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DYSKURS UKRAÏNS'KYKH MEDII: IDENTYCHNOSTI, IDEOLOHIÏ, VLADNI STOSUNKY. By Volodymyr Kulyk. Kyiv: Krytyka, 2010. 655 pp., illustrations, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN (paper) 9-668-97839-0.
Volodymyr Kulyk, a political scientist at the Institute for Ethnic and Political Studies at the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv, has written an extensive, thorough, and painstaking study of post-Soviet Ukrainian media discourse. The nine chapters and 550 pages of this book set the standard for future studies of Ukrainian media discourse, thanks in great part to the book's elaborate coverage of the discursive practices at work in the Ukrainian mass media and the ideological content of those practices, both explicit and-as the study emphasizes in its focus on unspoken assumptions and the construction of common sense and normality-implicit practices. For researchers from outside the field of media studies it provides rich and useful insights into how political, ideological, identificational, sociolinguistic, and cultural developments in post-Soviet Ukrainian society have both shaped and been shaped by media discourse. Considering the insights presented in the book about the formation of dominant frames and representations in Ukrainian media discourse and the media's role in shaping social attitudes, both the theoretical and methodological perspectives presented in the first two chapters and the critical analysis of the case studies make Kulyk's book worthwhile reading for Ukrainian journalists and public intellectuals, but also invaluable in Ukrainian graduate and postgraduate courses in political science, media studies, and sociology.
Apart from the extensive theoretical chapters and the overview in chapters 3 and 4 of the emergence and outlook of the...