I. Introduction This master‟s thesis represents study of female newspaper and magazine editors in Azerbaijan based on Western and Soviet definitions of journalism with explanation of local national features of this profession. The idea of conducting such research came right after completion of the 2008 research where we examined male editors-in-chief, deputy managing editors and department editors. Those journalism practitioners represented three age generations of Azerbaijani journalism: the old-school Soviet practitioners drilled to adhere party discipline; the war and crisis generation that experienced crash course in capitalism and learned to survive by all means and the youngest generation that came after economical stabilization of Azerbaijan after the year 2000. However, the 2008 inquiry left an aftertaste of incompleteness since the research did not involve even a single female editor. The reason of course was, that women (with one exception1) editors were not represented in that research since none of them were employed in the largest nationwide newspapers that were part of the research sample. Having in mind argumentation of Linda Steiner (Steiner, 1997) on masculine bias inside of journalistic community the 2008 research levitated reasonable questions: are there no female editors in Azerbaijan and if they really exist what is their position in the typological frame derived from the research of Azerbaijani male editors. Logically, the 2012 research had to take a similar approach to the inquiry, resulting in almost identical conceptualization and question apparatus, with the gender aspect being the key modification to the scheme. Despite the attention that the gender problematic received starting the 1990s, surprisingly there were only two attempts to explore female segment of mass media in Azerbaijan. Presented thesis is the third attempt to map female journalists working in Azerbaijani media. The first was a bilingual book “Elegant signatures” published by the Azerbaijan Journalist Women Association attempted to provide comprehensive information about 1412 female correspondents, editors and publishers that within the last century worked or currently work in Azerbaijani media. Even though the book claims to be of an encyclopedic value during our research we discovered that it omitted names of several editors that participated in our 1 In our 2008 research one of the selected newspapers – ruling party‟s Yeni Azerbaycan had a female deputy managing editor yet due to staff changes in a form of appointment of new editor-in-chief [appointed in March 2008] she hesitated to participate in our research. 2 Yusifova Sevil, “Elegant Signatures”, Baku, Elm ve Tehsil, 2010 1 research even though some of them were in local newspapers for 41 years not to mention name of the first Azerbaijani “professional” woman journalist Safiga Afandizade. The second endeavor was a joint survey of the International Journalist Federation and Azerbaijan Journalists Union aiming to map female journalist community and involving 200 journalist respondents. Data received after the first year of the two-year project were published in 2011 as a leaflet “Gender question in Azerbaijani media”. Much anticipated leaflet, however, limited itself to a brief description of gender legislature and general statement of well-known facts, that could be summed up in one sentence: “women‟s representation in decision making bodies remains very low”. According to the publication women journalists constitute only 30-35 % of employees in countrywide distributed newspapers and 20-25 % of local newspapers while there are only 10 female editors in all the editorial-offices surveyed. Disagreement over validity and generalizability of data collected by the two previous attempts and nonexistence of any other sources flagged a pressing need in a more serious academic effort to map landscape of female journalism in Azerbaijan. Simply put, current study of female journalism in our country is surrounded by unsystematic effort lacking consensus in methodology of conducting scientific inquiry. Among long-standing consequences of such state is enlarging knowledge gap that limits our understanding of current situation and thus prevents development of the whole media studies sector. Our thesis, lacking necessary financial sponsorship, can be qualified as a first small effort to close that gap and present knowledge about important segment of female journalism – editors. The information provided in the course of this thesis may be of interest both to scholars and the general public since its aim is to reexamine and provide readable theoretic summary of academic thought on such concepts as journalistic profession, gatekeeping, deprofessionalization and proletarization, objectivity and instrumentalization of journalism as well as to endeavor application of all these products of Western media theory on post-Soviet reality of Azerbaijan. We cannot, due to the limited nature of this paper, account all possible and relevant fields of female journalism, however, we believe that this is a start and step by step we will be able to close the knowledge gap and advance to answering the grand question – why media in Azerbaijan are as they are? 2 I.1 Hybrid regime and media in Azerbaijan The last two decades of turmoil caused by the disintegration of the USSR and territorial conflicts brought significant changes to societies of the CIS3 countries. One of them, Azerbaijan had to face the emergence of separatist sentiments in its Armenian community that resulted in demand for reunification of enclave Karabakh region with Armenian SSR and subsequent war with neighboring Armenia. The war shaped many of the political developments in Azerbaijan by causing humiliation and a heavy financial burden due to the loss of territory (agricultural land), refugees, war wounded, in creased defense spending, etc. (Zinin/ Maleshenko 1994: 104–105; Gulaliyev 2005: 161; Kamrava 2001: 220). However, despite the initial loss and bad economic situation Azerbaijan by the end of 2000 managed to recover and make a gain of its natural resources and strategic position in the region. However, the recovery came at a cost: currently Azerbaijan stagnates in its political development unable to make progress toward either a democracy or a clear-cut authoritarianism. The question of classifying political regime in Azerbaijan produced an enormous amount of literature where political scientists tried to tackle the issue. Out of the proposed classifications in our opinion the “hybrid regime” fits the most to describe reality of modern Azerbaijan. Finding the typology of authoritarian states provided by Juan Linz lacking transitional states, political scientist Larry Diamond expanded it adding the category of "hybrid regimes".4 Diamond‟s “hybrid regimes” are authoritarian regimes that can be found in pseudo democratic states that are neither fully democratic nor fully authoritarian. Yet, examining political regime in Azerbaijan with a closer look gives less auspicious results. Diamond‟s hybrid regimes serve just a transitional stage to the process of transformation on axis authoritarian – democratic, while Azerbaijan even though broadly matching the classification shows stable resistance to farther advancement in either direction. Major factor in the stability formula plays clientelism and more importantly nepotism that corrupt almost every institution of Azerbaijani society. 3 The abbreviation stands for Commonwealth of Independent States - the organization founded on 8th of December 1991 on the ruins of the Soviet Union and loosely uniting former republics of the Soviet Union with the exception of Georgia and the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 4 Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes: Elections without Democracy,” 21-35 3 Political opposition is denied access to state or private media that are capable to reach masses. Such inequality is most visible in the case of access to television or radio channels that even though are not state owned [except AzTv] belong exclusively to persons close to the government or can be easily silenced through license revocation5. In terms of printed press political regime allows greater pluralism and diversity than in case of electronic media. In 1995 Azerbaijan abolished the state controlled censorship institution and later democratized registration of new titles, resulting in more than 3500 media outlets being registered in Azerbaijan by 2012.6 However, existence of independent newspapers and magazines in Azerbaijan is doubtful since private media are in the cobweb of patronage deals, proxy arrangements or management cronyism making them quasi or semi-independent media outlets at best. More elaborate description of the process offers Karol Jakubowicz pointing that media in post-Soviet Russia lack „external independence‟ the feature that is also evident in Azerbaijan. The external independence is the existence of a political, economic, legal and regulatory framework that allows a publisher or a broadcaster to operate without outside interference (Jakubowicz 2009). In case of Russia the best illustration would be the case of the independent NTV television network that was taken over by the quasi-state company Gasprom after airing critical materials about Putin in 2000-2001 (Lipman and McFaul 2001). Similar case in Azerbaijan happened on 18th of February 2009 when popular Caucasian internet resource Day.Az published an anti-Putin interview with Boris Berezovsky and was closed the same day

Load more

Table of Contents