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occurs, one inevitably has to go down to lower levels and look at extra-media
practices of influence and at media routines.
Practices at the extra-media level in Russia are marked by the most dramatic
change since the Soviet period: a relatively unified agent of control (the Party-
State) has split into a number of competing actors. The most significant among
them were listed earlier.
The most heated public discussion in Russia in the early post-Communist
years has been centred around economic agents (owners and advertisers). Their
influence has surfaced after the abolition of preliminary censorship. Censorship
had been the major mechanism of control in the Soviet period and that is why it
had been seen as the only obstacle to freedom (although, of course, the Soviet
system of control included an economic component, but this was ‘hidden’
behind its administrative exterior). Thus, since economic influence has come as
an unpleasant surprise, it has been described in largely negative terms. This atti-
tude resembles that of those European countries in which private television was
introduced relatively late, for example, France.
To describe specific traits of Russian media ownership, it is useful to introduce a
distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ owners, the latter meaning individuals
or groups whose major interests lie outside media business. In the West, when own-
ership is external to a media organization, it is usually in the hands of the state.
Private ownership is mostly internal; it means that owners possess media outlets
only, have no interests outside the media industry and thus do not use media as
a vehicle for promotion of those interests. Influence patterns within these two
formats have been widely studied: e.g. Schlesinger (1987) on government control,
and Tunstall and Palmer (1991) on business control. By contrast, cases of external
private ownership (like General Electric and NBC) are less well studied.
In Russia, however, nearly all media, including private ones, are owned exter-
nally, and the majority of them are unprofitable. Because Russian business and
political elites are extremely interdependent, both see media first of all as
weapons to gain political capital – a vital resource that later can be converted
into all other forms of capital outside the media domain.
Let us consider an example of Boris Berezovsky, who until recently was an
influential media mogul backing the first national television channel and a well-
known entrepreneur, in particular engaged in automobile sales. Obviously, he
was interested in a favourable legislative climate and privileges for his primary
business. Two basic strategies of approaching the federal authorities are avail-
able to a media backer like him: either offering them the loyalty of your media
outlet in exchange for favours, or ‘media blackmailing’, that is threat of refusing
to be loyal. There is no legally proven evidence on whether Berezovsky was
using one or both of these strategies, but some consequences of his successful
lobbyism are well known. High taxes for imported automobiles gave an enor-
mous advantage to Berezovsky’s firm Logovaz in selling outdated domestic cars.
Ironically, this measure, seemingly aimed at protection of domestic products, was
combined with privileges given to Logovaz to import the most luxurious western
car models.
Seeing their media outlets as instruments for non-media goals, such owners
are not always interested in the profitability of their media business, and often