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News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power 229

sources, while media executives serve as mediators of all other outside pressures
concealed within ‘organizational’ control. However, reporters preserve some
degree of autonomy from their bosses. It is because their labour is connected
with symbolic production, that they cannot be precisely controlled. I witnessed
some cases in which journalists managed to successfully negotiate with their
bosses.
Once I watched a dispute between an anchor of a state national television pro-
gramme with her editor, who wanted to cut out a negative part of a story about
Chechen refugee children – in that case the major reason was the lack of time.
‘You can’t make a story completely rosy,’ the anchor said, ‘because when another
channel makes it black, people say that they are telling the truth and you are
lying.’ The negative part was kept. Even when the topic and the ‘accents’ are
imposed on journalists from above, they still choose the interviewees, the ‘picture’
and the composition creating the relative importance of topics by their ordering
in a story.
Of course, another mechanism of control often works when open pressure is
seemingly absent – recruitment of employees who are selected so that the ongo-
ing relation with them is built on trust. A news editor once said in an interview
that, although he is supposed to read all the materials before airing them, he
often signs them without scrutiny because he is confident of his people’s con-
sciousness. He noted: ‘all anchors are grown-ups, all sane ... an inner censor is
sitting inside them; everybody understands that something can be said, some-
thing not: do not swear on the air’.
This note about swearing is very typical, and reflects the fact that journalists
feel themselves subject first to the control of professional standards or organiza-
tional routines. Imposition of a topic, idea, timing, style, etc. is usually attributed
to this form of influence. Though superficial observation would confirm this, the
role of the control of routines should not be overestimated. In reality, journalists
often do not know their bosses’ full motivation (very much like each boss does
not know for sure what is going on in the higher layers of the hierarchy, ending
with equally disconnected political elites). Journalists make guesses about the
processes going on at higher levels on the basis of negotiations with their editors
and – as everyone of us – from watching television programmes. Thus political
control is ‘installed’ into the control of routines and is lost in it. It is not specific
to Russia, but the available data suggest that American journalists are even less
conscious of this device, maybe because of lack of open conflict.
In Russia, at the state television company under study, the bosses’ political
motives sometimes were spoken of openly. In general, journalists in both state
and private television companies are aware of political control and see it as
inevitable; they seem to be more inclined than their American colleagues to
acknowledge the constructed character of their products. They very seldom use
the notion of ‘objectivity’, and comment on the freedom of press only when
asked: they see it as a western myth that westerners themselves recollect only
when they ‘start teaching [them] democracy’. So, in addition to economic
control, journalists legitimize political control (‘a journalist sells their skill to
make stories just as a surgeon sells their skill to perform operations’). One of
the respondents told me that he would never work for Communist leader