Galina Miazhevich

Ukrainian nation branding off-line and online: Verka Serduchka at the Eurovision Song Contest

Abstract This essay looks at the role of the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual regularised European media event—in fostering the reconceptualisation of national selves of participating states. It draws attention to the representations of ‘new’ post-Soviet national brands at Eurovision in their interspatial (national, international and transnational) and inter-temporal (Soviet and post-Soviet) dimensions using the case of Ukraine. The essay argues that, through the manipulation of gendered, sexual and ethnic stereotypes, and by exploiting a kitsch idiom, the Ukrainian entry by Verka Serduchka in 2007, as well as the online responses to the show, aimed to articulate a vision of European nationhood, which simultaneously staked a position among other states of the former Soviet Union and reconfigured relationships with the shared Soviet past. Supplementary material for this essay can be found in the online version at: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20 (Figures S1, S2 and S3). This article was written with the generous support of the Gorbachev Media Fellowship. I would also like to thank Stephen Hutchings for his valuable comments on earlier versions and very useful feedback by Jeremy Morris and Vlad Strukov.

Official media discourse and the self-representation of entrepreneurs in Belarus

Abstract Within the diverging realm of Eastern Europe, the Republic of Belarus demonstrates one of the most extreme examples of ‘distorted’ transition. In addition to preserving numerous elements of the former political, nepotistic and quota-based state-controlled system, the slow process of restructuring of the inherited communist institutions in Belarus is coupled with the states attempt at conserving the phenomenon of ‘Soviet’ Belarus. In this context identity positions are more likely to be manifested in terms of the current state ideology, which leads us to consider the possibly anomalous case of business people. The question posed in this article is how officially sanctioned sets of meanings reflected in the official mass media inter-relate with the identity positions adopted by the emerging new societal stratum of entrepreneurs.

Sexual Excess in Russia’s Eurovision Performances as a Nation Branding Tool

The article focuses on the annual media event that is the Eurovision Song Contest. The festival of Eurovision, as the current heated debate about its relevance, nature and essence reveals, is an important phenomenon in the cultural life of contemporary Europe. The annual cycle of preparation for, and participation in, Eurovision is a useful lens for examining the “branding” of the contributing nations. The article investigates how recent transformations of sexuality demonstrated at Eurovision by Russia shape the reconstruction of the boundaries of taste of this post-Soviet nation, and how this in turn enables it to reconfigure its own position within the New Europe. It is argued that the sexual excess displayed in several Russian performances can be read in terms of an implicit dialogue with West European constructions of “bad taste” and the emergent notion of Euro-trash.

The Polonium trail to Islam: Litvinenko, liminality, and television's (cold) war on terror

This article examines how Aleksandr Litvinenkos death links the ‘war on terror’ with an emergent New Cold War. Based on an analysis of BBC and Russian Channel 1 news bulletins, it highlights the centrality of the post-imperial legacy of the two sides in the dispute to the manner of its unfolding, and to how war on terror discourse reconstructs national identities and international antagonisms. It draws on narratology to account for Litvinenkos liminal position inside and outside Islam (his deathbed conversion), the Russian security apparatus (his prior conversion from Cold War spy to noble dissident), and the UK (his ‘good asylum seeker’ status).

The Political Context: International and Domestic Security Concerns

The call to a Global War on Terror was logically implausible but rhetorically effective in its propagandistic evocation of a worldwide threat which required a resolute response. It conjured up a binary world of friends and enemies. Who, except the practitioners or sponsors of terror(ism), could eschew the challenge to destroy the sources of this evil? In the real sphere of international politics the concept of a Global War on Terror was as disingenuous as it was simplistic, but as a mobilizing ideological slogan or as a shorthand label it was endlessly reproduced in the Western media, preparing the way for George W. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war against the rogue states deemed to support terrorism. It set the tone of international relations for the remainder of Bush’s presidency, before the terminology was discarded by Barack Obama’s new administration in 2009, even though many of the associated policies remained in place (Zalman and Clarke, 2009). While it was current, the apparent success of the Global War on Terror as a political watchword also offered other states the opportunity to identify their policies towards troublesome neighbours and/or hostile groups within their own borders as part of the global struggle. The Global War on Terror extended in principle to any source of terrorism. However, the focus of discourse and policy was heavily concentrated on radical, anti-Western Muslim groups and the states which aided them. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ threatened to turn from myth into reality.

Commemorating 9/11: The Struggle for the Universal

Our final chapter unifies the central concerns of the preceding two. On one hand it treats a distinct genre of television terror reporting: the annual 9/11 commemoration report. Following Chapter 6 , it focuses on the role of genre in reconciling the generality of the campaign against the terrorist threat with the specificity of its manifestation in particular national contexts. And like Chapter 6 it refers to the poles of narrative in its approach to the treatment of this tension. But its efforts to locate the tension in the context of the semiotic flow and counterflow across national media spaces, and to interpret the multiplicity of transnational meaning as a function of cross-national divergence in perspective, place it within the orbit of the issues addressed in Chapter 7.

