News Media and Power in Russia

Olessia Koltsova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415545679
• eBook ISBN: 9781134283392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The end of communist rule in the Soviet Union brought with it a brave new world of media and commerce. Formerly state-owned enterprises were transformed, often through private ownership, and new corporations sprung up overnight to take advantage of the new atmosphere of freedom.

Until now, most research on media and news production in Russia has focused on the scope of government control and comparisons with the communist era. However, extra-governmental controls and the challenges of operating in a newly capitalist environment have been just as important – if not more so – in the formation of the new media climate. Filling the gap in the literature, this book examines the various agents who 'make' the news, and discusses the fierce struggle among the various agents of power involved. Drawing on existing theories and scholarship, the book provides a wealth of detail on the actual daily practices of news production in Russia. Original research is combined with compelling first-hand accounts of news production and dissemination to provide an incisive look at the issues and power structures Russian journalists face on a daily basis.

Part I
Theories, methods and historical context

1 Catching the wind

Theoretical approach to the study

To say “media production” or “practices of power” is to imply some regularities in these processes. But what regularities may be observed in a society that is experiencing an intensive social change? In a society where everything is fluid and unpredictable and escapes both academic analysis and everyday experience of participants? Is it possible to study such a society? As an insider who has tried to do it, I would answer yes, to some extent. And, what is more important, it is very worthwhile: it is not often that history gives us a chance to create an account of a rapidly changing social reality – a reality in which institutions emerge before our eyes, revealing their roots in society and unmasking the most covert patterns of social organization. Moreover, I believe that these patterns are not specific to Russia; my guess is that they are typical of some other or may be even all media systems, with the only difference that Russia is a more convenient place to reveal them. If this assumption is right, Russian experience may tell us something about the phenomenon of news production in general.

Post-socialist¹ media: conceptual problems

There is little novelty in regarding power as constitutive of any media production. Understanding power as action or practice is not new either. Thus, “practices of power in Russian news production” – the subject I intend to examine here – may seem just a new name for a well-studied phenomenon. However, the distance between the emergence of ideas and their application in particular empirical studies turns out to be a long one. Although the issue of media control both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union has generated a large body of literature, until very recently it usually had a single focus. What mostly attracted the attention of scholars from the “West”² is the question of the development of press freedom (or, as one of my Western colleagues has put it more succinctly, “does Russian government still pressure the media?”).

This question is important, but the way my colleague asked it indicates several common, albeit gradually vanishing, Western clichés about the post-socialist media (often borrowed by “Eastern” scholars who tend to ascribe to Western research a higher symbolic status). First, in many cases these media are (implicitly) examined through the prism of traditional normative discourse of press freedom, although other approaches have been successfully used in studies of both Western and “Third World” media. In fact, the latter have been investigated more thoroughly than those of the former Soviet block. Second, applied to post-socialist media, “freedom” usually means freedom from government control, though there exist other ways of conceptualizing freedom and power, as we shall see illustrated in some detail later in this chapter.

Third, such statements as the one about the Russian government “still pressurizing the media,” betray the existence of a common though usually silent assumption that Western governments have ceased to do so. Colin Sparks (Sparks and Reading 1998) is one of those scholars who also points out the existence of similar assumptions. He reproaches his colleagues for permanent, explicit and implicit comparisons of fully manipulated “Communist” media with an idealized system of Western “free” media, that itself has hardly ever existed in reality.

However, in non-comparative perspective many Western scholars often criticize domestic media. For example, while straightforward pressure and open conflict are not widely known in the West, Herman and Chomsky’s famous study (1988) has made the existence of external influence apparent. This has given the scholars grounds to conclude that explicit exercise of power by the US government must be substituted by mechanisms of domination. Thus a wide range of power relations in Western news production has been studied with a variety of approaches drawing a polyphonic picture of the multiform social influences experienced by media professionals.

