Weak Strongman by Timothy Frye

Author:Timothy Frye
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Television versus the Refrigerator

Foreign policy is a low priority for most citizens, and this makes it easier for politicians to manipulate citizens’ views about the outside world. In contrast, economic issues are central for most citizens, and people can benchmark their experience against government reports. This makes manipulation much harder on economic issues. Political scientists Arturas Rozenas and Denis Stukal studied more than thirteen thousand news reports from 1999 to 2016 related to the economy on Channel One, the main television channel in Russia. Since nondemocratic regimes are more likely to fall during bad economic times, information about the state of the economy is a sensitive topic. To their surprise, Rozenas and Stukal found that the coverage of positive and negative economic news was highly symmetrical. Falls in the Russian stock market, sharp depreciations of the Russian ruble, and slow economic growth were just as likely to be reported as good economic news, such as a bumper harvest or increase in oil prices. Direct censorship of bad economic news did not seem to be at play.

The factors credited with creating good and bad news, however, were quite different. The researchers noted that “bad news is not censored, but it is systematically blamed on external forces. In contrast, good news is systematically attributed to domestic politicians.”52 A few examples highlight this strategy. In late 2000, the Russian stock market experienced a severe crash that stopped trading. That evening Channel One reported,

Today, due to the sharp decline in market quotes, trading in the Russian trading system was stopped. In the US, George Bush and Al Gore continue the battle in the courts. Democrats believe that the process will continue until December 18, when the electoral college will meet.… The uncertainty about the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, after all, was reflected in the stock markets. Indeed, not so much in the American markets, as in the Russian ones.53

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