Modern Media-Opoly: Broadcast Media’s Interplay With Public Opinion In Post-Euromaidan Ukraine

Abstract

This thesis uses data from Grigore Pop-Eleches of Princeton University and Graeme B. Robertson of UNC Chapel Hill to empirically examine the relationship between the elite-owned broadcast media and public opinion in post-Euromaidan Ukraine (2015-2017). Placing quantitative results in the context of long-form, native-language interviews, this study holds that media plurality in the post-Euromaidan era has converged to a “media-opoly,” in which elite-driven dominance has cornered the market of mass information distribution. Findings of this dynamic’s relationship with political opinion suggest that perceptions of news cycles, as well as year-to-year political opinion outcomes, have related with both channel-specific and channel-agnostic viewership frequency habits. Study results imply that a symbiotic viewer-channel relationship has arisen in the context of categorically negative trust levels and corruption perceptions in Ukraine. Ultimately, this setting is associated with societal cleavages along lines of opinion-formation. As civil disobedience – a politicized expression of public opinion – has been central in many of modern Ukraine’s keystone periods of reform, this work’s findings have wide-ranging implications for twenty-first century Ukrainian policy. Conclusions suggest that – especially in the case of elite-owner collusion – Ukraine’s “media-opoly” poses a serious risk to post-Euromaidan civil society, a risk that translates to fears of political and economic stagnation in modern Ukraine.