The effect of television on viewers’ conscious and subconscious minds has been exaggerated. Television does determine the agenda, meaning people’s notions of what problems are important at the moment, but is not able to tell people exactly what to think.

Maria Solovyeva-Borngardt

Many consider it a proven fact that the results of any election today depends on TV. The person deciding what to show on television determines the public’s mood. This is also what American professor Ellen Mickiewicz of Duke University thought when she began studying the relationship between the Russian audience (the electorate) and TV. Yet Mickiewicz was surprised by her results. She is the author of the recent book Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia and is continuing to research the subject.

- What do Russians think about Russian television? Is it really true, as many believe, that you can control viewers’ minds via TV?
- That is a very broad way to pose the question. I am researching a more concrete issue, Russians’ views on how election campaigns are covered by Russian television. I have only recently begun to generalize the information I’ve gathered, but some trends are already apparent. As it turns out, Russians have a very clear notion of the phenomenon of campaign coverage and, most importantly, how useful the effects of televised election features are. Their evaluations are very frequently negative. Russian viewers think that the news before elections is uninformative, that it doesn’t give them enough information about candidates’ platforms and plans that would help orient them as voters. These news programs don’t reveal anything except self interest and behind them lies a group of supporters, reporters breaking the rules of journalist objectivity. In a word, one could conclude that Russian television viewers are very critical, and often relate extremely negatively to how television covers politics.
- And this completely contradicts public polls, that demonstrate indubitably that Russian viewers believe what they see on television more than they believe other sources of information, and out of all the channels, they prefer state-owned Channel One…
- Yes, that’s true, polls conducted by both Western and Russian researchers show that Russians trust television most as a source of information, and the leader among news sources is Channel One. In general in Russia, both politicians and television executives are firmly convinced that TV gives them power over people’s minds.
 I think that questionnaire-based public opinion polls, despite the advantage of large and representative samples, still do not give an accurate picture of the public’s frame of mind. Because sometimes you can only discover what people think and most importantly why they think that way by conducting detailed interviews. Finally, there is another aspect of the relationship between television and the audience in Russia in relation to which public polls can be deceiving. For many years now, Russians have been demanding things like “Let’s hear some good news” and “Down with the gloom and doom!” It seems that Channel One takes these requests particularly seriously. Again, when participants in our focus groups watch a positive news item off of Channel One (the channel’s emblem was concealed), the majority of them immediately stated that they didn’t believe it one iota. Because it was too positive and “things are different in real life.” In other words, the real issue is that Russians want more positive developments in their own lives and they project this desire onto television. However, when TV takes this seriously and shows a rose-tinted reality, viewers immediately stop believing it.
 I should note that when conducting polls sociologists frequently ask questions like “What most affected your choice as a voter?” and many people respond: TV. That’s how researchers conclude that television has a huge influence on people and their consciousness. However, in this case the very way the question is posed is not correct. The majority of us neither understand nor admit what influences us how, what complex, twisted ways external stimuli and signals get to us. When a person says “television influenced me,” this could be the way things seem to him, but that doesn’t mean that that’s actually the way it is.
- Yet if television doesn’t have a lot of power over peoples’ minds, how can we explain the success of those candidates supported by TV channels in both the national and local elections?
- First of all, we need remember that voters can only choose from what their given on eletion day. The majority of Russians are smart enough to understand that only pro-Putin politicians and Putin himself are capable of getting things accomplished. The majority of people don’t want to waste their vote. And they vote for United Russia, even though they understand that it’s not really a party at all. But they believe that United Russia will be able to help Vladimir Putin accomplish something real and take real action, the opposite of the previous Yeltsin administration that often looked inactive and amorphous. A very important element in Putin and his team’s success is the comparison with Yeltsin and his team. In Western scholarly literature, this is called retrospective voting. Voters compare the current situation with the past and not with the unknown, hypothetically possible future.
 And, say, those people that voted in the parliamentary elections “against all candidates,” and in some single mandate districts they made up as much as 20% or one fifth of the votes, were not affected at all by television!
 I think that Russians vote a certain way because they have a limited choice, and not due to the efforts of television channels. Though one also gets the impression that this is the achievement of television indoctrination.
- In general, do researchers have definite, experimentally confirmed ways of proving that the media do—or on the contrary do not—affect people and tell them what to believe?
- The way researchers understand how the media affect people has gone through three phases. Initially, the theory of direct and large-scale influence predominated. It is sometimes referred to as the “magic bullet” or “injection” theory. One shot and the person is transformed. Then theories that the media have a very limited, punctuated influence became wide-spread: every person has their own psychology and personal experience and every person seeks out what he specifically needs, likes, et cetera, so that the influence is minimal. We now find ourselves somewhere between these two theories.
First of all, we know that informational signals, messages sent by the media do not fly directly to a viewer or reader and do not always hit their target precisely. At the same time, the media do have an influence, but it happens in ingenious and twisted ways, and the initial signal along the way to the receiver undergoes enormous adaptation. When people watch TV, they compare what they see to their own experience. A person’s individual psychology also determines how he will process what he has seen or read.
 There is also a fairly large body of scholarly literature that demonstrates that television can influence how agendas are set, meaning that it to a certain extent determines what the audience sees as the important problems of the day. At the same time—and this is very significant!—it remains to be proven that television is capable of telling people what exactly to think about these problems.
- Many people are convinced that with the help of what Russians call the “25th frame,” subliminal messages, it is possible to manipulate people and plant ideas in their heads. For example, a certain clinic is constantly advertising on television that they can cure alcoholism using the 25th frame. In the press, you frequently hear that this editing technique has been banned in many countries due to its unusual effectiveness. What do you think about this?
- The so-called 25th frame belongs to the category of subconscious, subliminal advertising. In the 1950s in the US, the journalist Vance Packard wrote a book dedicated to subliminal advertising. The book made a big stir and about the same time some person announced that with the help of split-second frames edited into a film, he could make people want various things. Viewers wanted a soda or something of the sort. Consequently it turned out that this was a practical joke.
 Currently in the US few people believe in the effectiveness of such methods, and their effects are considered unproven. For this reason, there are also no special laws regulating their use. There is only general utility.

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