Television News Preferences and a Sense of Belonging among the Russian- speaking Minority in Post-Communist Latvia: the Case of Panorāma and Vremya

Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative audience research and drawing on the case study of two long-running evening news television programmes – Latvian-language Panorama, the flagship news programme of Latvian ex-state and current public television, and Russian-language Vremya, the main news programme of the former Soviet Central TV and today’s Russian state channel, also available in Latvia – this article demonstrates the interplay between news media preferences and broader sentiments and identity formation processes among the large Russian- speaking minority in the post-Communist Baltic country of Latvia. The results show that what can be seen as immersion of the Russian-speaking viewers in transnational television from Russia is not evidence of their lack of interest in the national life of Latvia, nor absence of their national allegiance to Latvia. The paper is part of a larger doctoral research investigation into responses of publics towards public service television as a nation-building project in Latvia.