Television, Power, and the Public in Russia. By Ellen Mickiewicz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 220p. $81.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Extract

This book opens and closes with the puzzle of how Russian rulers can control, distort, and bend the news to their own ends without worrying about how the audience receives it. On its first page, Ellen Mickiewicz asks: “[W]ouldn't these political leaders want anxiously to know what viewers make of the news?” And on its last page (p. 206) we are told that “political leaders and broadcasters persist in imagining an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass on the other side of the screen.” While there is no direct evidence in the rest of the book to indicate that leaders do not know what to make of their audience, or that they assume it to be an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass, these assumptions set up an interesting look at what audiences actually make of television news in Russia.