This book opens and closes with the puzzle of how Russian rulers can control, distort, and bend the news to their own ends without worrying about how the audience receives it. On its first page, Ellen Mickiewicz asks: “[W]ouldn't these political leaders want anxiously to know what viewers make of the news?” And on its last page (p. 206) we are told that “political leaders and broadcasters persist in imagining an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass on the other side of the screen.” While there is no direct evidence in the rest of the book to indicate that leaders do not know what to make of their audience, or that they assume it to be an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass, these assumptions set up an interesting look at what audiences actually make of television news in Russia.

The analysis concerning how audiences do react to television news is based on a series of focus groups (16 groups in four very different cities, including Moscow) conducted in 2002, which was conveniently around the time that the last independent and critical news channels were closed by the Putin government. The 158 participants viewed videos of news stories and discussed their interpretation. They were also led by facilitators to offer more general reflections on the significance of closing independent channels and on the differences between Soviet and post-Soviet television. Television is the topic of interest here because it is shown to be far and away the most important common source of news. Mickiewicz's primary concern is not conventional effects, as there is little reason to think that audiences are somehow duped en masse by state propaganda (in addition, the focus group design makes it hard to generalize to broader populations about conventional effects). It is how, in the absence of conventional cues and heuristics (e.g., meaningful party and ideological differences), do Russian citizens process the news and derive some sharable understandings?

The information-processing framework used in the book is well established, drawing from work by Doris Graber, Shanto Iyengar, Arthur Lupia, Matthew McCubbins, James H. Kuklinski, Paul J. Quirk, and others. However, as noted, the novel plot twist is that the kinds of heuristics that Americans derive from their party and ideological reference systems are missing in Russia due to a combination of corruption and instability in the political process, as well as the lack of reference and source diversity in the news itself. The book proceeds to look at different slices of Russian political life (such as election coverage and a pipeline story with environmental overtones) through the news lens, and to explore how members of the focus groups discuss them. Given that we are prepared to find different sorts of heuristics than described in much of the information-processing literature, it is surprising that there is very little attention paid to where these other heuristics come from. We learn later on, for example, that people rely heavily on available personal experience and knowledge. This is not automatically a socially shared or widely scaled heuristic, and we hear little about how this basis of information processing originates or translates into “public” (a term also in the book title). For example, we do not learn much about any other common, independent sources for personal knowledge that might produce some sort of coherent public opinion. We hear early on (p. 4) that “the Internet is protean,” but never hear about it again. For some reason, the importance of reporters and operators of investigative news outlets (e.g., the murdered Anna Politkovskaya) who risk personal safety are not brought out in the group discussions, and they receive only passing mention in the book. The focus is kept squarely on television.

The data clearly show that people are practiced in gleaning independent insights from opaque state spin. They also recognize some differences between news on state-controlled and then independent channels. However, some noted that the independent channels also represented powerful interests (e.g., Boris Berezovsky and TV-6) that were no more committed to the public interest than were state media. This may explain why the groups who watched election news on both state and independent channels (but stripped of channel identifiers) generally had trouble detecting differences in the style or information value of the coverage. At this point, Mickiewicz deftly interprets this inability to differentiate among election news sources from different channels by introducing polls showing that most people say they rely on their own direct personal experience over the news when making voting choices. One of the real strengths of the book is the interspersing of polls and focus group transcripts in order to provide a richly textured look at information processing patterns. There is considerable insight here about when the polls are good indicators of public thinking and when they can be badly misleading.