Strangely enough, when it comes to post-socialist media, the scope of academic inquiry has been predominantly narrowed to normative theories of democracy, often merged with the theory of modernization. Though the latter may not be used explicitly, it enters the analysis of non-Western media in a more concealed way. Modernization theory implies that all societies move, or should move, along the same trajectory: from inferior (pre-modern, pre-capitalist, authoritarian) to superior (modern, capitalist, democratic). So, with or without reference to the notion of modernization, the role of post-socialist media is usually evaluated according to their ability to promote this unitary course of development – this applies, for example, to the most complete account of Russian TV production and control over it by Ellen Mickiewicz (1997). Sometimes media are even expected to want to become independent from normatively undesirable forms of control (political, economic) and to subject themselves to normatively approved forms (legal, control by public opinion). Other scenarios of development are considered deviation. It is this normative orientation that leads to the situation in which even general overviews of the development of post-socialist media often become built up around the topic of liberation from government control (The Media after Communism 1994; Broadcasting after Communism 1995).

The main problem with this approach is that it tends to substitute descriptive or explanatory concepts with prescriptive categories which weakens analysis of any society – either “Eastern” or “Western.” In early 1990s it led to “developmentalist” and “transitional” hopes for rapid postsocialist Westernization that never materialized. Some scholars have tried to avoid this gap. Thus, Slavko Splichal, in his study of Eastern European media (1994), makes his normative approach explicit and carefully divorces its prescriptive and descriptive elements. This leads him to conclude, among other things, that desirable democratic change cannot be expected if a society does not possess social actors willing and able to bring about this change. Since media professionals themselves have not demonstrated such qualities, the change may only come if some other actors mobilize themselves for it.

A further step in understanding why the long-expected change did not happen, and what was really going on in post-socialist countries in the 1990s, is to acknowledge that the authoritarianism-democracy axis is not the only one along which societies can change. Thus, one of the most important dimensions of change in post-Soviet Russia was movement from the old institutional structure to its decline and later to new institutionalization. This included disintegration and further consolidation of the State and broader processes of dispersal and monopolization of power.

Some media scholars have come close to consideration of these questions. Ivan Zassoursky’s book on Russian media (1999), although still more narrative than analytical, described a whole series of various battles in which media have been objects, subjects, and instruments. As a Russian media insider, Zassoursky is completely free of any illusions concerning journalists’ willingness to bring about democratic changes.

Two works of the same period have been profoundly critical of existing approaches as well (Downing 1996; Sparks and Reading 1998). John Downing convincingly demonstrates the irrelevance of the concepts of public sphere and civil society for any description of post-socialist societies and shows the limitations of political economy. Instead, he characterizes the situation in the Russian media as a “competitive pluralism of power” (Downing 1996: 145).

Colin Sparks – whose critical approach has been already mentioned – similarly notes that the struggle between different power centers may explain the development of post-socialist media much better than any normative approach. Sparks is the first to list some of these powers for Eastern Europe. He describes four types of agents: politicians, businessmen, media organizations’ top managers and employees (Sparks and Reading 1998: 137). Both books, though they contain well justified criticism of the previous studies and suggestions for further research, do not put them into practice, at least on Russian material. Sparks studies Eastern Europe only; a chapter on post-Soviet media in Russia in Downing’s book is based on secondary sources.

At the same time, their attention to agency is a new trend in studies of post-socialist media; until recently, besides being normative, such studies have mostly been concentrated on macro-institutional analysis. Both “Western” and “Eastern” scholars have investigated questions of media ownership, legislation, formal state control and technological innovation/ backwardness (e.g. Lange 1997; Kandybina and Simonov 1999). All these important issues have little to say about periods when institutions are weak or even nearly dissolved, which is exactly the case of Russia in the 1990s.

Power in media studies: gaps and bridges

A third obstacle to theorizing post-socialist media, along with dominance of the normativist and institutional approaches, is that the different relevant areas of inquiry have been largely disconnected (this is pointed out by many scholars, e.g. Davis et al. 1998: 77–9). Though, for example, Downing bridges the theoretical gap between general political science, concepts of transition and media studies, much empirical evidence from Russia still needs to be introduced into the analysis. At the same time, scholars engaged in Russian, Slavic and East-European studies, along with “native Eastern” scholars, demonstrate the deepest knowledge of diverse empirical material, but they have often been reluctant to apply mass communication theories to this material.

