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News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power 223

groups within their institutions. To my knowledge, this may apply even to stable,
‘western’ societies.
The fluid character of institutions in Russia seems to make my accent on
agency and practice (vs structures) especially relevant. Values are unclear and
rules are predominantly informal, individuals identify themselves with their
institutions very loosely, and act counter to institutional interests; agents make
choices in an atmosphere of uncertainty and relatively low predictability; their
decisions are situational and their strategies are short-term. It is an open ques-
tion whether these are temporary traits of a transforming society, or constant
traits specific to Russia, if specific at all. Of course, all societies and their media
systems possess some degree of fluidity; the question is, when the fluidity is
significant enough to consider a given society a different case. These questions
cannot be settled here; next I argue that the proposed model fits the Russian
media better than either normative or purely institutional approaches.

Empirical base of the study

The empirical material that was collected for the current study also suggests that
conclusions presented here may apply to news (mostly on television), while
broader generalizations would demand further study. Moreover, the currently
available sources on Russian television news (both primary and secondary) are
very heterogeneous and cover some power agents and their practices much
better than others. That is why my study is more narrowly framed than, for exam-
ple, the work of Shoemaker and Reese, who could rely on hundreds of research
studies.
The most important source of my data is participant observation in the
St Petersburg affiliates of two national television channels, one private and one
state owned. The observation is documented in field notes and 23 interviews,
and was supplemented with visits to other channels. These data produce a full
and detailed (‘thick’) description of the practices of rank-and-file television news
producers in St Petersburg; secondary sources have provided information on
other regions, and it seems to agree with my observations. A most important
source here is the ‘Monitoring’ archive of the Glasnost Defence Foundation.
Since 1996 it has collected annually from 700 to 1200 cases of conflicts related to
the mass media throughout Russia, which are reported by volunteers and pre-
sented as one-paragraph stories (see Glasnost Defence Foundation, 1997a, 1998a,
1998b, 1999a, 2000).

The peculiarities of economic influence

To classify practices of influence, it is convenient to take the Shoemaker–Reese
scheme as a starting point. The most abstract level of influence – the ideological –
suggests that a system of values shared in any given society is structured to serve
the interests of a power elite. However, when it comes to the question of how this