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Other external influences

A last practice, open violence, is less usual than others. Journalists perish mainly
in the war zones (Chechnya, for example), or in accidents whose connection with
journalists’ professional activity is questionable. A little short of that, violence or
its threat are used both by criminals and by ‘power’ ministries (police, secret
service, the military). My respondents complained that bratki (rank and file mafia
members) do not let them shoot certain scenes, threatening to take or damage
their cameras or just to create ‘trouble’ for them. Exactly the same is often done
by the police, but they can also take journalists to the police station (Glasnost
Defence Foundation, 1997a: 355). Both criminal and state actors are also not
unfamiliar with blackmail and telephone threats.
All these practices are not used by one type of actor exclusively; actors make
alliances and thus may have access to a whole range of strategies. In their book
Press Control Around the World, Jane Curry and Joan Dassin enumerate many of
these practices as typical of nearly all countries (Curry and Dassin, 1982); so it is
not practices, but their combinations that are unique. It may be argued that no
one switches off the electricity in US media offices to pressure them. That is true,
but this does not necessarily ensure that American media have more autonomy.
As has been already noted, absence of open conflict may indicate successful
hegemony (here we come back to the level of ideology).
Ironically, the concept of hegemony does not work very well for Russia. For
hegemony, a relatively unified centre of power and a consensus over basic val-
ues are needed. As already mentioned, neither is found in contemporary Russia.
No matter how much media may be controlled by fragmented groups, public
opinion polls show deep cleavages on core issues (Bocharova and Kim, 2000). 3
Confusion about values, first, increases the role of individual decisions and,
second, replaces value-based choices with actions that are often driven by a cost-
benefit analysis. This is more clearly seen at the intra-media level, but before
turning to this, it is appropriate to consider why the audience has been called a
‘quasi-agent’.
It is true that the appeal to the audience’s interest is widely used by all play-
ers to legitimize their activity, but this does not mean that the audience is a real
player. Neither viewers nor readers have direct influence on the media; most
often they do not contact journalists. Rather, it is their image that participates in
the game. As a respondent put it, the audience ‘is a myth which a journalist
invents for himself’, and a myth is something that can be defined and redefined
more easily than a relationship with a real actor. Even when measured through
ratings, the audience has a status in decision-makers’ minds which is closer to
that of values, rules and habits than to actual individuals.

Media executives as power mediators

It is impossible to talk about the intra-media level apart from other levels. The
routines of rank-and-file journalists consist mostly of their interactions with