Radio Publicism in Russia: Conceptualization, Social Purpose, and Development Trend
Nowadays researching socio-political broadcasting of the 21st century is topical. The recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of journalistic radio programs, evolution of their format and genre diversity, and improvement of broadcasting forms and approaches. However, modern radio publicism as independent form of public-oriented journalism has not been studied sufficiently. The article deals with theoretical ambiguity of the concept of publicism (political and topical journalism), determines its general characteristics and patterns, namely, depth of author’s thought, a high level of personification, strong emotion, direct appeal to the society, publicist’s own ideals and values, solemnity, prepossession, worldview forming, and rapid development during transition and crisis periods. The authors analyze correlation between the notions “publicism” and “publicist style”, and determine that the latter, being the journalist’s manner of interpreting a public phenomenon and a way of his/her identification with a particular community, is one of the characteristics of publisism. Meanwhile, the study shows that some media content of publicist-like style only imitates publicism, being in fact pseudo-publicism, whose influence is destructive due to its anti-civil and anti-social orientation, provocative character and intolerant attitude. The authors propose their own scientific definition to the term “radio publicism”, point out essential and functional characteristics of Russian radio publicism, its development trends and prospects, and determine universal features of modern radio publicism. The article also describes its current genre-and-format structure. Documentary publicist and art publicist genre groups, having their own verbal, compositional, structural, and functional features and radio audience, are distinguished as ontological categories of radio publicism. The research methods used by the authors include structure functional analysis, typological analysis, method of observation, comparative analysis, classification, and a systemic approach.