ABSTRACT
Chapters 6 and 7 have demonstrated the importance of the regional perspective on Russian television genres intended for a national audience. And, as we saw in Chapter 2, regional television itself is eminently capable of serving the post-Soviet nation-building mission. Indeed, in each of these chapters, albeit in rather different ways, we have observed a tension between the global television forms to which post-communist television is bound, the national agenda it is called upon to implement and the local contexts in which that agenda is put to work. It is to a consideration of the interaction of these three phenomena within regional television proper that we now turn. In the light of Tehri Rantanen’s thesis that, in the 1990s, the global merges with the national and complicates the relationship of the latter with the local (Rantanen 2002), we aim to determine to what extent Russian television at the regional level is shaped by the influence of the global and/or the global/national, and to observe how differently global trends may affect local television depending on whether their influence is direct, or mediated by national television. According to a survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, 53
per cent of Russians consider themselves ‘permanent viewers’ of regional and local television and 31 per cent are identified as casual. Only 14 per cent do not watch regional and local television. Of all regional programming, viewers watch the news mostly (90 per cent), films (37 per cent), music (20 per cent), entertainment programmes (19 per cent), educational programmes, serials and programmes on social and political issues (18 per cent each). Significantly, 67 per cent of viewers claim to trust local television more than its national counterpart.1
