This collection of essays focuses on topics pertaining to Soviet propaganda and policy making. Among the essays, there is a study of the view of international relations presented by Soviet TV news, a survey of development in comparative communist studies, and an analysis of recent changes.

In recent years, the US fake news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has become a surprisingly important source of information, conversation, and commentary about public affairs. Perhaps more surprisingly, so-called 'fake news' is now a truly global phenomenon, with various forms of news parody and political satire programming appearing throughout the world. This collection of innovative chapters takes a close and critical look at global news parody from a wide range of countries including the USA and the UK, Italy and France, Hungary and Romania, Israel and Palestine, Iran and India, Australia, Germany, and Denmark. Traversing a range of national cultures, political systems, and programming forms, News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe offers insight into the central and perhaps controversial role that news parody has come to play in the world, and explores the multiple forces that enable and constrain its performance. It will help readers to better understand the intersections of journalism, politics, and comedy as they take shape across the globe in a variety of political and media systems. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Popular Communication.

In TV Socialism, Anikó Imre provides an innovative history of television in socialist Europe during and after the Cold War. Rather than uniform propaganda programming, Imre finds rich evidence of hybrid aesthetic and economic practices, including frequent exchanges within the region and with Western media, a steady production of varied genre entertainment, elements of European public service broadcasting, and transcultural, multi-lingual reception practices. These televisual practices challenge conventional understandings of culture under socialism, divisions between East and West, and the divide between socialism and postsocialism. Taking a broad regional perspective encompassing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Imre foregrounds continuities between socialist television and the region’s shared imperial histories, including the programming trends, distribution patterns, and reception practices that extended into postsocialism. Television, she argues, is key to understanding European socialist cultures and to making sense of developments after the end of the Cold War and the enduring global legacy of socialism.

This book explores Eastern European consumer cultures in the twentieth century, taking a comparative perspective and conceptualizing the peculiarities of consumption in the region. Contributions cover lifestyles and marketing strategies in imperial contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; urban consumer cultures in the Interwar Period; and consumer and advertising cultures in the Soviet Union and its satellite republics. It traces the development of marketing throughout the century, and the changes in society brought about by democratization and the 'Americanization' of consumption. Taken together, the essays gathered here make a valuable contribution to our understanding of consumption and advertising in the region.