IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/meanco/v9y2021i4p82-92.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Agency of Journalists in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Ukraine During Yanukovich’s Presidency

Author

Listed:
  • Esther Somfalvy

    (Department of Politics and Economics, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany)

  • Heiko Pleines

    (Department of Politics and Economics, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany)

Abstract

On the example of Ukraine during the Yanukovich presidency (2010–2014) this article explores which factors support journalists’ agency in relation to censorship pressure in a competitive authoritarian regime. It shows that a critical mass of journalists existed who reacted to censorship pressure with rejection. Based, first of all, on 31 semi-structured interviews, we examine the working conditions of prominent national journalists and analyse how they describe their role and motivations. We argue that the nature of competitive authoritarianism offers journalists opportunities for critical reporting, but that it is individual characteristics of journalists—including professional ethics, networks, and job mobility—which define whether and how the respective opportunities are used.

Suggested Citation

  • Esther Somfalvy & Heiko Pleines, 2021. "The Agency of Journalists in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Ukraine During Yanukovich’s Presidency," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 9(4), pages 82-92.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:9:y:2021:i:4:p:82-92
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/4227
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olga Dovbysh & Esther Somfalvy, 2021. "Understanding Media Control in the Digital Age," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 9(4), pages 1-4.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:9:y:2021:i:4:p:82-92. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.