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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In 1940, there were only 400 television sets in the Soviet Union. By 1950, there were 10,000; a decade later, some 4.8 million. Then in the five years between 1965 and 1970, the availability of television sets more than doubled, and by 1976, Soviet industry was producing 7 million sets annually. In 1960, only 5 percent of the Soviet population could watch television, but by 1986 that figure had risen to 93 percent, and television signals could be received in more than 86 percent of the territory of the U.S.S.R. Nearly all the households that are unable to receive television are in sparsely settled rural areas, mainly Siberia.
Although television is a relative newcomer to the Soviet media system, it has exerted an enormous effect on leisure time use. It has also reoriented patterns of information acquisition. Of the events in the world abroad covered by the Soviet media 86 percent are known to people through television, 77 percent through the newspaper, and 62 percent from radio.
The first author wishes to thank the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation for support of this research, which forms part of a larger project.
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3. “Tekhnika televideniia i radioveshchaniia v 12-i piatiletke,” Govorit i pokazyvaet Moskva, 1May 1986, p. 19. In the United States, 98 percent of all households have at least one television set.
4. See Ellen Propper Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, chap. 3, “Television and theDisplacement of Time and Values.” The patterns of leisure time use and the changes they haveundergone since the introduction of television are remarkably similar to those in the west.
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13. Because of the priorities of the fall football season, ABC does not broadcast its regularevening news on Saturday. Therefore, for that day we have only the CBS news. CBS, on the otherhand, does not broadcast a regular evening news edition on Sunday.
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15. This attitude is not true in other media: for example, some of the most popular films concernthe work, portrayed as heroic, of Soviet spies (often in World War II).
16. For a recent breakdown of the figures, see Elaine Sciolino, “Report Shows US Was Outvotedin the UN Through Most of 1985,” The New York Times, 4 July 1986, p. 4.
17. A good discussion of this narrative unity and the European practice of presenting unconnectednews bites is found in Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo, “Speaking of the President,” Theory and Society 13 (1984): 829–850 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