Mainstream media theories, on the other hand, have been developed with material from the stable Western, mostly Anglo-American world (studies sensitive to local contexts do exist but form a minority). Within the mainstream, relevance for my work is found in a number of relatively autonomous areas of inquiry that address various aspects of power, influence and control experienced by media.

Studies of news production have generally taken the form of ethnographic description (e.g. Tuchman 1978). In Russia, there was only one study of this kind; it was carried out at the editorial office of the most official Soviet newspaper Pravda in 1987, at the peak of perestroika, and was made by a Western scholar (Roxburgh 1987). Ethnographic studies have mostly addressed the dependence of media making on routines inherent to the profession of journalism, while extra-media power relations have been studied by a different set of scholars. Here, to repeat, power (control) has usually been associated with (authoritarian) governments or, for Western media, more readily with big business (e.g. Tunstall and Palmer 1991). Still other scholars have studied power relations between journalists and their sources (Ericson et al. 1989), while others have addressed the power of ideology (Glasgow University Media Group 1976). Here a unit of analysis was usually an individual. Various approaches from sociology of knowledge, as well as economic and conflict theories were used, depending on what facet of the phenomenon was stressed – conflict or exchange. Political communication scholars were at the same time studying the media strategies of politicians and the role of journalists in the relations with and between the former (e.g. Paletz 1987; Mancini 1993).

Not much dialogue seems to have occurred among any of the mentioned areas, while to my mind they cry out for integration – at least if one intends to get a full picture of media production and its exposure to a whole range of social influences. The latter might include local political context (e.g. post-socialist transformation) among others.

Some integrative efforts, however, have been made. One of the early attempts was Curry and Dassin’s Press Control around the World (1982) that gathered articles with different approaches to power and influence in the sphere of media. In general, the political-economic trend in the book has turned out to be dominant, but such texts as the constructivist and ethnographical piece by Gaye Tuchman have also found a place there. The concluding article by Jane Curry briefly lists various kinds of influence on media – from the most structural, such as literacy rates, to those produced consciously by agents. Besides traditional ownership and legislation, the list includes privileges/discrimination in funding, advertisements, licensing, access to information; confiscation of printed issues, personnel control (in particular, dismissals and co-optation), fines, arrests and, finally, direct threats to health and life. Curry assumes – and I tend to share this vision – that these practices can be encountered in different countries and in different combinations, but their very range is limited.

The idea of collecting and systematizing various influences on media was developed by a number of other scholars as well. Thus, Dimmick and Coit (1982) discern seven levels of influence: supra-national, society, media industry, supra-organizational, community, intra-organizational, and individual. Shoemaker and Reese (1996) offer a similar, though more elaborated “hierarchical model” scaling power influences from “micro” to “macro” social patterns. Their model is visualized as a set of concentric circles, with individual influences in the center, followed by media routines, media organization influences, extra-media influences, and, the outer circle, ideology, embracing all the other circles. Again, this scheme is meant to apply only to American media, but the major problem with it is that the scholars integrated very different empirical data from various studies and thus approached their subject in a very broad and somewhat abstract way. Using this model for concrete empirical research would be a little problematic. It puts together very different definitions of influence (personal/structural, intended/unintended) and thus provides no single unit of observation, although it shows some alternatives among which one may choose.

Since for reasons elaborated further below I chose to look at influence in terms of agents and their conscious actions, of special relevance are studies developing classifications of such agents. George Gerbner (1969), for instance, discerned a number of “power roles”: clients, competitors, authorities, experts, other institutions, and audience. Although he regarded these roles as patterns of institutional pressure, some of them, such as clients or experts, can be easily reconceptualized as willful actors committing deliberate actions. Joseph Turow (1992), picking up the term “power roles,” develops a narrower classification conceptualized predominantly in economic terms. His unit of analysis is a media organization that interacts with its environment on the basis of available resources and takes the role of either a service producer or a client. Its counterparts are other types of organizations, or “power roles” whose classification is borrowed uncritically from “in vivo categories”³ used within the media industry itself.

