Broadcasting and National Imagination in Post-Communist Latvia

This book uses the case study of public television in post-communist Latvia to explore how audiences respond to TV offerings and how their choices can be seen as an act of agency. Juzefovičs builds his book around Albert Hirschman's ideas and uses tools from social constructionism to assess how the public responds to the role of public television.

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This book uses the case study of public television in post-communist Latvia to explore the question of how audiences respond to TV offerings, and how their choices can be seen as an act of agency. Jānis Juzefovičs builds his book around Albert O. Hirschman’s classic concepts of exit, voice and loyalty – the options available to a person within any system. He uses Hirschman’s ideas, along with tools from social constructionism, to assess how the publics of both the Latvian-speaking majority and the large Russian-speaking minority have responded to the role of public television in the nation-building efforts of the new Latvian state. Along the way, he develops our understanding of public broadcasting more generally, and the way it can be used to define a national 'we'.