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17 News Production in

Contemporary Russia:

Practices of Power

Olessia K oltso v a

Key problems in the studies of post-Communist media

Why study power practices in Russian news production? Although the issue
of media control both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union has gen-
erated a large body of literature, it has usually had a single focus. What has
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mostly attracted the attention of scholars from the ‘West’ is the question of the
development of press freedom (or, as one of my western colleagues put it more
succinctly, ‘does Russian government still pressure the media?’).
This question is important, but the way it is asked indicates at least three west-
ern clichés about the post-Communist media (often borrowed by ‘eastern’ schol-
ars 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 suc-
2
cessfully applied both to western and ‘Third World’ media. Second, applied to
post-Communist media, ‘freedom’ usually means freedom from government con-
trol, though obviously there exist other ways of conceptualizing freedom and
power, as is illustrated in some detail later in the article.
Third, such statements as the one about the Russian government ‘still pressur-
ing the media’ betray the existence of a common though usually silent assump-
tion that western governments have ceased to do so. Colin Sparks (Sparks and
Reading, 1998) is one of the few 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 a non-comparative perspective many western scholars often crit-
icize domestic media. For example, while straightforward pressure and open
conflict are not widely known in the West, analysis of media content has made
the existence of influence apparent (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). This has given
the scholars a ground to conclude that explicit exercise of power by the US gov-
ernment must be substituted by mechanisms of domination. Thus (in general) a
wide range of power relations in western news production has been studied
with a variety of approaches drawing a polyphonic picture of multiform social
influences experienced by media-makers.

Source: EJC (1998), vol. 16, no. 3: 315–335.