Infotainment on Russian TV as a tool of desacralization of Soviet myths and creation of a myth about the future

El infoentretenimiento en la televisión rusa como medio para desacralizar los mitos soviéticos y crear un mito sobre el futuro Anna A. Novikova (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Rusia) [anovik[email protected]u] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 2014, 11, pp. 229 - 244 Abstract This paper deals with the process of incorporation of “infotainment” in the Russian television industry. Professional journalism is analyzed as a tool for the interpretation of facts, which have contributed to erode the myths of mass consciousness, which were formed by Soviet propaganda. According to the author, television news and other infotainment programs have affected socio-cultural processes in Russia; in particular, they have contributed to shaping the worldview of post-Soviet intellectuals, known as the “new intelligentsia”. Resumen Este artículo trata principalmente el proceso de incorporación del “infoentretenimiento” en la industria televisiva rusa. El periodismo profesional se considera como un medio para la interpretación de los hechos que ha contribuido a erosionar los mitos de la conciencia de masas configurados por la propaganda soviética. Según la hipótesis defendida por la autora, las noticias de televisión y otros programas de infoentretenimiento han influido notablemente en procesos socio-culturales en Rusia, en concreto, en la formación de la visión del mundo de los intelectuales post-soviéticos, también llamados la “nueva intelectualidad”. Keywords Russian television, infotainment, social myths, the discourse of intellectuals Palabras clave Televisión rusa, infoentretenimiento, mitos sociales, el discurso de los intelectuales Infotainment on Russian TV as a tool of desacralization of Soviet myths and creation of a myth about the future Recibido: 10/06/2014 Aceptado: 05/09/2014 Anna A. Novikova 230 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 Summary 1. Stating the problem 2. Theoretical and methodological basis 3. Results of the research 3.1. Infotainment as a tool of desacralization of Soviet myths 3.2. Infotainment as a tool for shaping the myth about the future 4. Conclusions Sumario 1. El origen del problema 2. Base teórica y metodológica 3. Resultados de la investigación 3.1. El infoentretenimiento como medio de desacralización de los mitos soviéticos 3.2. El infoentretenimiento como medio para la formación del mito sobre el futuro 4. Conclusiones selecta INfotaINmENt oN RuSSIaN tV 231 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] 1. Stating the problem Since the Perestroika era, Russian liberal intellectuals have contributed to the media as journalists or experts, and have been seen as “the active public” (Khrenov, 2007) of authoritative resources (which in different years included Ogoniok magazine, the Kommersant newspaper, the radio station Echo of Moscow, the television channel NTV, and the RIA Novosti news agency, among others). Their critical attitude towards the authorities did not prevent the majority from voting for the President and Parliament in accordance with the plans of Vladimir Putin’s political team. However, it did create a atmosphere of debate, which until recently did not interfere with the elite’s power It was in 2012, before the parliamentary elections, when everything began to change. At the time, the residents of big cities, above all, Moscow, dissatisfied with voting results, participated in demonstrations. A few months later, in the spring of 2013, the protests resumed due to the election of Vladimir Putin as president, and then again in the spring of 2014 in response to the appearance of Russian armed forces in Ukraine, as well as the annexation of Crimea. In this context, the leading media’s editorial boards underwent a process of transformation. The ownership of many media outlets regarded as liberal, like Kommersant, RIA Novosti, and the Lenta.ru website, changed hands, leading to the dismissal of senior managerial staff. Even at the media institutions that avoided firing notable employees, editorial policy has changed, there is now an increasingly positive and detailed coverage of the authorities’ actions, Russian national interests are highlighted, and foreigners are represented as enemies. These late changes have destroyed the ideology that had been developed by liberal media for the past 25 years. The ideology which came to be called “Western” in Russia is a specific Russian hybrid of notions and images from European culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Enlightenment to the culture of mass consumption. “In the eyes of Russian intellects, these ideas are considered through the concept of cosmopolitanism” (Beck, 2006). In its current form, the social group of Russian intellectuals sharing liberal “Western” values appeared