ECREA16-Abstract

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Thursday, November 10

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PN 128

Journalism and the Legitimation of Digital Sovereignty in Russia

D. Yagodin

University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

Russia has been one of the most active proponents of reforming the existing regime of cyberspace regulation, calling for greater control of national seg‑

ments of theWorldWideWeb. Gradually, this has been shaped into a form of a particular rhetorical construction: the notion of digital sovereignty. In the end

of 2012, following the surges of political protest caused by the controversial elections of the state Duma and the president, Russian authorities established

the Commission on Information Society Development. It became part of the upper house of the Russian parliament. Its temporary status implied one

particular task – to prepare legislative changes in the sphere of information and communication regulation. The Commission was given three years to finish

the job, providing support for many new laws along the way and presenting an overarching proposal for Russia’s cyber security strategy by 2016. The forth‑

coming document will supersede an already outdated information security strategy from 2000. As a media research, this study focuses on the instrumental

role of Russianmass media in supporting and legitimating the development of this policy document and a number of intermediary policy decisions. Scholars

have pointed to the evidence of instrumentalisation (Mancini 2012) of Russian mass media in the form of political clientelism (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos

2002; Roudakova 2008): the media directly serving the interests of the owners and sponsors. Due to powerful formal and often informal government

interference into editorial policies of the mainstreammass media (Oates 2007: 1294), Russian journalists can be seen as instruments in the hands of official

politics. Even when there is opportunity to question that role, the mainstream journalists remain loyal towards governmental decisions and policies, and al‑

though law prohibits censorship, practices of self-censorship in the mass media are prevalent (Simons 2015). This study draws on an analysis of media texts

in two daily Russian newspapers, Kommersant and Rossiiskaia Gazeta, focusing on discussions about Internet governance and digital sovereignty. The se‑

lected newspapers represent an elitist and mostly state-controlled public discourse. The content analysis of the media coverage shows how challenges to

national security (sovereignty) domestically overlap increasingly with challenges to political order and political legitimacy. The overall thematic diversity

of the Russian coverage prioritises discussions leading to a strengthening of the regime of digital sovereignty. By emphasizing the subject, the media draw

a line between cyber security understood as spying and malware disseminations on the one hand and as information security and ability to control what

content is available and accessed on the Russian territory on the other hand. Whereas the former is portrayed as merely a technical problem and as natural,

the latter presents a much more serious political concern for national stability, hence needing urgent response at legislative level.

PN 130

‘Please Stay Frustrated’. The Politicisation of Media Technologies in the German NSA Debate

J. Moeller

, A. Mollen

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Department of Communication, Mainz, Germany

University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Edward Snowden’s act of revealing the NSA’s activities was a political act – an act pointing to the increasing entanglement of communication and media

technologies with policies of states and businesses and the risk and challenges that these entail for democratic societies. In media and communication

studies discussions prevailed even before Snowden’s disclosures that media technologies relate to far reaching transformations in the realm of the political

(Bauman et al. 2014), challenging key political institutions and concepts. Thus, based on the assumption that democratic societies are in the midst of a pro‑

found, yet contingent, transformation process, we argue that the NSA scandal had the potential to provoke a public debate on the political implications

of media technologies that reaches beyond academic discourses, niche magazines and activist’s forums. This is an occasion to ask whether and how media

technologies are presented as a political issue in the news media debate. Herein, the concept of politicisation represents an instrument that supports

the investigation of transformative processes, which are directed at bringing an issue to political awareness. Christian Meier (1990) provides a basic un‑

derstanding of the political and politicisation that highlight this transformative character, drawing from the historical experience of how citizens became

a political institution in ancient Greece. Politicisation, is understood as a process, which is expressed in changing references to political units, defined as any

kind of decisive body. Additionally, we borrow from the operationalisation of politicisation in Europeanisation research. Consequently, we analyse the politi‑

cisation of media technologies along the transformative dynamics of (a) media technologies entering the realm of the political, (b) media technologies me‑

andering within the realm of the political and, (c) debating political projections for media technologies. Our analysis is based on three moments of intense

coverage during the first nine months of the reporting on the NSA scandal within two German quality newspapers (SZ and FAZ). 69 opinionated articles

were analysed with a qualitative frame analysis. The results show that media technologies enter the political realm in the reporting on the NSA scandal

within a number of thematic areas (international relations, citizenship, economy and overarching debates on the future of democracy).Within each of these

thematic foci discussions become increasingly diverse over time. Also, alternative actors slowly appear next to established voices in the discourse. Regarding

dimension (c), there is a clear lack of political projections for the future and consequently a lack of (controversial) debates thereof. We thus conclude our

presentation by sketching out the opportunities and risks of a political vacuum in the newspaper debate. Political vacuum is understood as a situation where

traditional institutions and concepts appear to have eroded, while no new definitions have yet emerged. In the wake of the transformative role of media

technologies, journalism could, thus, engage more in providing a space for new political solutions and projections. In this regard, German quality press’

reporting on media technologies is still underway.