SPLIT SIGNALS COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY edited by George Gerbner and Marsha Seifert IMAGE ETHICS The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television Edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby CENSORSHIP The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge By Sue Curry Jansen SPLIT SIGNALS Television and Politics in the Soviet Union By Ellen Mickiewicz TELEVISION AND AMERICA'S CHILDREN A Crisis of Neglect By Edward L. Palmer SPLIT SIGNALS Television and Politics in the Soviet Union ELLEN MICKIEWICZ New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1988 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of Oxford University Press. Mickiewicz, Ellen Propper. Split signals : television and politics in the Soviet Union / Ellen Mickiewicz. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-19-505463-6 1. Television broadcasting of news—Soviet Union. 2. Television broadcasting—Social aspects—Soviet Union. 3. Television broadcasting—Political aspects—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union— Politics and government—1982- I. Title. PN5277.T4M53 1988 302.2'345'0947—dc!9 88-4200 CIP 1098 7654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Preface In television terminology, broadcast signals are split when they are divided and sent to two or more locations simultaneously. The title of this book refers in part to that technical definition: the recent and massive development of television in the Soviet Union has sent video signals out over a vast area of eleven time zones; they are beamed where they have never before been re- ceived and they reach people who have been effectively out of the range of the mass media. This has been a technological and information revolution, and it has taken place with stunning rapidity. Within a short time, less than two decades, television has become the principal source of information—particularly about the West—for most Soviet citizens, and a mass public has been created. It has become pre-eminently the mass medium of communication. But there is another sense in which I use the term split signals: the impact of this revolution has been power- ful, but contradictory, paradoxical, and unplanned. The split signals affect both ordinary people and elites, both theory and practice. The television revolution began before Mikhail Gorba- chev came to power, but he has given it a new impetus and motive power. The most dramatic changes of his tenure have been made precisely in the mass media—television foremost among them—and the effects will be far-reaching. They have been set in motion to a large extent because the Soviet leadership seeks to mobilize its population for domestic economic and so- cial reform and because it recognizes that in the modern world information barriers are porous, that the flow of ideas seeps vi Preface through with tourists, radios, journals, meetings, the grapevine, and old-fashioned gossip. The advantage, moreover, will always be with the source that first transmits the information. But the Soviet population has changed, too; it is better educated, more urban, and now, through television, much more tuned in to messages emanating from Moscow. The first chapter of this book sets this new medium of televi- sion in the context of changes in the media system as a whole. It looks at new technologies and how television has created new patterns of media exposure. Central to any discussion of Soviet media must be a clear understanding of how they interpret infor- mation, especially news. The second chapter looks at the place that the world "out there" has in the Soviet media system. How inward turning or outward looking is the average television viewer in that country? How much do we in the West matter there? We shall find that, paradoxically (another split signal), and to a considerable extent as a result of Soviet media policy, there is a virtual obsession with America. Two policy directions substantially altered traditional media practices: operativnost (timeliness, or rapid response time) and glasnost (openness) are creating new imperatives, though their limits are problematic. In the case of the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident, the new policies were subjected to an unexpected test of huge pro- portions, and that incident will long be seen as a watershed. We shall also see media guidelines in operation in the work of indi- vidual Soviet correspondents. Chapters Three and Four look at the Soviet news, the single most important program on Soviet television. In these chapters, we look at the Soviet news as compared with American network news. Do these two news agendas resemble each other? Does the huge viewing public in the Soviet Union (some 150 million people) see the contours of the same planet we in the West inhabit, or do we live in different worlds? For this study, we analyzed some 3,695 individual news stories over five months: three in 1984 and two in 1985. Each story was analyzed for over twenty different categories, and the two time periods permit us to compare the news under the Chernenko and Gorbachev re- gimes. In addition, both American and Soviet newspeople, in extensive interviews, comment on what shapes their decisions Preface vii and how they look at the coverage of each other. The two news programs use pictures very differently; the role of anchors, the coverage of different kinds of newsmakers, the technical under- pinning of the news: on all of these dimensions, Soviet and American television are distinctively different, yet similarities are very important. But perhaps most important, both interpret the world very differently and see their roles in explaining the news—which could be a haphazard collection of unrelated events—in radically divergent ways. Watching the news is part of watching television. The news is embedded in a day's or a week's programs, and it is important to understand what that context is for the Soviet viewer. Chapter Four also includes an analysis of a week of television programs and discussion of non- news programs of particular interest. Behind the changes coming on the screen, there have been changes in how Soviet officials and experts think about commu- nication. If television has created the country's first mass public, the old ways of thinking about how people learn about events at home and abroad, what persuades them, and what captures their attention must also change. Even the time honored and doctrinally enshrined practices of millions of ideology personnel have become obsolete. In short, the television revolution is just that: a radical change in a whole system of interrelated processes of information flow and assimilation. Chapter Five examines this complex of components of the television revolution in the light of both Soviet and Western theory, and Chapter Six assesses the impact of television on the Soviet viewing public: how television has changed the way they use their time, for example. Soviet and American citizens reacted to the introduction of television in much the same way. It has affected movie and theater atten- dance, attention spans in school, and reading. Older people, housewives, and the poor are virtual television addicts. But the advent of television on a mass scale has brought more. It has brought the potential for profound changes in the effectiveness of the government's transmission of its messages. It is in this last chapter that we will look at what influences effectiveness and under what conditions it is most likely to occur. In preparing this study, I have been fortunate to have had access to the Soviet Union's most important national television viii Preface network: First Program. Emory University has the only research group in the country to receive (and it is received in real time) this network, and I am grateful to Emory for its support. There are many others to whom I owe thanks. This study was made possible by two grants from the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, who supported this research from its inception. I thank also the Rockefeller Foundation for its generous grant. These institutions are not, nor are those who are listed below, responsible for the conclusions I reach in this book. Among those whom I thank, there is one, whose engineering genius made our facility possible: the late Kurt Oppenheimer. I have also benefited from observations provided by George Ja- cobs, Stephen Hess, Fred Bruning, Vladimir Shlapentokh, and Aaron Ruscetta. I am particularly grateful to the news profession- als at the ABC, CBS, and NBC television networks who cooper- ated most generously with me and provided me with the oppor- tunity to discuss issues related to American broadcast news prac- tices and to observe how they worked. I owe special thanks to those at ABC whose interest and help were very important. In addition, I appreciate the cooperation of Soviet media profession- als in the United States and of the USSR State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting for the time I spent there with heads of programming and technical departments. The Tur- ner Broadcasting Company has been a most valued and re- spected friend, whose willingness to assist me in my research is gratefully acknowledged. I have been fortunate to have had the help of some talented and conscientious assistants: Gregory Haley, Laura Roselle, Nicholas Desoutter, Edward Hyken, Terry Krugman, Marina Teplitsky, and Philip Wainwright.