after the dissolution of the USSR. The style of journalism which can be related to this group, labeled as “infotainment”, plays an important role in disseminating their ideas. In the author’s opinion, since the 1990s, this “infotainment” has contributed to Russian television overthrowing old myths and shaping new ones in their stead. Anna A. Novikova 232 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 2. Theoretical and methodological basis The term “infotainment” (Postman, 1985), created by merging the words “information” and “entertainment”, has been used in the USA since 1980s to refer to an approach in news presentation (Thussu, 2007) which allowed journalists to abandon official accounts and thoroughly considered comments in favor of “unofficial” communication and amusing details. The appearance of infotainment in Russia is connected with the transition from the Soviet model of state-owned television to the American commercial model, all occurring after the dissolution of the USSR. Russian TV then had to face many problems which are familiar to European media researchers (Francia, 1998/99; Menduni, 1998), whose work, among others’, forms a part of this research’s theoretical foundation. However, the transformations of Russian TV in this period have particular features. Apart from the technological, economic, and cultural transformations, Russian mass-media also faced an ideology crisis. A commercialized model of TV broadcasting contradicted both communist and socialist ideals as well as the educational ideals of traditional Russian intellectuals. The author’s hypothesis holds the following: during the 20 years from the mid-1990s to 2010s, infotainment developed in Russia not only as a commercially successful news format, but also as a special language; a tool used by new Russian intellectuals in order to update the social myths that Russian culture had been imbued with since the 19th century. In Russia, an ironic attitude (Boym, 2002) towards the past and the official culture connected with communist ideology has become the main device of such communication. By using irony, infotainment in Russia has not only made news attractive for the mass audience, but also helped to desacralize (that is, to destroy) Soviet myths. The author’s analysis of TV infotainment is based on the research of Linda Hutcheon (Hutcheon, 1998) and Katerina Clark (Clark, 1981), who singled out the story about the formation of a positive character as the basic narrative model of Soviet culture, and on Alexander Prokhorov’s (Prokhorov, 2007) study of the literature and cinema of the Thaw, where Soviet art is examined in terms of dealing with three major tropes: the trope of a hero; the trope of war; and the trope of a big family. Russian infotainment, in the author’s opinion, uses the same tropes but presents them in a dialogical fashion. It is important to note Bakhtin’s speculation about serious genres, like traditional news, as “monologic”, dictating an integral and unchanging discourse about the world, while seriocomic genres, such as infotainment, are “dialogic” (Bakhtin, 1963). selecta INfotaINmENt oN RuSSIaN tV 233 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] In some cases, this was achieved by means of combining Soviet discourse and/or the discourse of intellectuals with postmodern ridicule of these discourses within the same news reports, and in others by means of storytelling, which allows to demonstrate how old Soviet myths are modernized using the example of ordinary people’s life stories. A discourse analysis of TV reports was used to determine the elements of myth that are responsible for the dialogical nature of discourse. This study also involved an analysis of the most significant projects of the NTV created using the method of infotainment. This choice has been determined by the specific role of the NTV in the late 1990s and 2010s. For several decades, it has been ranked among the three channels with the highest ratings. Despite the corporate conflicts of the late 1990s and the channel’s rebranding, as well as the resignation of a number of professionals, for a longer time than other Russian channels it retained its orientation towards liberal ideas, and American and European cultures, in addition to helping to shape the image of Russia’s modernized future. A documentary series by journalists Leonid Parfionov and Alexey Pivovarov, together with the NTV’s end-of-the-day news broadcasts from 2010-2011, provided the main material for the author’s analysis. 