The election choice polling offers some insight about what sorts of heuristics people do use to process information in Russia. Mickiewicz calls the most common basis for interpretation in the groups the “availability heuristic,” which basically means independent personal information that people can bring to bear to interpret one-sided news. It is not clear that when put this broadly, Russian heuristics differ much from what any people would use in the absence of more compelling general political cues. And there is curiously little discussion of the implications of such an individualized basis for reaching political judgments. Personal experience is a different information-processing tool than, say, party identification or ideology. Yet I finished the book wanting more insight about what this means for the public sphere, civic engagement, sense of efficacy, or trust. There were passing references to these things, but not much clear insight. Is the nature of personal economic, social, or security experience so similar across different segments of the Russian population that people have the basis for common critical readings of the news? Or is life in Russia so diverse as to leave publics hazy and scattered in their heuristics and resulting public opinion formations? Mickiewicz points vaguely toward the latter, without developing much in the way of implications for Russian politics. Her interest seems more intently trained on showing that individuals are not duped by the brand of state news they watch on television. Yet it would be surprising in light of the earlier stories of life in the Soviet information regime if most Russians proved to be hypnotized by these dim flickers of events and pronouncements by rulers.

My own sense from the author's presentation of the focus group data is that while individuals had their own interpretations of the stories they watched, there was a great range and not much consensus on how to think about the issues and the politics of the time. Indeed, even when the discussion turned toward more general media topics, such as closing down the independent TV stations, people ran the gamut of reactions from fear about having their personal choices restricted, to worrying about democratic freedoms, to cynical comments about the owners of the independent channels having their own power agendas that made them more like the state channels than real voices of the people. One applauded the increase in sports programming that subsequently appeared on the channel. Another was resigned: “It's useless to fight with the government. If Putin decided, then he decided” (p. 171). Thus, even the closing of TV-6 (which was a case discussed in the groups) did not produce anything like a familiar democratic outcry.

One of the most interesting sections of the book is Chapter 5, which involves a recounting of memories of Soviet TV by members of the groups. The most interesting feature of this analysis is that it puts some perspective around poll findings showing that some three-fourths of Russian citizens today favor some degree of media censorship. Mickiewicz uses the discussions from the groups to show that this is more complicated than it may seem. Many of the group members were young children at the end of the Soviet era who recall fondly their favorite programs (e.g., Good Night, Children), which suggested that the government cared for the quality of media content outside the restricted domain of news. Today, it seems, all has become corrupted, and some sort of regulation would be welcome.

In the end, what is most perplexing about Television, Power, and the Public in Russia is the frequent return to the puzzle about why Russian leaders bother to produce such out-of-touch content that is so easily deconstructed by the audience. Despite promising in the title to address how television news fits into the power equation of Russia, the author leaves the reader with the same unanswered question at the conclusion that she raised at the beginning. In the end, the book fails to solve the puzzle of media power. Yet the pieces are scattered throughout the text. One way of constructing them goes like this: In authoritarian regimes (and, perhaps, in democratic ones, too), coverage of issues, elections, and events in the media is public opinion, particularly when there are few other outlets to express a common voice. Enforcement of this single public voice regime is generally assisted by intimidation, jailing, and murder. Mickiewicz notes in passing that Russia is one of the most dangerous places to be an investigative reporter, or to open a critical media outlet. Yet she somehow does not connect those observations with the rationale for the state to promote news that is so out of touch with the people.

Nevertheless, some of the focus group members seemed to have the answer worked out. For example, the Moscow group met just a week after the closure of TV-6. It seems that one person who got the connection between state control of the media, power, and public opinion was Ivan in the Moscow group, who said: “[H]ere the source of power is the people, the opinion of the people. And … it's necessary somehow to manage this opinion.” When asked by another group member why it was necessary to close media outlets and make characters like Berezovsky heroes in the West, Ivan replied: “The purpose of power is power. And … power can get it … in the reelections if in the state there will be no oppositionist television, mass media which forms public opinion” (p. 171). Perhaps this puzzling media system accrues power to those who can use the media as a shield to prevent another, more independent public opinion from being expressed. In Russian pseudo-democracy, it seems that individuals are free to form their own views, perhaps even provoked by an absurdly controlled state media, but they are not free to have those views expressed and aggregated by the political heuristics through media outlets that typically give public opinion common meaning and power.