Repackaged Authoritarian PoliciesKazakhstan's "New" Version of Media Controls Peter Gross (bio) Kazakhstan is one of many former communist countries that defies Ivan Krastev's assertion that authoritarianism has ceased claiming "to be a real alternative to democracy."1 Since December 2011, when a strike by workers in Zhanaozen was brutally suppressed by the authorities and unrest spread throughout the country's Mangystau Region, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev has ratcheted up his already commanding rule.2 The media have been significant targets of Nazarbayev's authoritarian governance. Nazarbayev's government has engaged in a gradual but steady, multilayered, near monopolization of media in a country that had an underdeveloped journalistic scene from the start.3 At first glance, Nazarbayev's approaches to controlling the media in his favor are analogous to those of fellow autocrats in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, but there are significant realities and practices that separate Kazakhstan from other formerly communist states.4 A Brief Political Context While there has been progress in the economic sphere and in the establishment of civil societies throughout Kazakh history, its geography-related "national ideology and apparent obsession with global crises" and the resulting extant conservative culture continues to have deleterious effects on progress.5 This culture buttresses the facilitating national penchant for "a strongman leader whose primary responsibility is to safeguard national security" and feeds the governing class's rationalizations for authoritarian rule.6 Kazakhstan, a predominantly Muslim country, is a noncompetitive authoritarian state wherein voting has become a meaningless exercise.7 The dominance of Nazarbayev and his Nur Otan Party, fraud, patronage, and their engineered absence of bona fide opposition contribute to the rigged system in which active citizen participation has little impact on outcomes that are effectively pre-ordained.8 The Nazarbayev administration speaks in terms of democracy while governing authoritatively. Astana's political masters appear unbreakable in their conviction that control over civil society, markets, and the media secures political power.9 The Nazarbayev administration justifies its obsessively autocratic mentality as [End Page 187] a means of self-preservation, which in Kazakhstan includes inciting aggression against independent media and journalists and the creation of manipulative policies, laws, and propaganda. Monopolization organically lessens the need to employ these tactics. To that end, the state and the government remain the unremitting advertisers, propagandists, and controllers of the media and information, in the name of "security and the fight against international terrorist threats."10 In the digital realm, there is the added cynical use of electronic communications to offer public services—e-government—and an overwhelming presence by Nur Otan Party members and associates. The rulers portray the control and exploitation of state media and assaults on the few remaining independent media outlets as necessary not only to protect the country, but also to uphold the citizens' privacy, safety, and overall well-being in society. A One-Family (and Associates) Oligarchy The media oligarchs' sway over traditional platforms is comparable to that of many of their counterparts in former communist countries. The oligarchic figures in these countries either co-opt the state and government, like in most Central and Southeast European countries, or are co-opted by the state, as in Russia, Belarus, Hungary, and Macedonia.11 In Kazakhstan, neither type of appropriation is necessary. The fact that they have been uniquely a Nazarbayev family affair since 1991 makes the way that the family and "business associates have taken control of all of the most influential organs of the media" the system's most conspicuous trademark.12 On the political and legislative side, Nazarbayev's control over the Nur Otan Party and the party's aggregate domination of state and government organs, including the parliament, assures media legislation and policies in favor of his political household. The articulation of laws is inhibiting freedom of the press, allows for wide interpretations that amount to censorship, and incentivizes self-censorship.13 The party's near monopoly over the media assures propagandistic support for such legislation and policies, which makes the tag-team of political and media power impervious to demands for change; those who clamor for democratization are easily rebuffed and neutralized in ways reminiscent of the Soviet era. Although...

This chapter discusses the main issues in the early research on the related areas of journalism and mass media systems studies, and the trajectory of scholarship as it evolved in the 1990–2017 era, its increasingly sophisticated, targeted, and analytical scholarship. It considers the assumptions upon which scholarship was initially based and its related research shortcomings, which included the still-unresolved absence of applicable models/theories and a consequential list of other major and minor problems. A major difficulty in journalism and media scholarship in post-totalitarian countries, stemmed from the absence of applicable models and/or theories, inclusive of those offered by studies of post-authoritarian nations. The synergism between media markets, ownership, and politics continues, potentially posing a threat to independent, democracy-supporting journalism. Journalism and media studies in all transitions-transformations suggest thematic similarities in scholarly foci. The legal environment substantially contributed or detracted from journalism's evolution in unequal ways across the regions.

This keynote address at the Digital Media International Conference at the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, on May 2017 briefly discusses fake news and the nature of its effectiveness; then addresses the potential, theoretical negatives and reasons for them when fake news is disseminated by via digital media; and concludes with some remarks about the reshaping of the public sphere, an issue that is wide open for scholarly exploration.

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Politics and media in Romania have more than just a symbiotic relationship, one in which they rely on each other. The elites that lead these two institutions share common values, beliefs, and attitudes, which translate into practices and behaviors. The end result is a corruptible, corrupt and corrupting relationship, between two corruptible, corrupt and corrupting institutions, that is detrimental to democracy in general, to the watchdog role of the media, and to their professionalization.

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In Romania, the political system, itself an amalgam of systems and still shifting in line with a continually evolving democracy, is only the vessel in which corruption is percolating and not the cause of it; culture is the cause. This is true of the very nature of how instrumentalization, clientelism, and political parallelism have evolved. Romanian clientelism and the political parallelism are often an expression of the powers of the manager-journalist or star journalists and not only of media owners and politicians. This may set the Romania mass media system apart from other systems.

The article attempts to determine how the Internet has influenced the work practices of journalists in Romania, using data from a qualitative research, "The professional practices and constraints of the Romanian gatekeepers," conducted between December 2010 and January 2011, involving a sample of 73 journalists from 67 local and national media outlets. The results of this research show that the Internet has become both a guide to public expectations and public criticism of the media. In addition, it also serves as a barometer of news consumption, which guides journalists to create the media agenda. The perverse effects of the introduction of Internet in journalistic practices are considered the creation of the Google reporters and copy-paste and office journalists.