3. Results of the research According to the type of analysis carried out, the reports were divided into two categories: those making sense of the myth about the past and those creating a myth about the future. The reports in which journalists were engaged in an ironical dialog with the past fell into the first category. The second type of reports involved storytelling about the people who live in accordance with the laws of this mythical future. The socio-cultural crisis resulting from the dissolution of the USSR was at first perceived by intellectuals as a chance to acquire cultural domination. Some of them even made an attempt to join the power elite in building a capitalist society. Others, on the contrary, chose to preserve the ideas of the socialist state. With a considerable delay in the Russian political sphere, the division into “right” and “left” took shape. However, the younger generation of intellectuals born in the USSR and brought up in the period of Brezhnev’s “modernization”(Makarkin, 2011) were oriented not as much towards the cultural experience of Soviet intellectuals as towards the global culture of consumption, which was perceived as a Anna A. Novikova 234 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 manifestation of freedom. The USA became a reference point for them, and infotainment became the language of a media myth about the future. With regard to the term “intellectual”, which does not have a common definition in Russian social sciences, the interpretation of Konstantin Sokolov (Sokolov, 2007) will be used here. According to him, Russian intellectuals should be regarded as a heterogeneous social group, which comprises several concentric circles. To the “core” belong the few “ideologists” – the cultural elite creating mythologemes, forced to establish certain relations with the authorities, who search for consultants capable of influencing public opinion. The middle layer consists of “propagandists” – sociologists, historians, philosophers, journalists, and bohemians – who process these ideologemes into myths and pass them on to society with the help of the contemporary media. The periphery is formed by “executors” – doctors, teachers, lawyers, and engineers – who rank themselves among this subculture guided by social myths transmitted by TV. Moving forward, we regard infotainment as a creation tool for a specific discourse and myths by means of which “propagandist” intellectuals communicate with “executor” intellectuals. The main social myth addressed in this work is that about the uniqueness of Russian intellectuals and their specific cultural mission, which distinguishes them from their European counterparts. This myth already started to take shape in the 19th century and has undertaken some shifts in Soviet culture throughout the 20th century. The media, starting with magazines and newspapers, followed by films, radio, and TV, played an active role in this process. Therefore, by the 1970s, marked by social stagnation in the USSR and the development of the ideology of consumption, the public’s ideas about intellectuals had already been completely mythologized; a fact of reality (Barthes, 1970) gave way to ideas about it that were largely shaped by the film industry (Prokhorov, 2007). During this period, the values of the cosmopolitan intellectuals oriented towards the cultural standards of the Euro-Atlantic world and those of their traditionalist counterparts were not mutually opposed, but rather provided the dialogical nature of the culture. This was due to the fact that being an intellectual in the USSR was a peculiar form of protest against the idea of universal equality, both cultural and socioeconomic, which was degenerating into mediocrity. In these conditions, both cosmopolitanism and traditionalism worked equally well to distinguish oneself from the crowd. 3.1. Infotainment as a tool of desacralization of Soviet myths The system of Soviet myths included both social myths about the past, like the triumph of the Revolution or victory in World War II, and social myths selecta INfotaINmENt oN RuSSIaN tV 235 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] about the future, like the victory of technical progress or of communism worldwide (Wright, 2005). By the end of the 1980s, the majority of these myths failed to inspire Russian society. By the early 1990s, all the myths were about the past even though people continued to see themselves as the heirs of Soviet culture, longing for it in a nostalgic way. Between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, infotainment in Russia was used to ridicule Soviet myths, stereotypes, and models of behavior. One of the most popular authors and presenters of TV programs during this period was the journalist Leonid Parfionov (NTV), who presented the weekly news show “The Other Day” and the historical program “The Other Day. Our Era”, where he played with the official discourse of Soviet state leaders by superimposing his own image on archival photos so as to appear to be participating in the events himself. Both programs combined irony towards the Soviet past with nostalgia for it. Infotainment allowed the presentation of serious political, economic, and historical information through storytelling to be easily