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News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power 221

Strangely enough, when it comes to post-Communist media, the scope of
academic enquiry 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
latent way. Modernization theory implies that all societies move (or should
move) along the same trajectory: from inferior (premodern, precapitalist, author-
itarian) to superior (modern, capitalist, democratic). So, with or without refer-
ence to the notion of modernization, the role of post-Communist media is
usually evaluated according to their ability to promote this unitary course of
development – this applies, for example, to a most comprehensive account of
Russian television production and control over it by E. Mickiewicz (1997).
Sometimes media are even expected to want to become independent from nor-
matively undesirable forms of control (political, economic) and to subject them-
selves to normatively approved forms (legal, control by public opinion).
The main problem with this approach is that it tends to substitute descriptive or
explanatory concepts by prescriptive categories, which weakens analysis of any
society – either ‘eastern’ or ‘western’. In the beginning of the 1990s it led to ‘devel-
opmentalist’ and ‘transitional’ hopes for rapid post-Communist westernization
that never came true. Later studies are more realistic. Ivan Zassoursky’s book
(1999) is one of the pioneers among the few Russian monographs on post-Soviet
media, though most of them are still more narrative than analytical. Contrary to
Zassoursky, Slavko Splichal’s sophisticated study (1994) evaluates the recent
development of Eastern European media within an openly normative framework,
but prescriptive and descriptive elements are carefully divorced. Splichal also crit-
icizes some elements of western theories often taken for granted by many ‘eastern’
scholars (for example, ‘market idealism’).
Several recent works have been critical of unconscious normativism in post-
Communist media studies as well (Downing, 1996; Sparks and Reading, 1998).
Downing convincingly demonstrates the irrelevance of the concepts of public
sphere and civil society for any description of post-Communist societies and
shows the limitations of political economy. Instead, he characterizes the situation
in the Russian media as ‘competitive pluralism of power’ (Downing, 1996: 145).
Colin Sparks – whose critical approach has been already mentioned – similarly
notes that the struggle between different power centres may explain the devel-
opment of post-Communist media much better than any normative approach
(Sparks and Reading, 1998). Sparks is the first to list some of these powers for
Eastern Europe. He describes four types of agents: politicians, business people,
media organizations’ authorities and their employees (Sparks and Reading,
1998: 137). [...]

The idea of power as a unifying concept

Thus to integrate various kinds of power relations into one empirical study it is
necessary to unite the aforementioned related areas into a consistent approach.
Different scholars have used such words as ‘influence’, ‘power’ and ‘control’
quite differently, sometimes not clarifying them at all. In various studies one can