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Popkova Postcoldwar Discourse DISS FINAL Cold War discourse in the post-Cold War media world: Articulations of global politics in Russian and US mainstream and alternative media A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Anna A Popkova IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Catherine R. Squires, Dr. Giovanna Dell’Orto June 2015 © Anna Popkova 2015 i Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my advisors, Dr. Giovanna Dell’Orto and Dr. Catherine Squires for their invaluable support, guidance and mentorship over the years. I would also like to thank my committee members - Dr. Shayla Thiel-Stern and Dr. Thomas Wolfe – for their input and conversations that challenged and inspired me to think about scholarship in new ways. This project would not be possible without the intellectual and emotional support of my fellow graduate students; special thanks go to Stephen Bennett, Sarah Cavanah, Elizabeth Housholder, Brett Johnson, Jennifer Lueck, Meagan Manning, and Rodrigo Zamith. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Aleksandr Popkov and Svetlana Markosyan, who taught me how to think, dream and read between the lines. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 1: Theory and Method………………………………………………………...14 Chapter 2: The War in South Ossetia…………………………………………………. 55 Chapter 3: The Syrian Debate……………………………………………………….... 90 Chapter 4: The Death of Hugo Chávez……………………………………………… 167 Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….. 205 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………. 223 1 Introduction On the bright morning of August 8, 2008, my family and I were having breakfast on the terrace of our cabin in Southern Central Siberia, near my hometown of Krasnoyarsk. As always, we turned on the radio to listen to the morning news, and to what we expected to be the main news of the day: the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. However, the newscast did not start with the Olympics that day. Instead, we were told that hundreds of Russian citizens were being killed in South Ossetia – a breakaway region on the Russian-Georgian border – as a result of a military attack by Georgia that was attempting to regain the region. The news updates were broadcasted continuously throughout the day. By the evening, it was clear that Russia had made a decision to enter the war in order to protect its citizens in South Ossetia. I returned to the city the next day, and my first move was to check what the foreign, and especially American, media had to say about the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia. “Russian Air, Ground Forces Strike Georgia; Military Action Follows Georgian Offensive to Reassert Control Over Separatist South Ossetia,” 1 “Stopping Russia; The US and Its Allies Must Unite Against Moscow's War on Georgia,” 2 “Russia and Georgia Clash Over Breakaway Region,” 3 proclaimed the headlines of some of largest and most influential US news media – apparently placing the blame on Russian aggression. 1 Peter Finn, “Russian Air, Ground Forces Strike Georgia; Military Action Follows Georgian Offensive to Reassert Control Over Separatist South Ossetia,” Washington Post , August 9, 2008, A01. 2 “Stopping Russia; The US and Its Allies Must Unite Against Moscow’s War on Georgia,” Washington Post , August 9, 2008, A14. 3 Michael Schwirtz, Anne Barnard and C.J. Chivers, “Russia and Georgia Clash Over Breakaway Region,” New York Times, August 8, 2008, A1. 2 I was shocked, confused, disoriented but also certain that something was not quite right with the media coverage of the conflict. Russian and American news media told different stories. Moreover, as I kept reading the news reports, I couldn’t help noticing how both Russian and US news media evoked the memories of the Cold War in their narratives. Whether it was the New York Times stating that “global politics have breathed new life into the conflict, making it a flash point for resurgent tensions between former cold war rivals” 4 or the Russian newspaper Izvestia insisting that “Georgian military power has been gained largely due to the help of Georgia’s western friends,” 5 media in both countries framed the conflict in terms that reminded the readers – more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War – of the proxy wars and the east-west geopolitical struggle. I kept wondering what kinds of political, historical and ideological forces clashed in the world’s media scene while the military forces clashed on the battlegrounds of the Northern Caucasus? This project examines the role that the Cold War discourse plays in informing and structuring the Russian and US mainstream and alternative news media narratives about international events and controversies that occur in the post-Cold War time but trace their historical roots to the Cold War geopolitical struggles and expose disagreements between Russia and the United States in the 21 st century. This project also seeks to identify what other discourses of global politics and international affairs are interwoven in media narratives examined in this study and how their interactions with elements of the Cold 4 Michael Schwirtz, Anne Barnard and C.J. Chivers, “Russia and Georgia Clash Over Breakaway Region,” New York Times, August 8, 2008, A1. 5 Dmitryi Litovkin, “Kak Gruziya Gotovilas’ k Voyne i Kto Ei Pomogal,” Izvestia , August 8, 2008, http://izvestia.ru/news/339510 . This and all further translations from Russian are made by the author. 3 War discourse work to create meanings for these media’s audiences in the post-Cold War era. The Cold War discourse is defined here as a way of talking/writing about events and issues that explicitly or implicitly contextualizes them – through a set of corresponding references, metaphors and associational chains – within the oppositional dichotomies of “communism versus capitalism,” “authoritarianism versus democracy,” “East versus West,” the confrontation between the “two great powers” and the division of the world on “spheres of influence.” It is important to examine the role and place of the Cold War discourse in the post-Cold War news media narratives because media narratives influence in one way or another the public understanding of the world around us and of the roles that different actors play in global politics; 6 media narratives also help create and sustain political and intellectual environments that enable the emergence of concrete policies that determine the “rules of the game” in global affairs. 7 As Giovanna Dell’Orto put it, “the press matters in global affairs because the images of national identities it helps create and negotiate influence expectations and consequently policies.” 8 The tragedy of the Cold War was rooted, among other things, in fundamental misunderstanding and miscommunication of American and Soviet state identities to each other and to their own populations as fixed and monolithic rather than as nuanced and fluid. Mass media in both states played important roles in constructing and disseminating the narratives that shaped 6 See, for example Robert Entman, “Framing US Coverage of International News,” Journal of Communication 41, no. 4 (1991): 6-27; David Perry, “The Image Gap: How International News Affects Perceptions of Nations,” Journalism Quarterly 64 (1987): 416-433; Yahya Kamalipour, ed. Images of the US around the World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 7 For comprehensive review of the scholarly literature on media-foreign policy relationship see Derek B. Miller, Media Pressure on Foreign Policy: The Evolving Theoretical Framework , First Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 8 Giovanna Dell’Orto, American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era , Reprint edition (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 4 these identities. 9 The end of the Cold War presented an opportunity for discursive transformation through re-articulation of state identities and re-imagining of the overall interpretive framework of international affairs and global politics. Indeed, on the one hand, the material reality of geopolitics changed drastically. The USSR collapsed and US – Russia relations do not constitute the centerpiece of global politics anymore; communist ideology not only doesn’t structure life and politics in Russia, Eastern Europe and former USSR states but the region embraced a capitalist model of development domestically and is actively involved in global economy; the borders are open, making travel as well as educational and cultural exchanges a reality for all people (not only the political elites as during the Cold War); Russian and American astronauts explore space together and the two countries have made significant progress on mutually reducing their nuclear arsenals. 10 Yet on the other hand, a number of events and controversies following the conflict in South Ossetia – from the Russia-US standoff at the UN Security Council in 2011-2012 over the peace resolution in Syria, to Russia’s decision to provide refuge to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, to an ongoing Russia-NATO debate over the missile defense system in Europe and to the most recent conflict in Ukraine – have kept prodding frequent speculations as to whether “the Cold War was back.” 11 The escalation 9 James Aronson, Press and Cold War , Expanded edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); George R. Urban, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War , 1st edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
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