The Ten O’Clock News: Anxious Attention

In the two-year period we studied, the Ten O’Clock News (hereafter the News ) gave extensive coverage to Islam-related news, in terms of both the frequency and the prominence of reports. The cumulative weight of the coverage lay predominantly on security-related events abroad in which British national interests were directly or indirectly at stake. Reporting of domestic Islam-related news was similarly dominated by questions of security. In its newsmaking, as we pointed out in the Introduction, the BBC was bound by a PSB remit with several dimensions. Its reporting was expected to be truthful and accurate, but also to show impartiality. Indeed, the BBC made a fetish of impartiality in its editorial and instructional literature. However, that commitment was qualified by the important caveat that the requirement was for due impartiality, with the stipulation that the code of rules to be drawn up by the BBC Trust must, in particular, indicate that due impartiality did not demand ‘absolute neutrality or detachment from fundamental democratic principles’ (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2006, §44(7)). Thus, by implication, there were circumstances in which impartiality should be attenuated – notably, in cases where democratic values were judged to be under attack. More generally, as we also observed earlier, while journalists were required to abstain from expressing personal political opinions, the corporate output was, in fact, formally obliged to sustain a range of liberal, civic values. The judgement made by Philip Schlesinger (1978, p. 205) more than three decades ago still holds true: ‘the concept of impartiality and its related operational practices are worked out within a framework of socially endowed assumptions about consensus politics, national community and the parliamentary form of conflict-resolution’. Or, as Georgina Born (2005, p. 382) argues, in the light of the inherently selective, interpretative nature of journalism, ‘the [BBC’s] doctrines of objectivity and impartiality continue to operate as performative fictions or “strategic rituals” that bind the professional culture, providing ethical moorings and augmenting its credibility’.

Vremia: Compliance and Complicity

In the period of our study, Russia’s Channel 1, as an N(S)B, showed many similarities with BBC 1 and France 2 in their roles as PSBs, but also a range of distinctive differences. Like the British and French broadcasters, Channel 1 had the duty of representing the nation to itself in terms of values, institutions and practices. However, those values, institutions and practices did not always coincide with the types common to West European democracies. While the BBC and France 2, though not identical to each other, had to balance their respective statutory requirements of impartiality or neutrality, accuracy and fairness against an implicit assumption that they should remain within the conventions and norms of the established political and social order in their respective countries, they were not directly at the service of the government in power at any given time, although they could be subjected to pressure. Channel 1 operated on a somewhat similar basis to the old ORTF in France under De Gaulle. It was not a purely propagandistic operation on Nazi or Soviet lines, but it was closely tied to the state’s direction as a conduit of political communication from the Kremlin to the Russian public.

‘Islamic Extremism’ and the Brokering of Consensus

In Chapter 5 we revisit the theme of Muslims and integration broached in Part I and subject it to more detailed scrutiny. We turn our attention to how post-9/11 news broadcasts on Islam represent, discuss, and participate in changing societal consensuses on inter-ethnic/intercultural cohesion, and to what such changes tell us about shifting power configurations in Europe. In each case, (re)definitions of extremism as a marker of what lies beyond the socially acceptable are key to the dynamics of the shift. And in each case, media systems play a crucial role in driving the process.

The Journal de Vingt Heures: A Degree of Detachment

France 2, as flagship PSB channel within the France Televisions (FT) group, operates under a remit of objectives and obligations, set out in its Charter. The reform of FT in 2009 led to a reformulation of that remit, with some new points of emphasis, notably with regard to coverage of the European Union (Ministere de la Culture et de l’Information, 2009). However, besides the fact that the new remit showed a strong degree of continuity with its predecessor, chronological accuracy requires this chapter to refer to the requirements stated in the previous version of the Charter, which applied at the time we recorded our data (France Televisions, 2005). To a considerable extent, FT’s PSB remit had premises similar to those of the BBC. Although the concept of due impartiality did not figure in the documents, and was not a fetish in the way that it was for the BBC, the notions of neutrality, accuracy and rigour did figure explicitly, and in common with the stricture on the BBC, FT journalists were prohibited from expressing partisan political opinions. The Charter located itself firmly and clearly within the democratic, republican framework. Its preamble was dedicated to the principle of freedom of audio-visual communication, deriving from the fundamental freedoms of thought and expression. The Charter and France 2’s own Cahier des charges (Ministere de la Culture et de l’Information, 2002, 2007) construed the requirements of equity, independence, pluralism of opinion, democratic debate, solidarity and civic involvement in serving the general interest of society. FT was regulated by the Conseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA) in terms of quotas for representation of government, opposition parties and trades unions, but not for the President of the Republic, who was deemed to be above party. Besides promoting intellectual and artistic creation, France 2 was required to serve an educational role in disseminating civic, economic, social, scientific and technical knowledge.