FROM THE HISTORY OF FORMATION OF MEDIACRITICISM IN RUSSIA (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE MAGAZIN-NEWSPAPER "THE CITIZEN")

The article shows how mediacriticism was used for positioning of the periodical that had just appeared in the information field; how it was used for evaluation of condition of modern journalism, for building relations with potential allies and barefaced antagonists. The article examines an important episode of the ideological and political struggle in journalism of the 1870s, which revealed a trend towards the concentration of groups of readers around certain media that foreshadowed the emergence of political parties. Journalistic criticism was the harbinger of mediacriticism that touched, in addition, upon a wide range of problems which worried Russian post-reform society: from moral to economic ones. The subject of analysis of this article is the speeches about the Russian press of publicists from the conservative magazine-newspaper "The Citizen" headed by V.P. Meschersky.

During the post-reform period there was polarization of the society by the ideological and political issues; social grouping took place as harbingers of future political parties; these groups started sharp struggle which reflected in journalistic discussions which were later analyzed in mediacriticism. The magazine-newspaper “The Citizen” expressed on its pages commitment to conservative ideology which main values were: government, religion, preservation of the national identity, preservation of the nobility’s leading position, maintenance of patriarchal structure in a family, patriotic orientation of humanitarian education. The main antagonist of “The Citizen” was the liberal party’s body – a newspaper of A.A. Kraevsky “The Voice”, which was supported by a liberal-westernism faction in the government. Meschersky’s tactics towards that newspaper was quite diplomatic: he did not want to start a direct animosity between the periodicals but he had to express disagreement to those statements of “The Voice” that, in his opinion, damaged stability in Russia. Thus, Meschersky balanced his remarks to the political newspaper “The Voice” with the compliments to the literary periodical “Patriotic notes” which was owned both by Kraevsky and N.A. Nekrasov; that explains the balance of power in public opinion.