FROM SOCIALIST HUMANISM TO NEOLIBERAL POPULISM: TWO REGIMES OF MEDIA IN LATE AND POST-SOCIALIST EUROPE

This dissertation explores the central role media played in the redefinition of socialist culture following Stalin’s death and explains how Bulgaria’s transition from socialist to post-socialist media has hindered the emergence of a democratic civil society. Through a multi-method approach that engages with both primary sources in print and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts, this project uses Bulgaria as a case study in order to offer a historical account of the post-1989 (neo)liberalization of media and its role in the proliferation of xenophobic, far-right discourses. The first part of the project seeks to explain how and why mass communication and especially the new medium of television intervened in the cultural and political changes that accompanied post-Stalinist socialism. I trace how, starting in the 1960s, high culture became a major feature of Bulgarian media. Through the television screen, opera, ballet, poetry and theatre entered the Bulgarian home. The goal of this ambitious endeavor was first to assist the population, rural for the most part, to achieve the socialist humanist vision of a holistically developed personality and second, to frame socialist consumption not simply as the accumulation of material goods, but also as the enjoyment of high cultural products. The second part of the dissertation, examines the construction of the media sphere after 1989. It shows that the conceptualization of civil society as separate from the sphere of the economy obscures the multitude of ways through which neoliberal capitalism subsumes mass media and corrupts the public sphere. The dissertation argues that one of the most detrimental outcomes of this degenerated media field is the ongoing growth of the far-right political parties and movements