Analyzing media production as an industry is Turow’s explicit goal; consequently, he applies a standard classification of social actors that can be met in many other industries as well. This makes mass media comparable with other spheres of economic activity, but deprives them of their specificity. Looking from an “industrial” angle, Turow also gives priority to those actors who are better seen from this position: various satellite businesses surrounding media organizations deserve detailed classification, while those who stand “outside” the industry are termed, for example, just “authorities” though the latter may be also divided into many subgroups. This asymmetry is complemented with broadly uncritical vision of actors’ typical activities. In some cases those activities that are usually declared by the actors themselves are listed as their actual functions, e.g. it is said that a typical practice of the authorities is to regulate and arbitrate between others. In other cases actors are ascribed those typical activities which have been widely accepted as real by (republican) public opinion: thus, trade unions are first of all seen as a source of boycotts and other disruptions. Despite my critical attitude to Turow’s typology of power roles, my own classification of power agents is built up not without its influence (see the following three sections).

A dynamic approach to power in media

Power

As I tried to show above, the question of power, and its companion terms of influence and control, have received significant attention both in the studies of post-socialist media and in general mass communication theory. Yet not much reflection on the concept seems to have taken place; at least I failed to find any that could help me interpret media phenomena that I observed.

Outside media studies the concept of power has always aroused heated discussions, mainly because the term itself is extremely vague and allows a legion of interpretations. It may be understood as property, resource, potential, relationship or action; as personal or structural effect; as intended or unintended impact etc. Thus power is difficult to divorce not only from control or influence, but also from force, coercion, manipulation, authority, domination, hegemony, limitation, restraint – the list may be continued.

When studied empirically, power – like some other broad concepts – acquires another unwanted feature. Taken without further specification, it embraces all heterogeneous terms mentioned above and tends to promote messy accounts and conclusions. When using a precisely defined notion, one immediately finds out that, what can be differentiated analytically, empirically merges into an indivisible amalgam. Hence, following the precise definition of power, one risks getting the picture much reduced; otherwise, one makes more and more additions and, finally, runs into an infinite broadening of the initial concept. Therefore, I think, what can be defined is a preferred notion that will be focused on, but the text to be meaningful must include related phenomena.

To develop a wholly new theory of power in media is, probably, too ambitious a goal for this book, so I shall limit myself to elaborating a concept applicable to my data and to positioning it among other concepts. For the latter purpose, it will be enough to rely on a compendious classification of approaches to power offered by Mark Philp (1996: 657–61).

He distinguishes four groups of such approaches. The first deals with ability to bring or actual bringing of both intended and unintended change into the environment of the object of power, irrespective of its (non-) compliance with the object’s interests. This broad vision of power, in fact, equates it to any causality and is represented by the Foucauldian tradition. The second view considers only those changes which in the absence of power would not be undertaken by its object, although the change itself may still be both intended or unintended, personal or structural. This group of theories includes most Marxian approaches, with their notions of domination and hegemony. The third approach describes power as a conscious action of an agent who brings change out of his/her motivations, but not necessarily against the resistance of the object of power. This view is the closest to various game theories. Finally, the last view narrows power to an agent’s conscious actions committed against the will of the object of power.

Although initially my search for an appropriate concept of power was inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, the vision finally adopted in this study is clearly closer to the third group of approaches. I focus my research on human actions that intend to change the final object – a media product – in accordance with agent’s interests as they are understood by the agent him/herself. Philp criticizes this approach for its inability to give a nonreductionist account of structures and institutions (Philp 1996: 659). Partly I agree, but for a number of reasons addressed in some detail later in this chapter I concentrate my analysis on agents and their practices. The latter term, by which I denote manifestations of power, is borrowed from Michel Foucault (power as “something that is rather exercised than possessed” – Foucault 1977: 26). However, I use the word in a simpler and more concrete way – to mean typical actions of successful imposition of an agent’s will. This definition has much in common with that of Max Weber (1968: 53) but, while he defines power as ability to conduct one’s will, I look at the action itself. Ability, as something not observable, is not addressed and is reduced to its manifestations in various power resources. Next, restricting power to suc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Theories, methods and historical context
• Part II Agents of power
• Part III Special studies
• Conclusion
• An example of an annotated transcript of an interview
• Chronology
• List of interviews
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography