Journalism and the political

Discursive tensions in news coverage of Russia by Felicitas Macgilchrist Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture DAPSAC The editors invite contributions that investigate p

Journalism and the Political

Volume 40

Journalism and the Political Discursive tensions in news coverage of Russia

by Felicitas Macgilchrist

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society

and Culture (DAPSAC)

The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies

Maison des Sciences de

l’Homme, Paris, France

University of East Anglia

Teun A van Dijk Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

Konrad Ehlich Free University, Berlin Mikhail V Ilyin Polis, Moscow Andreas H Jucker University of Zurich J.R Martin University of Sydney

Luisa Martín Rojo Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Jacob L Mey University of Southern Denmark

Christina Schäffner Aston University Ron Scollon † Louis de Saussure University of Neuchâtel

Associate Editor

Johann Unger

University of Lancaster

j.unger@lancaster.ac.uk

Journalism and the Political

Discursive tensions in news coverage of Russia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Macgilchrist, Felicitas

  Journalism and the political : discursive tensions in news coverage of Russia / Felicitas Macgilchrist

p cm (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, issn 1569-9463 ; v 40)

Includes bibliographical references and index

1.  Russia (Federation) Press coverage United States 2.  Russia (Federation) Press coverage Europe 3.  Foreign news Political aspects United States 4.  Foreign news Political aspects Europe 5.  Mass media and language United States 6.  Mass media and language Europe 7.  Discourse analysis Political analysis United States 8.  Discourse analysis Political analysis Europe.  I Title

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of

Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

8TM

5.1 Corpus and stake inoculation 76

i Journalism and the Political

7.1 Balance, fairness and conflict 130

Table of contents ii

Particular thanks are due to the journalists and other media workers who took the time to talk to me, sometimes at great length, in Moscow, Berlin, New York and by email and telephone: Günter Bannas, Daniel Brössler, Paul Carvalho, Guy Chazan,

CJ Chivers, Andrew Jack, Tom Kent, Sonia Kishkovsky, Steven Lee Myers, Tom Parfitt, Wolfgang Röhl, Michael Schon, Nick Paton Walsh, Markus Wehner and a few others who would prefer to remain anonymous

On the academic side, I would first like to thank Werner Schiffauer for port, encouragement and an inspiring ability to think theory together with politi-cal practice Thanks for the freedom to explore and write – for not pulling the grass to make it grow faster The stimulating intellectual environment provided

sup-by the Anthropology Workshop at the European University Viadrina opened a whole new field for me Thanks also to Christa Ebert, for welcoming my post- foundational approach to the postgraduate colloquium Our discussions were immensely productive for me

I have also benefited enormously from feedback on earlier drafts and papers from Paul Chilton, Barbara Christophe, Terry Cox, Tatjana Felberg, Gunther Kress, Hartmut Lenk, Charlotte Lundgren, Marcus Otto, John Russell, Maria Smyshliaeva, Tom Van Hout, Stephen White and participants at the Essex Sum-mer School, although not all will agree with the positions taken in this book I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, who helped me to focus more explicitly

on parts of the argument presented in Chapters 1 and 10, and to Greg Myers for giving just the right comments at just the right time Thanks to Carol Duncan, Ali Sultani and Sylwia Wewiora for help with acquiring materials, and to my students for reminding me of the value of applied discourse analysis Heartfelt thanks to

my other friends and colleagues for constructive discussions and well-needed tractions Marco Frank has now spent almost as much time with the ideas in this book as I have Thanks for your insightful feedback on the entire study and for constantly drawing my attention to new theoretical work; talking with you about these ideas – and so much more – has been more valuable than you can imagine.The research for this book was provided by a German Research Founda-tion (DFG) stipend through the graduate programme ‘Representation-Rhetoric-

dis-Knowledge’ at the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences (Kulturwissenschaften)

of the European University Viadrina The theoretical exchanges in that gramme set this research in a quite unforeseen direction I thank all involved

pro-x Journalism and the Political

Any failings in the book remain, of course, my responsibility Chapter 5 is a revised version of ‘Metaphorical Politics: Is Russia western?’ published in Catherine Baker, Christopher Gerry, Barbara Madaj, Elizabeth Mellish & Jana Nahodilova (Eds.),

Nation in Formation: Inclusion and Exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe

(London: UCL SSEES[Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe No.1]) Chapter 9

is an updated version of ‘Positive Discourse Analysis: Contesting dominant

dis-courses by reframing the issues’ in CADAAD ejournal, 1(1): 74–94 I am thankful

to the publishers for permission to reprint these materials

This book is dedicated to Athol and Siegrun for their constant love and port and their ever-increasing activism

Politics has long been a central dimension of public debate and research on nalism and news media discourse Journalism has been given a leading role in influencing political decision-making, in the ‘CNN effect’, or in producing the vibrant public spaces necessary for the public to actively participate in democracy Journalism is also considered to be the ‘fourth estate’, providing a set of checks and balances on the executive, legislature and judiciary Discourse analysis has exten-sively explored the language and other discursive practices of the news media as they constitute the subjects of political issues such as exclusion, inclusion, terror-ism, racism, war and the Other

jour-This book contributes to this body of work on discourse, journalism and tics by suggesting a rather different relationship between journalism and politics,

poli-or rather, between journalism and ‘the political’ To do this it draws on discourse analysis, journalism studies, cultural studies, hegemony theory and the recent vibrant theorising of the difference between politics and the political

The argument is twofold First, the book argues that the everyday work of writing and reading the news is part of a complex and multifaceted set of practices articulating hegemonic relations of power Domestic and international news, in this sense, can say as much about the reporters and their social, political, cultural, historic, practical and technical contexts as about the reported The hegemony under analysis in this book is the ‘common-sense’ that one geographical area of the world is more developed, civilized and democratic than other areas of the world Depending on the situation and the speaker, this area is variously referred to as the West, the Occident, Euro-America, the industrialized world, the minority world, the North, liberal democracies, electoral democracies or free countries A (global) social order is constituted in which this area is sharply delineated from ‘the rest’: the East, the Orient, the developing world, the majority world, the South, non-democracies, partially free or not free countries, etc

Yet, second, the study presented here illustrates that journalism is also cisely the site where the instability of this global social order becomes visible The borders and boundaries between these two entities – whatever we call them – are constantly shifting in the news To pre-empt the analysis in later chapters, dur-ing the disputes between Ukraine and Russia about Gazprom’s delivery of gas to Ukraine, there was much coverage in the western European news suggesting that the Russian government, or then president Vladimir Putin, posed a dangerous

pre-xii Journalism and the Political

threat to civilized Europe When new legislation on non-governmental tions was being discussed in Moscow, this was widely reported as a deepening

organisa-of anti-democratic tendencies in Russia Yet during the hostage-taking in a local school in Beslan, Russia was constituted in the news media as one of the victims of international terrorism, linked to Australian victims in Bali or Americans in New York against the common Other that is being called ‘Muslim terrorism’

Russia forms the locus for in-depth case studies in this book due to its central role in the destabilisation of common-sense news frames following the end of the Soviet Union The end of the Cold War caused dislocation not only for citizens in the now post-Soviet nations, but also for observers in ‘the West’ During the Cold War it was simple, a US American foreign correspondent once told me: something happened somewhere in the world and you looked to see, are they on our side or are they on the Soviet Union’s side After the end of the Soviet Union, there was a need for new ways of reporting, including new we/they distinctions

A range of recent linguistically-sensitive (critical) discourse analyses have explored the constitution of a new ‘they’ in studies of news coverage of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Muslims, etc My aim in this book is slightly different It pro-poses a methodological approach which explicitly takes up the challenge that we should be ‘focusing our analysis more directly on the indeterminacies or contra-dictions’ (Allan 1998: 138) and the ‘incompletions, gaps, paradoxes and contradic-tions’ of (media) discourse (Fairclough 2001: 239) To date this has remained by and large a desideratum for discourse studies By closely analysing such tensions and fissures it is possible, I argue, to trace how journalism makes the partiality and contingency of any given hegemonic formation become increasingly visible and thus increasingly instable This is not only the argument that news selectively reports on world events and thus constructs hegemonic formations, but also that

the news itself makes visible its construction process and thus deconstructs hegemony

The central argument of this book is that it is this double gesture which gives temporary journalism a significant role in what Oliver Marchart (2007) calls ‘the moment of the political’: contemporary journalism makes visible the (constant yet ultimately impossible) institution of social order

con-For Stuart Allan (1998: 139), the added purchase of focusing on cies and fissures is that analysis can contribute to the empowerment of counter-hegemonic voices trying to contest the truth effects of news media Although I am wary of using the word ‘empowerment’ in an age of increasingly savvy and critical media users, I do believe that, as part of a broad post-foundational perspective

indetermina-on politics, truth and being, this type of analysis can cindetermina-ontribute to the expansiindetermina-on

of alternative hegemonic projects, i.e those positions, arguments and normalities which are not yet common-sense in wider public spaces On a more academic level, by unpacking the complex discursive practices of this (post-foundational)

method-or similar proposals have previously suggested.

Chapter 1 sketches the theoretical work which has influenced my ing of the political and enabled this particular approach to journalism and, in par-ticular, to foreign news It outlines the research strategy and embeds contemporary foreign news coverage of Russia in its institutional practices Part I then focuses explicitly on the political argument, examining how the moment of the political is potentially recuperated in a range of reports on Russia The analysis in Chapter 2 touches on the issues of civil society, democracy and human rights as it traces how

understand-a story understand-about new legislunderstand-ation develops This chunderstand-apter understand-also introduces centrunderstand-al understand-anunderstand-a-lytical concepts: chains of equivalence, nodal points and lexical variation Chapter

ana-3 analyses reporting of the conflict between Gazprom and Ukraine over energy supplies; its primary analytical focus is deconstruction and how news stories carry the seeds of their own subversion Chapter 4 turns to the death of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and traces the mimetic circulation of discourse as the news media rely increasingly on public relations materials Finally in this section, Chapter 5 examines the conflict between two political projects, each attempting to fix the meanings of a series of crises during the Russo-Chechen con-flict from the hospital siege in Budennovsk in 1995 to the school hostage-taking

in Beslan in 2004

Part II explores in more detail three aspects of journalistic practice In views with correspondents and editors the themes of sourcing, balance and com-plexity reduction appeared as central features of journalism and/or reporting from Russia To approach these issues, and to explore the relationship between these practices and the political, the corpus introduced in Chapter 5 is examined more extensively in Chapters 6 to 8 The theme of sourcing is taken up in Chapter 6

inter-It explores the conventions of attributing responsibility both for a story (i.e. which sources are legitimate) and within a story (which participants are responsible

for which actions), arguing that new trends in journalism – first person stories, increased reliance on news agencies – point towards a merging of these two areas of responsibility Chapter 7 investigates the journalistic epistemology of

xi Journalism and the Political

balance and the binary logic which this can articulate Chapter 8 turns to the unavoidability of complexity reduction Micro-analysis of the use of history and descriptions of the citizens of the North Caucasus embeds the stories in their argu-mentative contexts

In Part III (Chapter 9) the findings from previous chapters are drawn together

to analyse how news stories contest conventionalised mainstream views It asks which strategies work, which do not and why some succeed where others fail The hope is that this kind of ‘positive’ discourse analysis can suggest ways for inter-ested parties to shift the discourses, destabilize entrenched storylines and propel fresh ideas, new vocabularies and resignified stories into the media Finally, Chapter 10 reflects on salient themes from the analytical chapters, and considers further research opportunities following from this study

Overall, the analysis draws on the signal strength of critical approaches to discourse analysis, the close attention to the language and semiotics of published texts, but also on post-foundational political theories The aim is to combine micro-analysis of specific texts with a focus on the ambiguities and inconsistencies

in texts, the struggles for hegemony, and those moments in which the contingency

of (global) social ordering becomes visible, rather than concentrating solely on ‘a’ dominant discourse

artillery shells have reportedly killed several Russian peacekeepers as the crisis in the breakaway province of South Ossetia worsens Battles raged around the capital, Tskhinvali, today and buildings burned as Georgia launched an air and tank attack

on the separatist stronghold’

What is happening in these news stories? How can The Daily Telegraph shift its

version of the story 180 degrees from a Georgian invasion to Russia waging war on Georgia within 24 hours? There seems to be a series of conflicts, or lines of differ-ence, involved in these extracts Conflicts are drawn on a textual level between the Kremlin and the West; between Georgia and Russia; between Georgian forces and Russian-backed separatists; between Georgian shells and Russian peacekeepers But taking a step back from the texts, there is also divergence between the reports

on 8 and 9 August and among the various news media

News coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict in 2008 provides a prime example of how a hegemonic interpretation of global events is produced and at the same time undermined from within On the very first day of reporting (8 August), Georgia was widely reported world-wide as the aggressor For a few weeks after the second day (9 August), European and North American news media retrieved their more conventional perspective that the Russian government was the aggres-sor The conflict became an instance of the line of antagonism between the West and the non-West A few months later, the story shifted again when Human Rights Watch presented evidence of indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and British monitors stated that Georgia had fired the first shots at civilian areas in South Ossetia (Swain 2008; Whewell 2008)

This chapter sets out to do three things First, it outlines the theoretical tation of the study, in which I draw on a particular set of concepts in order to theo-rize international news reports such as the ones cited above Second it describes the research strategy adopted Third it positions the cases to be analysed within recent debates about contemporary foreign news coverage

orien-2 Journalism and the Political

1.1 Theoretical orientation

The following steps present the logic of the central argument in more depth, and outline the ways in which a range of key theories and concepts (discourse, articu-lation, antagonism, hegemony and post-foundationalism) inform the book

1 The basic premise is the discourse theoretical perspective that discourse does

not simply reflect a pre-discursive reality, but constitutes reality Drawing on

semiotic theories and in line with constructionist premises, a correspondence theory of meaning in which words and phrases refer to ‘the way the world really is’ is replaced by a relational understanding of meaning in which words and phrases gain their meaning in relation to other words and phrases The under-standing of discourse used in this book is a fairly broad one: discourse refers here not only to speech and writing but ‘embraces all systems of signification’ (Laclau 2006: 106), i.e any kind of meaningful practice that forms the identi-ties of objects and subjects; the principles, orderings or matrices of meanings making something sayable/thinkable/doable at all.1 In this sense, I agree with Schatzki (1996: 13) that discourse theories are also practice theories

Particularly relevant to this study are investigations into the constitution

of social order through for instance, the construction of a positive identity

of a ‘Self’ (a ‘we’) through the differentiation of an ‘Other’ (a ‘them’) This difference may be thought in terms of geography, race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, ideology, rationality, and so on Three sets of studies were influential for my thinking First, seminal broad-sweep studies on the constitution of difference – and thus the denigration of what is marked Other – between, for instance, colonizer-colonized (Said 1978; Spivak 1988), reason-unreason (Foucault 1961) or male-female (Butler 1990) Second, (historical) research

1 This is not to be confused with the idealist notion that the world only exists in discourse

An oft cited example is Laclau and Mouffe’s comment on the earthquake It is ‘an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will’ (Laclau & Mouffe 1985: 108) But as soon as we try to make sense of this event – as a natural phenom- enon, the wrath of God or the result of man-made climate warming – we are in the space of the discursive See Butler (1993) for an insightful discussion illustrating how this type of de- construction differs from the linguistic monism of some forms of constructivism See Couldry (2004) on the use of the term ‘orderings’ of signification rather than ‘systems’ Pertaining to journalism, this definition of ‘discourse’ means that not only texts are understood as discourse, but also that the daily routines of foreign correspondents in Moscow and their domestic edi- torial teams are understood as discursive Which contacts to develop, who to source, what to select, where to travel, how much time/space to devote to a story, who to brief, how to lay the story out, which news agencies to subscribe to, etc are all part of discourse about Russia.

Chapter 1 Introduction 3

on the construction of ‘Eastern Europe’ as part of the project of creating an identity as ‘the West’ (Malia 1999; Naarden 1992; Neumann 1996b, 1999).Third, I was strongly influenced by linguistically-sensitive studies of the constitution of difference and alterity The field of (critical) discourse studies,

as developed by, inter alia, Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress (1979/93), Norman Fairclough (1989, 1992), Ruth Wodak (Wodak et al 1999, 1996) and Teun van Dijk (1991, 1997) has been signally important in drawing attention to how power and domination operate through language The focus is on exploring

more intimately how lines of difference, and the often accompanying exclusions,

are constructed Similarly, although from a different epistemological tive, discursive or rhetorical psychology has refocused the attention of social psychology towards the analysis of language rather than cognitive processes (Edwards 1997; Potter & Wetherell 1987; Potter 1996) I draw from these two approaches what David Silverman (1999: 414) has called an ‘aesthetic for social research’: an aesthetic of smallness and slowness This ‘uncompromisingly focus

perspec-on apparently “small” objects’ (Silverman 1999: 420) opens the way to explore the quotidian and apparently ‘banal’, but in no way benign, everyday (language) practices constituting the social order in which we live (cf Billig 1995)

Analysing journalism from this perspective, Luisa Martín Rojo (1995), for instance, has illustrated how the Spanish press articulated Saddam Hussein as a threat to the ‘we’ of the civilized world Mika Luoma-Aho (2002) argues that the articulation of the nationalist conflict in the Balkans as an existential threat to European security constituted the European Union as a political subject John Richardson (2004) has shown how the ‘they’ of Islam has been articulated with the threat of extremism, terrorism, despotism and sexism, simultaneously constituting a ‘we’ of democracy, tolerance and equality The construction of Russia as an Other for western Europe has been shown in several studies (Le 2002, 2006; Loew & Pfeifer 2001; Macgilchrist 2005; Neumann 1999; Raittila 2003; Riegert 2003)

2 The question then is how to theorize the media’s construction of lines of ference in society, and thus of a particular social order One mode draws on

dif-a Hdif-abermdif-asidif-an (1989) understdif-anding of the (idedif-al) public sphere dif-as dif-a spdif-ace

of open discussion in which all have the right to voice their position, and in which consensus among antagonistic parties can – and should – be found Despite the wide variety and complexity among contemporary Habermasian approaches, a shared goal remains some kind of deliberative democracy in which rational consensus can be developed This is grounded in rules of discourse which orient us towards reaching mutual understanding and an ideal speech situation of undistorted communication It feeds into politics

in concepts of ‘community cohesion’, ‘third way’ centrist politics and a range

of democratic institutions and practices such as deliberative polling and

4 Journalism and the Political

forums, citizens’ juries and the need to publicly present reasons for particular (political) claims and arguments The perspective of deliberative democracy feeds into critical approaches to discourse analysis when studies criticize the

distorting effects of hierarchical power and domination or the

misrepresenta-tion of groups or individuals and thus assume that a form of undistorted resentation is possible It is also relevant when the goal of discourse analysis

rep-is formulated as drawing attention to the exclusion of particular groups and calling for their inclusion in processes of rational political deliberation

A range of recent work has, however, questioned these presuppositions and goals From Michel Foucault’s (1976, 1982) work on the multiplicity and omnipresence of power relations to work in cognitive science questioning whether rationality really is a normative standard for behaviour and whether reason is sufficient to understand how decision-making works (Damasio 1994; McKenzie 2003), the ideal discourse situation of deliberative democ-racy seems increasingly unattainable In a more political argument, Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2005), for instance, argues that since any consensus is neces-sarily based on exclusions, it is precisely the aim for consensus which blocks particular voices from political participation and creates ethnic, religious or racist fundamentalisms

A second way of theorising the construction of lines of difference and constituting social order, which as I will outline below I found immensely useful as a lens for observing journalism, thus radically questions the useful-ness of positing an ideal communicative model which cannot be attained and necessarily entails exclusions Instead of privileging consensus, contempo-rary poststructuralist or post-foundational political thinkers such as Judith Butler, William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Nancy, Chantal Mouffe, Aletta Norval or Jacques Rancière see antagonism – or dis-agreement, dissent, negativity, disharmony or conflict – as constitutive of the social I have found the term ‘post-foundational’ useful, in this sense, to point

to the ‘constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation’ such as totality, universality, essence, ground, reason or consensus shared by these thinkers (Marchart 2007: 2) Since meaning and identity are relational, a total (full, essential, etc.) identity is not possible; the Other of the totality must be outside the totality, thus creating a fissure in the totality which is thus by definition no longer total.2

2 I should point out perhaps that it is not my intention in this book to ‘bash’ Habermas or the range of work which has been done on journalism or media discourse and the public sphere In the sense that (critical) discourse analysis is always an engagement with linguistic theories and

Chapter 1 Introduction 5

Oliver Marchart (2007) is keen to dissociate post-foundational thinkers

from what has been thought of as a postmodern anti-foundationalism which

entirely erased all foundations The deconstruction of the onto logical status

of figures of foundation by no means leads to the argument that the ground

is completely absent and that ‘anything goes’ Instead, it argues that if there is

no final socially or historically necessary ground then the ground which is

generally accepted at any one time must be defended, and new grounds can

be laid Any grounding which is done – and it must be done or we would live

in a psychotic universe – is contingent, partial and political.3

Against this background, Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001: xi) definition of hegemony, one of the central concepts I use in this book, as ‘a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain’ begins to make sense If there

is no final ground, the terrain upon which we live is inherently able But to avoid the psychotic state of living in undecidability, decisions (to identify with particular political projects and the discursive formations they articulate) must be made Hegemony is attained – albeit only temporar-ily and precariously – when there appears to be no alternative to a certain political project, for example during Thatcherism in the UK in the 1980s or neo-liberalism in the 2000s Although popular support for the political project in question may be lacking, when participants see no alternative,

undecid-it becomes almost impossible to talk about an issue – about polundecid-itics – in terms other than the hegemonic formation (Laclau 1990) Since this terrain

of no-alternative has constantly to be rearticulated to suppress potential alternatives and is thus constantly shifting, theorists of ‘radical democratic pluralism’ argue that struggling for hegemony is precisely what democratic politics is about (cf Norval 2009; Smith 1998)

What I found attractive about this orientation is that it is, in a way, a tying down of the project of deconstruction From this perspective, we now perceive what Lefort (1988: 19) calls ‘the dissolution of the markers of cer-tainty’ and thus the impossibility of a certain and final ground But at the same time, we perceive that we must have a ground in order to communicate

social or political theory (cf Weiss & Wodak 2008), I believe that this body of post-foundational theorising can open up new ways of thinking about journalism, media and discourse.

3 This leads thinkers in this tradition away from the pessimism or nihilism often ated with postmodernism and towards a view that radical change is possible through the establishment and consolidation of new hegemonic projects For more on the implications of post-foundational thought for democracy, citizenship or ethics, which go beyond the scope of this book, see, for instance, Butler (2005); Butler, Laclau & Žižek (1999); Laclau (1996); Mouffe (2005); Rancière (2006).

associ-6 Journalism and the Political

and to act at all, and thus the possibility (or necessity) of what Judith Butler (1992) has referred to as ‘contingent foundations’ Deconstruction, as I under-stand it, is not about negating or dismissing concepts, it is about questioning and opening them up so they can be resignified in ways that were previously not legitimate.4 The point is then not to negate the idea of foundations, but

to attend to the ‘construction of foundations presupposed as self-evident’ (Spivak 1993: 153) and to ‘interrogate what the theoretical move that estab-

lishes foundations authorizes, and what precisely it excludes or forecloses’

(Butler 1992: 7)

The political or critical point of these theoretical positions is that ries thought to be foundational (such as the autonomous or unified subject, economy, truth, science, culture, universality, rationality, etc.) are rendered sites of permanent political contest (Butler & Scott 1992; Marchart 2007; Silverman 1993).5 Claims to ground society are interrogated for the exclu-sionary moves they make It follows that any social order – such as ‘the West and the rest’, liberal democracy or modernity – is the site of contingent and precarious articulation of competing (hegemonic) claims

catego-3 A third, related, point is the dynamic debate sparked by the distinction some post-foundational thinkers have drawn between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ which they claim opens new paths for reflection.6 Where politics refers to the ontic level of party programmes, institutions and practices involved in pol-icy-making and other activities of the state or political system, the political is used by these thinkers to refer to the ontological level and the institution of

4 Since Derrida himself has written that ‘All sentences of the type “deconstruction is X” or

“deconstruction is not X” a priori miss the point’ (1991: 275), I will leave the definition at this.

5 Butler writes: ‘A social theory committed to democratic contestation within a postcolonial horizon needs to find a way to bring into question the foundations it is compelled to lay down

It is this movement of interrogating that ruse of authority that seeks to close itself off from contest that is, in my view, at the heart of any radical political project’ (1992: 8).

6 The difference between politics and the political in the sense used in this study can also refer, to borrow Žižek‘s (1990: 252) vocabulary, to that between ‘the antagonistic struggle in social reality’ and ‘pure antagonism’ In the antagonistic struggle (politics), one party feels its full development is blocked by the other (women by men; ethnic minority by majority, etc) ‘Pure an- tagonism’ (the political), however, is logically prior to this antagonistic fight For Žižek, thinking

in Lacanian terms, there is no possibility of ever achieving a full identity; ‘it is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already

in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic, immanent impossibility’ (ibid., cf Stavrakakis 1999: 71ff.) For other understandings of the concept of ‘the political’, see, e.g Arendt (1958, 1993); Bedorf & Röttgers (2010); Bröckling & Feustel (2010); Chandler (2005); Honig 1992.

Chapter 1 Introduction 7

the social, i.e the moment in which the dimension of antagonism or cidability is apparently resolved into a solid, full identity of the social.7 As Lefort writes:

unde-The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across

its divisions becomes visible It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes

shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed (Lefort 1988: 11)

This is where it gets exciting for studying journalism and media discourse

I have assumed above, firstly, that media discourse constitutes rather than reflects difference and society and, secondly, that a plurality of hegemonic projects is competing to present a figure of foundation for society Now, thirdly, the argument here is that the social, as that which appears to be sedi-mented into stable social structures, is itself precarious It requires discursive work to repress the political, i.e the dimension of antagonism which means there is no possibility of achieving entirely stable social structures ‘The social’ refers thus to the moment of forgetting: forgetting that it could all be organ-ised otherwise ‘The political’ refers to the moment of remembering: recalling that it could all be otherwise and that the social (social structures, society, global social order) is a hegemonic articulation

4 What this leads to is a radically new conception of the role of journalism in the political Studies of journalism or media discourse have tended to privi-lege politics over the political Textual studies have explored representation, political activity, exclusions, inclusions, racism, etc in the media Journalism studies have considered (western) journalism as the fourth estate of democ-racy or voiced concern about the ‘CNN effect’, the disproportionate influence

of news media on political decision-makers (Robinson 1999)

There seems to be no denying the impact of news media on political actions and policies (Willis 2007) Yet – and here I return to an uncompromisingly

7 In a recent elaboration of the ontic/ontological distinction in Heidegger’s early work, Jason Glynos and David Howarth write that ‘an ontical inquiry focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or ‘region’ of phenomena, whereas

an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical pre-conditions for such objects and their vestigation’ (2007: 108f.) If a researcher investigating national identity takes for granted the notions of ‘nation’ or ‘national identity’, then her research operates on the ontic level ‘If, on the other hand, the research inquires into the underlying presuppositions that determine what is

in-to count as an identity or role, how these phenomena are in-to be studied, and that they exist at all, then the research incorporates an ontological dimension’ (ibid.).

8 Journalism and the Political

focus on apparently ‘small’ objects – the way the media work today (more on

which below), journalism is also precisely one of the public spaces where the

political can become visible In the extracts at the start of this page, we see not only antagonistic struggle on the ontic level between Russia and Georgia or the Kremlin and the West or between different newspapers’ ways of symbolis-ing what has happened In the very plurality of stories, and the contradictions among the positions, the contingency and undecidability of the contemporary social order flickers through, and we are reminded – briefly – of the political institution of the social.8

At this stage, Marchart’s elaboration of ‘the moment of the political’ vides a useful differentiation of this theoretical position from the more widely accepted position that (i) news stories report only a few selected perspectives

pro-on events and (ii) there are multiple other ways of reporting the events

[W]hat is given in the moment of the political is not only a crisis within a specific discourse (which leads to conceptual change only), but the encounter with the crisis or breakdown of discursive signification as such – in political terms, the encounter with society’s abyss or absent ground And it is the realization of the groundlessness of the social as the entirety of the discursive, rather than just the realization of the groundlessness of any particular discourse, which has come to define the emerging post-foundationalist constellation (Marchart 2007: 32f.)

For Marchart, the political is indeed everywhere, but it is an everywhere which

is only visible in the fissures and gaps in the social A practice participates

in the political when it dislocates the familiar rituals of a hegemonic tion and reminds us of the grounding moment of any given social order and thus of the contingency of the social This, it is my conviction, is precisely the potential of contemporary journalism.9 The concern in this book is with this

forma-8 There is always a danger in linguistically-sensitive discourse analysis of making too grand claims from the slimmest of evidence I wholeheartedly agree with Jan Blommaert’s argument, however, that close analysis can read ‘infinitely big features of the world from infinitely small details of human communicative behaviour’ (2010: 198) It is in this sense that I suggest that the moment of the political bubbles through in news media Whether this means media users see it or act on it is another matter entirely Perhaps the point is that as post-foundational thought becomes more widespread (if its hegemonic project becomes more hegemonic) then these moments of the political may become yet more visible to more users.

9 Marchart’s list of criteria to define minimal politics would not include journalism since

the criteria are limited to hegemonic projects which include some kind of active attempt

to disrupt current hegemonies It seems, however, unnecessary to limit participation in the political per se to hegemonic projects, since the ‘by-product’ of media discourse that I analyse

in this book seems to meet his definition of ‘the political nature of even the smallest and apparently most ineffective practices’ which can be considered to participate in the political when they ‘dislocate the familiar rituals of the hegemonic formation and remind us of the

Chapter 1 Introduction 9

‘production of incompletion or dislocation, the failure of the representation of community [which] takes place in the very production of such a representa-tion’ (Arditi & Valentine 1999: xii) Doing the research leading to this book, I became convinced that this dislocation does not only happen in rare moments

of revolutionary rupture, as it is generally analysed, but also in the small and slow apparently mundane and quotidian moments of daily life News media,

as an ever-present element in contemporary life, are therefore a prime site to investigate these processes The case studies in the following chapters aim to explore this argument in more depth Drawing on Lefort, these news stories are perhaps only a tiny rip in the hegemony, ‘but the traces of the rip will remain even after the veil has been woven anew’ (2008: 43)

The political role of journalism is thus not simply in influencing political leaders, nor in providing the public with reports and opinions to help them make informed decisions in elections or other available spaces of democratic political activity It is in reminding its users, no matter how briefly, that the totality of society suggested by politics and normal everyday life is based on

a political moment of institution and that the social world is radically open This opens up, and keeps open, processes of politicisation which would not necessarily be considered possible in a social world which imagined itself to

be on solid foundations (cf Butler & Scott 1992; Marchart 2010)

5 The final point I want to make in this section is that the argument thus far also suggests a new relationship between journalism and hegemony A final set of work informing this book is research on journalism from a hegemony perspective Previous studies drawing on this concept have seen mainstream (western) journalism as an agent of ‘hegemonic ideology’ or domination Journalists were considered to be ideological agents who drew readers or viewers to agree with the perspective of the ruling elites by consensus rather than by force (Glasgow University Media Group [GUMG] 1976, 1980; Hall

2005 [1982]) ‘Simply by doing their jobs, journalists tend to serve the cal and economic elite definitions of reality’ (Gitlin 1980: 12) Drawing on Antonio Gramsci (1971) and Raymond Williams (1977), these approaches adopt an active notion of hegemony: ‘hegemony operating through a com-plex web of social activities and institutional procedures’ (Gitlin 1980: 10)

politi-It was also important to these studies to point out that readers of course did not unthinkingly swallow the messages presented to them; they negoti-ated or rejected parts or the entirety of media stories (Hall 1980) This under-standing still strongly influences media analysis, including this study, today

original moment of political grounding and thus of the contingency of the social’ (Marchart 2010: 324f.; Marchart touches on these thoughts briefly in the English edition of his book [2007] and elaborates them in the 2010 German edition).

10 Journalism and the Political

Yet hegemony in these studies was primarily about securing consensus for the already dominant elites

A second wave of hegemony studies of journalism is now beginning to emerge with a more dynamic, (even) less deterministic, understanding of hegemony Nico Carpentier and Bert Cammaerts (2006), for instance, engage with Mouffe’s work on hegemony, democracy and agonism For James Lull (2000), hegemony, as a method for gaining and maintaining power, is fragile, requiring renewal and modification to remain effective Tom Van Hout and myself have explored the micro-practices of stabilising and destabilising hege-mony through an ethnographic approach to news production (Macgilchrist

& Van Hout 2011) Anabelle Sreberny draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s work on articulation and antagonism as providing a ‘more labile and less firmly situ-ated’ notion of hegemony than the first wave of hegemony analysis of media (Sreberny 2008: 116) For Sreberny, Laclau and Mouffe’s approach allows for continuous change, albeit small and perhaps not apparent, because hegemonic articulation is constantly accompanied by counter-articulation in alternative spaces

In this book, I work with a similar understanding of the iterative tion of hegemony (cf Derrida 1988) Precisely because the news media con-stantly reiterate constructions of democracy, Russia, conflict, human rights, etc., ‘gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions’ (Butler 1993: 10) Chapter 9 in particular explores practices of counter-articulation In line with the above argument on the political, how-ever, this study adds one further feature to thinking the relationship between journalism and hegemony Not only do alternative media or alternative, non-mainstream, practices articulate counter-discourse; this counter-discourse

articula-and the visibility of the political moment are also articulated from within the

mainstream news outlets themselves (cf Macgilchrist 2009)

1.2 Research strategy

In order to trace the constitution and contesting of hegemony – the (textual) tices of iteratively maintaining the equilibrium – I adopted a case study approach Without entering the debates on quantitative and qualitative research (cf Flyvb-jerg 2004; Laitin 2003), there is something of a contradiction when case study approaches using largely qualitative methods attempt to select ‘representative’ cases in order to achieve generalizability Mario Small advocates ‘developing alter-native languages and clarifying […] separate objectives, rather than imitating the language of classical statistics for problems to which it is not suited’ (2008: 10) In

prac-Chapter 1 Introduction 11

this sense, the aim here is to explore the specificities of each case, and to consider how one case is related to another Texts for close analysis have been selected to explore what is ‘sayable’ rather than to provide a representative picture As with all (quantitative and qualitative) research, the analysis presented here is contingent upon present epistemologies and my own situation in the field and is therefore contestable Alternative interpretations will of course always also be possible I borrow from anthropology a ‘culture of close attention’ (Schiffauer 2008: 15) in which the aim is to present a description and interpretation which is plausibly

argued and resonates with readers One hope of resonance is that others

encoun-tering similar situations, people, discourse or media may then pay closer attention

to the specific case facing them, reflecting on similarities and differences, and on whether they are engaged in a political moment

More specifically, the study analyses ‘critical discourse moments’ (Chilton 1987), i.e issues which were considered sufficiently newsworthy to warrant cov-erage in many different news outlets It examines news stories (i) synchronically across different media outlets, countries and languages, (ii) diachronically from the 1990s to the 2000s, and (iii) closely, drawing on tools from linguistically- sensitive discourse analysis.10 Each chapter describes the particular corpus of texts

on which its analysis is based

I see three advantages for this study in analysing critical discourse moments First, it means analysing bursts of journalistic energy devoted to Russia across a wide range of news media in a compressed time span It enables the tracing of the start of a story, the moment when nobody is quite sure what happened, and the process in which this initial uncertainty is fixed into one or more stable nar-ratives And it also enables a particular focus on rips and fissures in the stories Previous research on perceptions, stereotypes or frames of Russia in ‘the West’ has not always aimed to capture the dynamism and contradictory, shifting nature of signification practices in the media (e.g Brandt 2003; Crudopf 2000; Gavrilova 2004; Hudabiunigg 2004; Janssen 2002; Loew & Pfeifer 2001; Paul 2001; Seifert 2003; Semenenko, Lapkin & Pantin 2007)

Second, journalists have noted in interviews that they often use such moments

of heightened attention as ‘pegs’ enabling them to draw attention to background

10 There has been little interaction between linguistic and political theorists of discourse The former has criticised the latter for being in danger of extreme relativism; the latter has criticised the former for simply doing technical analysis These accusations limit the enor- mous potential that I see in integrating both perspectives, especially since, irrespective of political and epistemological differences, both share an orientation to critical inquiry and

a motivation ‘to contribute to an awareness of what is, how it has come to be, and what it might become, on the basis of which people may be able to make and remake their lives’ (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999: 4).

12 Journalism and the Political

issues they feel are important, for instance, the conflict in Chechnya A range of issues beyond the immediate crisis is thus included in the analysis Third, the large amount of data produced during a critical discourse moment foregrounds jour-nalistic practices and the ways in which different requirements have to be juggled simultaneously, such as the aim of producing quality copy to tight deadlines, the reliance on a stock of shared knowledge to make stories as brief yet also as infor-mative as possible, the cross-citations among media outlets, the struggle for above-the-fold, front-page space, the need for domestic journalists and editors to work

on foreign stories, and the economic pressure for every story to draw readers.The analysis is complemented by open interviews I conducted with nine for-eign correspondents based in Moscow, shorter interviews and discussions with reporters and editors in the UK, USA and Germany, and further correspondence and telephone calls with some of these individuals Interviews took place between

2005 and 2008, lasted between 20 minutes and four hours, and were generally understood as a discussion or conversation Drawing on interviews goes some way towards pursuing my interest in ethnographic approaches to the news media which increased as this study developed Although participant observation would

go beyond the scope of this particular study, I believe it is nevertheless possible – and crucial – to pay attention to journalistic practices within predominantly text-based analysis Interviews to gain journalists’ accounts of how a text was created are usually possible, albeit with sometimes bemused journalists And a wealth of studies on the production of news provides insights on how texts are embedded

in other practices, from the classic newsroom ethnographies (Burns 1977; Gans 1979; Gitlin 1980; Schlesinger 1978; Tuchman 1978) to more recent studies (e.g Cotter 2010; Doyle 2006; Paterson & Domingo 2008; Rodriguez 2001; Van Hout 2010)

1.3 Russia

The more specific argument I make in this book regards the news coverage of Russia The basic assumption is that reporting Russia, or indeed reporting foreign news in general, can say as much about the reporters and their (social, political, cultural, historic, practical, technical) contexts as about the reported Given the Russian Federation’s high visibility across newspaper, television, radio and inter-net news, the country offers a prime site for investigating the functions, sometimes deliberate and other times non-deliberate, of foreign news coverage

In 1999, the Russia in which I spent a year living and teaching was radically different from the Russia my friends and acquaintances in Britain expected Some suggested that I was mad to go there, the Russians were mafia mobsters; others asked whether I was sure I would be okay given the food shortages and lack of

Chapter 1 Introduction 13

fresh vegetables Ten years later, journalists, researchers and others that I met at various evening events connected to Russia asked about my research With several individuals I reframed, in the course of our chat, some contemporary public ver-sions of Russian politics I would mention, for example, that Vladimir Putin is not the second Stalin; that although the main television channels generally do not, the print media quite certainly do voice very critical positions on Kremlin poli-cies; that only a small percentage of the Russian journalists killed since 1993 were critical of the Kremlin; that Alexander Litvinenko had a less than clean past, with interesting connections to Boris Berezovsky; that Berezovsky himself had an axe

to grind against Putin; that reconstruction has finally started in Chechnya; or that according to the CIA World Factbook (2008), ‘Russia ended 2007 with its ninth straight year of growth, averaging 7% annually since the financial crisis of 1998’

‘During this period’, the factbook reports, ‘poverty has declined steadily and the middle class has continued to expand’

Despite the source of these last facts, the response from my conversational partners has often been to ask, jokingly, if I work for the KGB, or whether my research is funded by the Kremlin The joke is based on a shared understand-ing which the German journalist Gabriele Krone-Schmalz summarised on the

news channel n-tv with the term ‘Russlandversteher’ (‘Russia-understander’, cited

in Logvinov 2007) She is dismayed that this term is increasingly used to credit anyone trying to portray a different – less critical – version of Russia The anomaly which these less critical versions seemed to present for many people around me provided the original impetus for this study It is my hope that this book will provide those interested in Russia, and with a feeling that somehow the mainstream news reporting in Euro-America is too predictable or does not give as full and nuanced a picture as it could, an overview of which narratives are indeed dominant, and also which alternative accounts are available on the mar-gins of the news landscape

dis-1.4 Foreign news

To embed news texts on Russia in their institutional practices, the first port of call is economics and the market Journalism is an intensely competitive business, which is nevertheless often associated with the strengthening of democracy Schol-arly accounts of (western) journalism often begin from a perspective of delibera-tive democracy and a normative notion of journalism ‘as a democratic practice’ which is currently in trouble (e.g Rosen 1994) If news media is the ‘fourth estate’

of democracy, (public) journalism should provide the public with information to

‘make it as easy as possible for citizens to make intelligent decisions about public affairs’ (Charity 1995: 2; cf Cook 1998; Entman 1989; McNair 2002) New forms

14 Journalism and the Political

of journalism are thought to be transforming news into a democratic dialogue between members of a community (cf Tunney & Monaghan 2010; Zizi 2009).While some observers celebrate the ability of news media to do just this (Entman 2004), others argue that this laudable goal cannot be achieved when the news media are commercial institutions vying for survival, growth and profit within a market economy, as they currently are These observers highlight, for instance, the growth of infotainment, a cynical style of reporting, the weakness

of the public broadcasting sector, reductions in staff numbers, the influence of advertisers and public relations, a narrowing of the news agenda, and homogeni-zation resulting from the increased concentration of ownership now that six major corporations, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, own a huge propor-tion of global media networks (Bagdikian 2004; Davies 2008; Herman & Chomsky 1988; Klinenberg 2005; McChesney 1999, 2004; Schudson 2003).11

For some, this heralds the end of journalism as we know it It seems larly worrying for foreign news Rem Rieder (2007) reports one editor whose solu-tion to the dire straits of her publication is to get rid of the foreign bureaus The brief surge in interest in foreign news after the September 11 attacks in the US was not sufficient to halt the decreasing proportion of news covering global events (cf Paterson & Sreberny 2004) Dan Rather, long-time CBS anchorman, was quoted less than a year after the 2001 attacks saying that ‘a feeling is creeping back in that

particu-if you lead foreign, you die’ (Hannerz 2004: 237) Of the 24 foreign bureaus CBS used to have, only six now remain, none of which are in Africa or Latin America (Lewis 2007: 32) Only four US newspapers maintain foreign-based correspon-dents (Constable 2007) Most news outlets have made large cuts in the number of foreign correspondents

Three sets of challenges to foreign coverage have been seen to result from these changes; each has also been seen to embed opportunities The first challenge is the narrowing of the news agenda Not only is the time/space devoted

11 Ben Bagdikian provides detailed information of ownership, mergers, joint ventures, the bending of monopoly rules, etc in what he calls ‘the new media monopoly’ In 1983, fifty companies dominated the news landscape in the USA Thirty years later, five did: Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Viacom and Bertelsmann (Bagdikian 2004: 16) Add a sixth, Vivendi, and a large proportion of the global market in major web- sites, commercial broadcasting and print media is covered (Sreberny & Paterson 2004: 14) Regarding advertising, according to Eric Klinenberg: ‘In the late 1990s, Times Mirror CEO and Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes generated professional outrage by announcing that advertisers should play a key role in shaping journalistic content In the early 2000s, edi- torial meetings with advertisers and the internal marketing staff are routine, and the editors I met unabashedly reported that they worked hard to produce more marketable and profitable products’ (2005: 60).

Chapter 1 Introduction 15

to foreign news decreasing (cf Parks 2002); but television, print and online news outlets’ are increasingly relying on a small number of (western-based) global news agencies, with Reuters and Associated Press (AP) playing a particularly structur-ing role (cf Paterson 2003, 2007) Horror stories abound of individual mistakes

in single news agency stories which, because they are not fact-checked, ate across multiple news outlets, in print, on television and online (e.g Davies 2008; Niggemeier 2008) Perhaps more importantly, this reliance further increases what has been called the agencies’ ‘profound importance in the distribution of knowledge of current human affairs’ (Rantanen & Boyd-Barrett 2004: 47) At a conference of journalists in April 2008, several foreign correspondents criticised their editors for not trusting the correspondents’ judgement on which stories were worth reporting Editors were not willing to consider stories which were not cov-

reverber-ered by news agencies (Bouhs 2008) Similarly, a foreign correspondent for The

Guardian told me that if his report on events conflicted with the news wires, his

editors were more comfortable following the wire agenda During the first days of reporting from Kiev during the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004 they were happier to rely on the agency categorisation of events as Russia vs the USA or EU than listen to his less black and white view of what was happening on the street.Secondly, a homogenization of opinions Although direct control of the news agenda is rarely exercised by owners, there are worries about strikingly similar pat-

terns published in newspapers with the same owner The Guardian, for instance,

reports that Rupert Murdoch strongly backed the war in Iraq in 2003 Of the 175 newspapers owned by his News Corporation, not one disagreed; all voiced simi-larly pro-war sentiments (Greenslade 2003)

The third challenge arises from the increasing demands placed on journalists

in the new hi-tech newsrooms Journalists in a study of British and Spanish vision newsrooms expressed concerns about becoming computer-bound “mouse monkeys” The new technology in digital news emphasises speed, sometimes at the expense of accuracy With instantaneous live reporting given priority there is little space left to explain contexts (Avilés et al 2004) Similarly, the focus on live report-ing means that if there are no (video) images of an event, it does not become news (Sreberny & Paterson 2004: 13)

tele-Mark Deuze (2006, 2007a, 2007b) is one of the strongest voices arguing against these pessimistic views of the future of journalism, and pointing to opportunities for today’s journalism Firstly, regarding the news agenda, although the increasing power of news agencies in traditional news institutions may be increasing, so too

is the power and reach of alternative sources of news such as blogs, podcasts, munity media and other forms of user-generated content (on foreign coverage, see Guensburg 2008; Lewis 2007; www.medialens.org) Secondly, these same sources diversify the opinions available in the media The resulting ‘disintermediation’

com-16 Journalism and the Political

removes traditional news publications from their role as the sole intermediary between public institutions and the audience, and thus reorganizes the traditional hierarchy in which readers followed editorial opinion

Thirdly, new technologies, although negatively received by journalists in traditional newsrooms, have been warmly welcomed by early adaptors, who are generally new journalists, freelancers, citizen journalists and audiences The Spanish/British study cited above notes that after initial resistance, and despite continued ambivalence about digital systems, journalists generally accept that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages (Avilés et al 2004: 98) Graham Holliday (2008) reports plans at CNN and ABC to expand foreign coverage again now that technology makes it more economically viable to upload images from distant loca-tions Websites integrating news and gaming point the way to future mediations of complex global information (e.g www.newsgaming.com) As new practices chal-lenge traditional journalistic ways of doing things, so ‘the culture of journalism

is becoming more diverse, open, and dynamic all the time’ (Deuze 2007b: 170) Overall, while Deuze avoids undue optimism, he does argue that journalism as

we know it need not face extinction, ‘as long as a new “network journalism” adapts itself to changing social and technological realities’ (2007b: 141)

Deuze’s arguments tie in to a conception of journalism as a potential pant in the moment of the political If we add his argument about the increasing variety of positions from which the news is reported to recent statistics on media use, which indicate that a large proportion of people now go to multiple media out-lets to get their national and international news (e.g PEW Research Center 2008), there is a growing possibility of media users being confronted with incompatible and shifting versions of the world Of course, it is impossible to do more than spec-ulate on what users do in a study based primarily on textual analysis Nevertheless, returning the examples at the start of this chapter on the Georgian-Russian conflict

partici-in 2008, this is not only the argument that the difference between reportpartici-ing from

8 August 2008, when Georgia is the aggressor, to 9 August, when Russia becomes the aggressor, indicates the diversity of perspectives on the events It is also not only that this reporting dislocates trust in the news media to report the world as it is, or that the boundary differentiating ‘the West’ from ‘the rest’ is socially constructed

It is the more far-reaching possibility that the sedimented, unquestioned nature

of social order as such can become shaky The political – as the perception of the groundlessness and contingency of any social reality; as an encounter with society’s abyss – can be reactivated in this quotidian way at any time

Chapter 2 presents the first case study It explores the (de)stabilisation of the global social order of ‘the West and the rest’ in coverage of proposed legislation on non-governmental organisations operating in Russia

part i

chapter 2

Developing a story

NGOs, legislation and human rights in Moscow

This chapter now begins to pay more close attention to the intricacies of reporting Russia Two things should become clear in this chapter First, what an ‘uncompro-misingly focus on apparently “small” objects’ means when analysing the political Second, that the analysis differs from the type of discourse analysis which seeks patterns of representation across large corpora Since I am particularly interested

in the possibilities for recuperating the moment of the political, I will tend to spend less time on analysing regularities and more on exploring the breaks, tensions and fissures in the discourse For insights into regularities, I rely here on extensive previous research indicating that Russia has indeed predominantly been reported

in a negative way; as backwards, expansionist, undemocratic and uncivilised (cf Brandt 2003; Browning 2002; Crudopf 2000; Ellefson & Kingsepp 2003; Erler 2005; Hudabiunigg 2004; Janssen 2002; Keller & Kopelew 1985; Loew & Pfeifer 2001; Malia 1999; Marx 1990; Naarden 1992; Neumann 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1999; Ostrow 2002; Paddock 1998; Paul 2001; Petro 2006; Seifert 2003; Wolff 1994).1

This first critical discourse moment is a small incident touching on salient social issues: democracy, civil society, human rights On Wednesday 21 December 2005, the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, passed a bill regulating the activities

of non-governmental organisations This was the second reading of the proposed legislation after vocal domestic and international protests had led to amendments

of the first version On Friday 23 December, the bill was fully approved on its third and final reading A LexisNexis search of all UK, US and German-language news stories filed from 21 to 23 December retrieved 49 news items

1 I write ‘predominantly’ because, of course, no representations are monolithic The cited studies have also pointed to the occasional accounts of Russia as an admirably communal,

egalitarian, revolutionary or spiritual Other in, for instance, the traditional mir (communal

villages) or the new socialist utopia This was, nevertheless, an Other, utilized in these cases

to criticise the lack of morals or the conservatism of ‘the West’, ‘western Europe’ or Britain, France, Germany, etc.

20 Journalism and the Political

After describing this small corpus, the following two sections analyse sions among different media outlets with the help of the concepts of chains of equivalence and lexical variability The final section explores the development of the story into a human rights issue, drawing on the concept of nodal points

ten-2.1 Corpus: NGO legislation

LexisNexis is the primary database used throughout this study; texts were

analysed with the help of Atlas.ti, a qualitative research software package, and Wordsmith, used in corpus linguistics The ‘news’ section of LexisNexis stores texts from newspapers, magazines, journals, news agencies, transcripts of

TV and radio news, web-based publications and other news media across the globe, sometimes going back to the 1970s Parameters for this search were set in LexisNexis to ‘UK publications’, ‘US news’ and ‘German language news’ Search

terms were ‘NGO’ and ‘Russia’ or ‘Russland’ appearing ‘anywhere’ in news items

from 21 to 23 December 2005 After removing irrelevant items, UK publications returned 13 texts on the new NGO legislation; US 14 texts and German language (including Germany, Switzerland, Austria) 22 texts Overall, 13 texts were avail-able on 21 December; 21 texts on 22 December and 15 texts on 23 December.The following selection of extracts gives an impression of the reporting, and will serve as the basis for the subsequent discussion These extracts are drawn to illustrate a wide range of positions articulated in the news

(1) The new vulnerability of NGOs dealing with issues such as human rights and

the environment marks a further stifling of civil society in Russia

(The Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2005) (2) “The objections [Einwände] from non-governmental organisations were

practically ignored”, Tatyana Kasatkina from Memorial told Die Welt

(Die Welt, 21 December 2005)

(3) The Russian human rights organisation Memorial stated on Friday that even

the final version of the law is draconian: “This will mean the destruction

[Zerstörung] of civil society in Russia”, said the director of the organisation,

Tatyana Kasatkina (AP – German, 23 December 2005) (4) Critics of the Russian regime [Russische Regimekritiker] had their worst fears

confirmed: democracy and human rights in Russia are in the same dire straits

[ähnlich schlimm bestellt] as they are among the outcasts [Geächteten] of the

international community: Cuba, North Korea or the central Asian former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan That, at least, is what it says in black and white in the latest report from the US organisation Freedom House The authors criticised

that anti-democratic tendencies had intensified [vertieft] significantly there

(Stuttgarter Zeitung, 23 December 2005)

Chapter 2 NGOs, legislation and human rights in Moscow 21

(5) The law is necessary to weed out ‘bad’ NGOs, to avert terrorist or extremist

dangers which could reach the country in the disguise [unter dem Deckmantel]

of NGOs, claim the law’s supporters (Die Morgenpost, 21 December 2005)

(6) The Russian leadership under President Vladimir Putin wants to stop civil

organisations preparing, especially with support from abroad, a change of

government [Machtwechsel] such as that in the Ukraine or Georgia

(Die Welt, 22 December 2005)

(7) [Stanislav Dimitriyevski:] “I have the feeling that it was easier for Soviet

dissidents in the 70s They were supported by the international community,

whereas we are just sold for oil I don’t feel I have any moral support

whatsoever.” (Tages-Anzeiger, 21 December 2005)

(8) And to what overall goal are Mr Putin’s measures tending: a constitutional

amendment, so that he can run for a third term in 2008, or a paramount role, such as that exercised in China by Deng Xiaoping from behind the scenes? It is impossible to say The science of Kremlinology is back

(The Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2005)

(9) The bill’s supporters say the proposed measures are similar to laws in the United

States and other Western countries designed to monitor the flow of funds sent

to NGOs from abroad to ensure that the money isn’t used to support terrorist organizations and illegal groups (Washington Post, 22 December 2005)

(10) Russia’s efforts to regulate NGOs, foreign ones in particular, is not much

different from existing U.S laws dealing with foreign NGOs What many

foreign NGOs do in Russia today would be illegal in the United States The

Kremlin is set to emulate the United States by establishing its own version of the “Foreign Agents Registration Act.” The purpose of FARA, according to its Web site, is to ensure the American public and its lawmakers know the source

of information (propaganda) intended to sway public opinion, policy and laws

stabi-In Constructing Universality, Laclau provides a useful illustration of differential and

2 The notion of chains of equivalence/difference shares some similarities with van Dijk’s ological square’ (see Chapter 7) albeit with some epistemological differences (van Dijk 1998a, 1998b) An advantage of Laclau and Mouffe’s approach for this study is its emphasis on flex- ibility, since chains can be shifted and reoriented (rearticulated) more easily than ideologies.

