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News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power 225

choose obedience of media people at the cost of temporary financial losses.
However, what differentiates this situation from the previous Soviet regime
is that various power groups compete in their struggle for resources, thus pro-
viding some pluralism of interpretations that sometimes grows into fierce ‘infor-
mation wars’. To get an idea of the tenseness of these wars one has to remember
just what has been at stake in Russia in the 1990s: a huge sector of state property
has been put forward for privatization, and it was the government who was
deciding on the rules of this game.
Restricting some aspects of media content, owners in Russia, like any power
centre, open new possibilities for the media as well, first of all the possibility to
survive. This serves the interests of both top media executives and rank-and-file
employees. It explains why numerous unprofitable Russian media, instead of
merging into bigger entities and realizing economies of scale by shrinking their
staff, prefer searching for additional funding from external owners. Thus unprof-
itability of the Russian media seems to be both cause and consequence of exter-
nal ownership.
In this situation, it is not surprising that owner control is most often legit-
imized by journalists (though they admit that in theory it is not desirable). To
‘work for the company’s policy’ is considered normal and even a mark of pro-
fessionalism. This was confirmed by all of my respondents. It is not by chance
that the Glasnost Defence Foundation monitoring reports contain so few con-
flicts with economic actors (about 10 percent in 1998); such monitoring, collect-
ing the cases of open rivalry, is not able to flag latent conflicts and contradictions.
While rank-and-file journalists often do not recognize this control as control,
news editors can feel the owner’s influence more clearly. They claim they
have regular talks with their bosses that provide general guidelines for news
policy (for example, lists of taboo topics/persons), and the rest has to be
divined from a knowledge of the larger political situation. This knowledge,
apart from watching television, is gained through informal interaction with
different elites. News editors may also receive telephone calls concerning parti-
cular events or persons. For example, in one city the municipal authority owned
a television company and prohibited coverage of the visit of the leader of a
competing political party.
Advertisers’ control is more readily regarded as illegitimate, though its exis-
tence is very often frankly acknowledged as an inevitable evil. In Moscow, where
the advertising business has been developing rapidly, this control is mediated by
audience research firms, and the number of commercials on the air is directly
dependent on ratings, despite low levels of trust to these ratings (Koneva, 1998).
Outside Moscow and in St Petersburg in particular, the advertising market is
more chaotic (especially after the crisis of 1998) and is only loosely connected
to any ratings. Each programme is on the air as long as it can find funding
(Pushkarskaya, 1998). This leads to fragmentation of media organizations (when
nearly every programme is registered as a separate medium), and to a large
amount of hidden advertisement – stories favourable to and paid by the source,
but presented as news. In one of the newsrooms under study, there was a news-
cast schedule on the wall on which ‘hidden’ commercials were openly marked
with the word zakaz (story by order). Though advertiser pressure is not unknown