ABSTRACT
Almost in the same breath that Russians complain about political mud slinging, they do admit that there must be something to it or it would not be on television. In this way, Russians are not particularly different from audiences around the world, as numerous studies have shown that the political attitudes of most people are affected at least to some degree by what they see on television. This chapter will pick up important themes from the 2000 focus groups and examine whether these attitudes resonate throughout the Russian population. The chapter will use data from a survey of 2,000 people across Russia.1 This opinion poll asked many questions based on the discussions in the focus groups during the 2000 presidential elections in Russia. In particular, this chapter will attempt to define the differences in political attitudes between those who routinely watched staterun television and those who favored the commercial NTV network. What emerged were important variations in opinion and political behavior between these two groups. The analysis in this chapter will focus on whether viewers of state television were accepting the authoritarian message to the point that they were reacting to state messages more like subjects of a repressive regime than citizens of a new democracy. This analysis of the Russian media audience at large will serve as the final step in the consideration of the role of the Russian media in civil society, fitting it into the third segment of the model of media environment, content and audience discussed throughout this book.
