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Zyuganov, but ‘on a more vague level – Luzhkov, Gorbachev – I don’t care’. This
awareness of external control and cognizant adaptation to it are typical of my
respondents. It allows one to assume that Russian journalists are more controlled
than dominated, while their American colleagues may be more dominated than
controlled. This may change in Russia as the system equilibrates.

Journalists and their sources: negotiation and conflict

The second type of power agents with whom journalists most often interact
are sources of information. Journalists have more power resources in this rela-
tionship. Media and their sources are mutually dependent: media producers
impose their format and, in general, the necessity to ‘mediatize’; sources try to
define content, often successfully, using their monopoly of certain knowledge (or
newsworthiness). This interdependence leads to informal cooperation and com-
promise. This is characteristic of mass media in all societies, but, in Russia, coop-
eration is especially intertwined with exchange relations – for example, when in
zakaz stories a ‘source’ is a hidden advertiser. Open bribes are more and more
prevalent at the level of media organizations than with individual journalists
because management tries to gain control over this source of income.
Individual journalists more often shape their relations with sources as ‘help’,
and problem-solving occurs without money being involved. Appropriate accents
are given to news stories for transportation of furniture or dental treatment, for
instance – whatever a source can provide. If the return service is delayed, these rela-
tions are not recognized as exchange. In general, they are most often described as
problems experienced by other media organizations. Tariffs on hidden advertise-
ment are named in reference to other companies (according to available sources
they vary from US$100 to 2000 per story, depending on the size of audience, while
the average income in Russia is, very roughly, equivalent to US$100 a month).
Thus the exchange relations between journalists and their sources may be seen
as a continuum of practices with increasing legitimacy: from story-making for
money on the one extreme to compromising in exchange only for those resources
necessary for journalists’ professional activity, e.g. for access to information.
In their well-known study of news sources, Ericson et al. (1989) underscore the
consensus that dominates journalist–source relations. That might be true for stable
systems, where interactions have become habitual, but not for Russia. In Russia,
sources as autonomous actors have emerged only recently, while during the
Soviet period the major tensions were between media producers and censors, who
mediated journalist–source relations. Furthermore, conflict seems to be inherent
in these relations in general, and derives from different interests of the actors:
information in which sources are interested is not journalistically valuable, and
vice versa. Both sides try to maximize their power. Journalists treat their sources
according to these sources’ degree of power. For example, a two-hour wait for a
minister at an airport was taken by journalists as normal, while a one-hour tardi-
ness of a press secretary from a museum caused a journalist to become indignant
and threaten to cancel the story if ‘they can’t manage it normally’.