‘ide-22 Journalism and the Political

antagonistic relations on the ontic level (see Figure 2.1; 1999: 303) In the diagram,

Ts is in an antagonistic relation with D1, D2, D3, etc The latter are different from one another, but not antagonistically so In Laclau’s example, Ts represents the oppressive Tsarist regime of pre-revolutionary Russia The horizontal line stands for the frontier separating the regime from the rest of society D1 represents the workers’ demand for higher wages; D2 students’ demand for the relaxation of discipline in educational institutions; D3 liberal politicians’ demand for freedom of the press, etc Each particu-lar demand is different from the others (the difference represented by the lower half of the circle), but they can be linked together – in a chain of equivalence – as anti-system activity (represented by the top half of the circle); the equivalences function to uni-versalise the demands

Ts

D1

Figure 2.1 Logic of equivalence

Mapping this to news discourse, and the extracts above, various differential and antagonistic relations can be made out In several extracts, Russia is linked together in an equivalential chain with other countries which have already been worked up in other contemporary cultural texts as illegitimate

The first chain includes other ‘outcast’ countries (Extracts 4, 8) In a news story

headlined ‘In one boat with the outcasts [Geächteten]’, Elke Windisch in the

Stuttgarter Zeitung links the NGO legislation with the Freedom House 2005 annual

report which had demoted Russia from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’ A second chain links Russia to the Soviet Union (Extracts 7, 8) The news items thus create similarities (equivalential identities) among these specific countries, i.e the historic Soviet Union and contemporary Cuba, North Korea, Uzbekistan, China, and Russia A political frontier is drawn up creating two antagonistic camps: democracies (including the country reporting the news) on one side, non-democracies on the other

This process involves two moves First, the focus is on similarities among the elements in either camp instead of differences The lower half of the circles

Chapter 2 NGOs, legislation and human rights in Moscow 23

in Figure 2.1 refer to the different countries, and the upper half to the general equivalent ‘not free’ In addition to geographic similarities, historical equivalences are drawn up Russia is a continuation of the Soviet Union This chronological chain, widely employed in news stories about Russia, draws on (and simultane-ously reproduces) a largely unquestioned reading of history in which no country

is free from a continuity with its past With a conception of discourse in which non-linguistic practices are also considered discursive, the existence of the US organisation, Freedom House, its offices, its funding, and its practices of collating information to measure freedoms (countries can be ‘free’, ‘partly free’ or ‘not free’) are aspects of the discourse of democracy They play a role in the creation of politi-cal identities as free democratic nations, regions or civilisations

Secondly, alliances across the antagonistic frontier are elided Among critics

of the US authorities, a common complaint is the lack of criticism of the US’ nomic and political partners Saudi Arabia and Pakistan Of the 49 ‘not free’ coun-tries which could have been selected from the Freedom House report, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Extract (4) selects only the three – Cuba, North Korea and Uzbekistan – which had appeared in recent news as robustly anti-democratic and/or anti-western Notably, all have associations with communism

eco-A second chain became visible to me after using concordance software with this small corpus Qualitative as much of the analysis is, I have also drawn on AntConc and Wordsmith software to provide a novel way of reading the texts (cf Glasze 2007) Looking at word lists, keyword lists and concordance lines goes some way to countering the oft-voiced criticism of discourse analysis that it only finds what it sets out to find Although the frequency of a decontextualised word does not say much on its own, frequency and relative frequency can point to sig-nifiers which have been privileged, even if only to be disendorsed and rejected And they have indeed led to surprising findings Reading the corpus on the NGO legislation, I noticed immediately the predominance of ‘human rights’ which I return to below Only through analysing word lists did I see that the more innocu-ous ‘foreign’ was one of the most frequent words In the US news stories it was the

tenth most frequent word (after the, of, and, to, in, a, NGOs and bill), which is quite

a remarkably high frequency.3

3 Thompson and Hunston (2006) discuss the tensions and common ground between corpus linguistic and social semiotic research given that the quantitative methods of corpus linguistics ‘can appear reductive and insufficiently related to the texts of which a corpus is composed or to their social contexts’ (2006: 3) The most frequent words are rarely the most exciting for social research: ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘to’, etc (in German, ‘der’, ‘die’, ‘und’) Fairly unproductive for my purposes are also the most frequent content words, in this case, Russ*(where *refers

to the set of words using the stem ‘Russ’, e.g Russia, Russians, Russland, russisch, russischer)

24 Journalism and the Political

A short piece from The Associated Press illustrates the use of the signifier

‘foreign’ (emphasis added in all extracts unless stated otherwise)

(11) Russia’s lower house of parliament tentatively approved a much- criticized

bill Wednesday that severely restricts non-governmental organizations and could threaten the survival of rights groups and others considered disloyal to the Kremlin

After a wave of protest from Russian and foreign NGOs and foreign

governments, President Vladimir Putin had called on deputies to revise the bill, including scrapping a requirement that local branches of foreign groups register

as virtual Russian entities subject to stricter financial and legal restrictions That measure was included among dozens of amendments that were adopted Wednesday

Still, NGOs say the version passed Wednesday in the crucial second reading– when substantive changes could be made before a final vote – remained draconian Sponsors of the legislation said it was necessary to stem terrorism and

extremism Critics and supporters of the legislation alike say the bill has grown out of the Kremlin’s increasing displeasure with nonprofit groups that criticize the government, advocate democracy and promote human rights

Such groups, many financed by Western institutions, played significant roles

in the mass demonstrations that brought opposition leaders to power in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and sparked alarm

in Moscow (AP, 21 December 2005)

A chain is articulated in Extract (11) including on the one side: NGOs, rights groups, others considered disloyal to the Kremlin, protest, Russian NGOs, for-eign NGOs, foreign governments, nonprofit groups that criticise the govern-ment, advocate democracy and promote human rights, Western institutions and mass demonstrations that brought opposition leaders to power On the other side of the antagonistic frontier, a chain of equivalence includes the Kremlin, Putin, restrictions, draconian and perhaps Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma

In this text an antagonism is produced between a set of signifiers which seem

to be linked by a universal (human) rights discourse, in which rights are linked

and words such as NGO, law, legislation, bill, etc The following results give the frequencies in

instances per 1000 words Words based on the stem foreign (Ausland, Ausländer, ausländische,

etc.) appeared in the German texts 40 times, i.e with 5675 words in the German corpus this

makes 7 instances per 1000 words In the UK 2.5 instances per 1000 words, in the US 11/1000

Human rights (Menschenrecht*) in German texts 4/1000; UK 4/1000; US 6/1000.

Chapter 2 NGOs, legislation and human rights in Moscow 25

to public criticism, protest and democracy And which are felt to be blocked from fully achieving their identity as democratic rights by the Kremlin This is thus pre-sented not as an antagonism between ‘the West’ and ‘Russia’ or ‘the outcasts’ but as

an antagonism between the Russian government and universal rights As one lish foreign correspondent said to me when I asked why UK news reporting was so critical of Russian politics: it is not about Russia or the Russians His job is to cri-tique those in power If he happens to be in Moscow, he criticises those in power in Russia If he were in Washington, his job would be to criticise the US government

Eng-It is not his responsibility, he told me, that his colleagues based in Washington are not as critical of power as he is Whatever the priorities, however, in Extract (11), foreign governments, united with those in favour of universal rights, are located

on one side of an antagonistic frontier with the Kremlin on the other

A third chain of equivalence is articulated which is quite the opposite of the first two, although it only appears in two of the texts in the corpus In

Extract (9) above, The Washington Post mentions that ‘the bill’s supporters

say the proposed measures are similar to laws in the United States and other Western countries’ The newswire service UPI (Extracts 10 and 12) posts a story linking ‘Russia’s efforts to regulate NGOs, foreign ones in particular’ into

a chain of equivalence with ‘existing US laws dealing with foreign NGOs’ (the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA), ‘the American public’, ‘its lawmakers’ and ‘democracy’

(12) [F]oreign NGOs would have their activities and finances subject to greater state

oversight […] Russia’s efforts to regulate NGOs, foreign ones in particular, is not much different from existing U.S laws dealing with foreign NGOs […]

A Russian version of FARA will actually strengthen the country’s democracy and political parties Compared to U.S politics, the cost of funding political parties in Russia is still low Cutting off outside funding of any sort will make the parties rely on domestic resources instead of hoping for a grant from a

Western NGO – and the demands the donor has before dispensing funding

A Russian FARA will also make political parties more accountable to Russian law and voters

Since Putin came to office, Russia’s super-wealthy oligarchs are no longer

allowed to buy and sell political parties and politicians In light of the heavy involvement of Western NGOs in elections in the post-Soviet nations recently, the Kremlin now intends to ensure Russia’s politics will not be subject to

the same kind of machinations Introducing a Russian version of FARA will promote party development at home and Russia’s overall democratic project (UPI, 21 December 2005)

At this point, a second diagram illustrates the struggles to fix meaning