Nationalism and the Media

Russian contemporary society experiences nationalistic moods contagion that causes tensions among different ethnic groups. The subject of these tensions, ethnic minorities, comprises 22% of the population, a total of 26 million people (RFSSS, 2010). However, relatively little research is conducted on the topic of ethnic minorities media representation in Russia. Scholars focus on television news coverage though entertaining media is being neglected in existing academic research. The project explores ethnic minorities representation in the Russian television series in order to fill in the lacuna. It combines theoretical foundations from nationalism theories and media representation theory to explore the particular case. The first theoretical pillar brings a specific understanding of ethnicity as a socially constructed notion; the second one contributes by explaining the media role in ideology transmission. As a method, the thesis uses Multimodal Discourse Analysis to investigate the chosen series from a multimodal perspective. It allows the researcher to fix meanings in a variety of semiotic resources as well as explores socio-economic and political influences on the media representations. Project’s results provide confirmatory evidence that ethnic minorities in the series are undervalued — they are represented as insignificant parts of the Russian society. Furthermore, the data appear to suggest five ethnic minorities representation themes exist in the Russian TV discourse — money, traditionalism, aggression, illiteracy and criminality. However, some tensions within this discourse were also discovered. As such, five representation themes are problematic only within ethnic characters — the same characteristics for Russian characters are approved and justified. Moreover, the research has found that the series frequently mock the society itself for being xenophobic and judgmental.