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But in the current situation of economic weakness in Russian media, the pluses
of such information outweigh the minuses.
Not only journalistic investigation, but any search for a topic costs a lot, espe-
cially on television. My experimental investigation at a newspaper took about six
weeks, I made a dozen trips to various organizations, about 60 telephone calls,
and, as mentioned, was threatened. The honorarium I got was roughly enough to
buy a pair of boots. Thus the most frequent methods to block investigation in
Russia now resemble western PR: in most cases, it is enough to flood editorial
offices with positive information about yourself, sometimes coupled with negative
data on your competitors, and you do not need restrictive sanctions too often.
Moving towards this technique of influence is a general trend in sources’
behaviour. Their very first autonomous actions after official abolition of censor-
ship were mere imitations of old Soviet methods, that is direct administrative
orders. The problem now was that this did not work, because sources had no
resources to mandate the fulfilment of their orders. So they switched to the strat-
egy of concealing information from reporters and refusing to speak on air. This
strategy had its own disadvantage: when your voice is not presented in the
media, it is very likely to be replaced by the voice of your rival. This was the
major reason why the Russian government lost the information war in the first
Chechen campaign. Banning access to information through the federal military
provoked journalists to use Chechen sources, who were more than willing to
provide their own version of reality. It should be added that the government had
no clear information policy in general, it made no preparations for the campaign
and seemed to try the Afghanistan scenario again.
In the second war, the change in strategy was dramatic, and reflected a broad
change in sources’ attitude towards the media. This time the government (more
exactly, Mr Putin) had a consistent policy, which was active construction of an
official version of events in Chechnya, and setting conditions for its dissemina-
tion through the media. For instance, the government press centre has borrowed
the idea of pools from the Gulf War, and it is hard to get information except from
them – first of all, because the war zone is not safe (for more details on Chechnya,
see Koltsova, 2000).
On the whole, the development of relations between reporters and their
sources can be characterized as mutual learning. Journalists are acquiring skills
of working with information in new conditions, and information sources,
including political actors, are learning new manipulative tactics. Sources, parti-
cularly government sources, are moving from preliminary censorship, to con-
cealing unfavourable information, to imposing favourable information on media
producers. However, each time the situation seems to quieten down, a new con-
flict emerges, reshuffling actors and reshaping their balance of power.

Conclusion

The format of an academic article does not allow for a more detailed account of
power relations in Russian news production. However, this brief description