Monday, March 31st, 2008 Panel: "Media in Ukraine"

Description

Mykola Riabchuk (Visiting Scholar, University of Alberta), “Benign Neglect or Feckless Engagement? Mass Media and Politics of Memory in Post-Soviet Ukraine”
Marta Dyczok (University of Western Ontario), “Do the Media Matter? Focus on Ukraine”

Modern societies and politics are inconceivable without mass media and communications, sitting as they do at the intersection of overlapping spheres of influence and power – politics, economics, and technology. Although most analysts agree that there are ‘complex and powerful links between mass media and the national political system’ (McQuail 1990, 1992), and that ‘beyond doubt, the mass media represent an important variable in the process of social change,’ (Kunczik 1984), there is no consensus among scholars on the main question, what role does the mass media play in political and social change? Marta Dyczok focuses these questions on contemporary Ukraine, and suggests that despite the continuing belief in the power of media, the role media is playing is rather ambiguous.

From the first days of national independendence, Ukraine’s postcommunist leaders have been torn by the two opposite imperatives. On the one side, they had to embark on the state-nation building project that meant, in particular, promotion of a new national identity and a new historical narrative that binds people together and legitimizes their emancipation from the former colonial masters. Yet, on the other hand, since they had been themselves loyal servants of those masters for many decades and, in fact, represented them in the country, they eventually had to silence some important anti-colonial and anticommunist overtones of that narrative, or even to mute them altogether. Mykola Riabchuk argues that mass media have been playing an important role in this process, reflecting highly ambiguous, incoherent, and overtly opportunistic politics of memory pursued by the post-Soviet elite within the past decade and a half.