accessible for a mass audience. It attracted the viewers by means of scandalous, shocking, and criminal details of the past and the present. In fact, not only the political myths of the Soviet era were subject to infotainment’s ironical laughter, but also cultural myths, particularly tailored to intellectuals-educators of the past. For instance, TV serials “Live Pushkin” (NTV, 1999) and “Gogol-Bird” (1 channel, 2009) desacralize the myths about great Russian writers. Their literary achievements were represented as a result of their tumultuous private lives or a consequence of mental illness. The mass audience, attracted by tabloid-like details, was intrigued and indignant at the same time. “Old school” intellectuals turned off their TVs in resentment. Neither group of viewers could understand the game contrived by the series’ authors. They were trying to show that the life and work of writers considered “literary classics” was more complicated and contradictory than it is taught in schools. In losing their sacredness, these writers become modern heroes free from Soviet ideological one-dimensionality. The meaning of this game lay not in overthrowing the literary authority of Pushkin and Gogol but in giving the viewer an intellectual and emotional shaking, in purifying the discourse about culture from stock phrases and perceptional stereotypes. By emphasizing the eccentricities and pranks of these geniuses, the authors of these films represent great writers for the viewers as “their own people”. “And yet I wish I could drop in “The Yar” [name of a restaurant] for dinner together with Alexander Sergeich [Pushkin] if only for a quarter of an hour,” sang Bulat Okudzhava, an exponent of the spirit of Soviet intellectuals. Leonid Parfionov, the author of the above-mentioned films, eliminates the distance between himself, his audience, and the geniuses of the past. He can go dining with writers and he Anna A. Novikova 236 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 actually does it with his signature technique – injecting himself as a documentary character into staged episodes of the film. The overthrown myth about a positive Soviet character is replaced by a myth about a new hero, who is cosmopolitan not only in geographic terms but also in those of historical time. Such cultural provocation forms part of the dialog (Bakhtin, 1963) between propagandist intellectuals (journalists) and executive intellectuals (the enlightened public), the aim of which is to prevent the latter’s worldview from stabilizing. By returning the spirit of counter-culture to Pushkin and Gogol and searching in revolts of the past for features akin to the present, Parfionov and his followers educate the viewers no better than intellectuals of the past. He does not, however, take a moral stand which appears to scare the 21st century commoner who is afraid of exhibiting bourgeois traits. This fear, in the author’s opinion, has penetrated into Russia together with contemporary western culture shaped at the meeting-point of bourgeois culture, with its traditional values and counterculture, which has been overthrowing traditions since the mid-20th century. Before the revolution of 1917, Russian culture did not have time to become bourgeois. Later on, the bourgeois attitudes and lifestyle of the party elite of the 1970-80s started to influence various strata of society. In those years, intellectuals attempted to oppose this process as counterculture. However, the political and economic cataclysms of the late 1980s and 1990s prevented both the establishment of bourgeoisie and the formation of counterculture from being completed. Bourgeois attitudes continue to be viewed by Russian intellectuals as a rejection of the idea of serving the people, which is still a meaningful part of the myth about a positive character. Another basic Soviet narrative which laid the foundation of social mythology is the war myth. It has also undergone a desacralization process starting from the mid-1990s. On different channels, films were created using 20th-century newsreels, episodes from feature films, and including interviews with experts from various fields, as well as eyewitnesses. Their aim was to revise the Soviet version of 20th century history. During the first stage, it was neither a game nor a kind of entertainment. It was a manifestation of glasnost which accompanied the perestroika processes. By the early 2000s, most of the terrifying facts of 20thcentury history had already been communicated to the public, but this did not destroy the Soviet myths about war and victory – neither the Civil War nor World War II. The mass consciousness continued to sacralize Stalin as the victor in the war against fascism, and the USSR as the savior of the world. Yearly public debates, held just before 9 May, confirm this. selecta INfotaINmENt oN RuSSIaN tV 237 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] A