Representation of public events in the Ukrainian press in 1989

Abstract

In the field of Ukrainian journalism, public events are not just random facts of reality, they reflect the dynamic process of development of relations between the media and the public, reveal tendencies in the process of information exchange in the society. Ukrainian history shows that people use public spaces for integration representing their views, sharing information face to face, supervise facts and opinions by particular communities, especially when the official media does not respond to requests for reality. This article is deal with issues that concern to representations of public activity in the media as the reflection of the changing social environment and economic transformations that influence the changes of public opinion and foster a culture of communication. The development of the information society and global transformations in the media has also influenced changes in the media discourse of the late USSR. The overwhelming amount of domestic media research in Ukrainian journalism is devoted either to the historical stages of its development with an interest in the emergence of the first print media, or with the modern era of new media dominance. In this context, the late Soviet period is poorly understood. In the 1980s, media production technologies was changed, and the processes of printing, recording, filming, and broadcasting became less expensive and more accessible to non-professionals and, accordingly, less controlled by the authorities in comparison to previous time. The stable soviet media discourse at the time was demonstrating meaningful and technological transformations, though not as much as the smartphone era. The representations of social life and the authorities in media was changing: party leaders, representatives on the ground and officials are photographed and filmed on the streets not just «with the people» but «among the people», with rallies and cultural actions breaking through the fronts of newspapers. The processes of spreading the ideas of free speech, a free exchange of information in the 1980s began to evolve steadily and culminated in 1989, the official year of the fall of the Iron Curtain. The aim of this article is to explore of the tendencies of representations of public activity in the Soviet media of the late 1980s and early 1990s in order to clarify the origins of the development of modern independent journalism and to formulate policies of interaction between the public, the media, and the authorities in the context of legitimizing the rights on freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, that shape public relations in modern Ukraine. Article is devoted to the review of representations of public events in 1989 in the media on the example of the local Kharkiv newspaper «Leninska Zmina» (1989), which was the printed organ of the Kharkiv Regional Committee of Komsomol of Ukraine (Lenin Committee of Soviet Youth). It is possible to explore the processes of development of this discourse in the footsteps that remained in the mass media of the late 1980s. Public events of that time appeared not only as an object of journalistic reflection but as facts of public communication that influenced the formation of new media discourse. Ukrainian researcher V. Kulik points out that the transformations of ideologies and social relations and identities are reflected in the discourse of the media. Research on representations of public events in the media is an effective monitoring tool for media discourse analysis to understand the political and cultural ecosystem. Despite the diverse of thematic focus, public events were part of a new cultural publicity paradigm that began to emerge with the collapse of the USSR.