TV series of docudramas about the major battles of the Great Patriotic War (“Rzhev. An unknown battle of Georgy Zhukov” [NTV, 2009], “Moscow. Autumn of 1941” [NTV, 2009], “Brest. The bonded heroes” [NTV, 2010], among others) represented an interesting attempt at breaking stereotypes with the help of infotainment. The journalist Alexey Pivovarov who travels to the battlefields becomes the main character of these films. It is through his eyes that the audience is allowed to view the present and the past. Reconstructing the past by means of docudrama, the directors of these films investigate the events that war myths are based on. Military leaders and common soldiers played by actors argue with the heroes of Soviet films about war and dispute official memoirs, showing that life during the war was hard and that a discourse describing it should be dialogic and allow for irony, necessary for contemporary postmodern consciousness even in tragic historical episodes. In the authors’ opinion, cultural modernization is impossible without this dialog with the past. Precisely this is the main task of the “new intellectuals”, and infotainment serves this goal. 3.2. Infotainment as a tool for shaping the myth about the future In the 2000s, wishing to be in keeping with the zeitgeist, while shaping its aims and values, the educated class in Russia had nothing to rely on but the tradition of Soviet intellectuals with their belief in progress and the bright future promised to them. To this end, each individual or community added elements of Western bourgeois culture or various forms of homebred traditionalism at their own pleasure, as well as various details from niche cultures (from yoga to Orthodox Christianity, from rock to folk music). The point was that it should be unobtrusive and without bombast, with a tinge of self-irony and playfulness. Infotainment, encompasses nowadays not only TV but also many other forms of cultural education – from museum exhibitions, concerts and theatre performances to public lectures and educational programs – and has become a convenient way of representing the cultural elite’s worldviews, shaping new ideology and new myths, and transmitting these to “executive intellectuals” in such forms that will not be rejected by contemporary consciousness as obtrusive and one-dimensional. Infotainment in present-day Russia is not a set of techniques but a style in which one part of society represents its notions of the future. As an alternative to the heroes of the past, television has provided a new myth about heroes of the future, which deals with individual economic success. For example, in one of the episodes of “The Other Day” on NTV channel, entitled “Exodus Reversed” (released on 21.04.2002) the viewers were Anna A. Novikova 244 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 229-244] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 • C lark, K., (1981) The Soviet Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P. • E liade,_.(1949) Le Mythe de l’Eternel Retour. Paris: Gallimard. • F rancia, P. (1998/99) Origins and impact of ‘Infotainment’ upon British Public Service Broadcasting. • H utcheon, L. (1998) Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern. University of Toronto English Libraryon-line (Ian Lancashire, Director) http://www. library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html • K hrenov, N. (2007). Publika v Istorii Kulturi. Fenomen publiki v rakurse psihologii mass. [The Public in History of Culture. Mass Psychology and the Phenomenon of Public]. Moscow: Agraf. • L otman, M. (1999) Intelligensiya i Svoboda (k analizu intelligentskogo diskursa) [Intellectuals and Freedom ( discourse analysis intelligentsia)] In Russkaya intelligensiya i Zapadniy intellektualizm: Istoriya i Tipologiya [Russian Intelligentsia and Western intellectualism: The history and The typology]. Moscow http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/History/ uspen/01.php • M akarkin, A. (2011) Brejnevskaya Modernizatsiya: Kollektivizm I Individualnost’ [Brezhnev’s modernization: collectivism and individuality] // Naprikosnovenniya zapas, _ 1. http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2011/1/ ma3.html • M enduni, E. (1998) La Televisione. Il Mulino. Bologna. • P ostman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves To Death. Pinguin Books. • P rokhorov, A. (2007) Inherited discourse: Stalinist tropes in thaw literature and cinema. St.Petersburg: Akademitheskiy proekt. • S okolov, K. (2007) Russkaya Intelligensiya XVIII – nathala _ veka: Kartina Mira i Povsednevnost’. [Russian Intelligentsia XVIII - beginning of XX century: a Picture of the world and Everyday life]. Moscow: Nestoristoriya. • T hussu, D. K. (2007) News As Entertainment: the Rise of Global Infotainment. London: Sage. • W right, R. (2005). A Short History of Progress. Cambridge (MA): Da Capo Press.