Page 248 - Communication Theory and Research

McQuail(EJC)-3281-17.qxd 8/16/2005 12:01 PM Page 233

News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power 233

based on the concept of power as practice is enough to support some conclusions.
First, it has shown that all agents, including media producers, possess some
resources and thus can exercise power. This means that complex power relations
in news production are not unidirectional, and that the production itself does not
take place exclusively within the journalistic community (contradicting norma-
tive visions of journalism as ‘independent’ activity).
Second, practice-oriented approaches are very helpful in studying rapidly
transforming societies (such as Russia in the 1990s), where formal institutional
analysis has little explanatory capacity. In Russia, old power relations have sud-
denly collapsed, while ‘new’ ones are still not routinized and thus have become
highly visible to the actors. This leads not only to explicit forms of control and
conflict, but also to greater reflexivity of all social actors, their general awareness
of various mechanisms of power and pragmatic use of them.
One of the major limitations of the suggested approach is that power defined
as practice can hardly be quantified, and thus the overall distribution of power
between the actors cannot be ‘calculated’. But it is questionable whether any
other approach is able to answer this question, especially in cases of transform-
ing societies.
As an end note, when this article was being prepared for publication, my fore-
cast of the possibility of a new open conflict came true. The dramatic story of
NTV, the only national channel not controlled by the new Russian government,
found its end in what de facto meant its shutting down. This event starts a new
epoch in the history of post-Soviet media and, I am afraid, makes the media
landscape described in my article a part of Russia’s past.

Notes

This research was supported by the Moscow Public Scientific Foundation and the European
University at St Petersburg, Russia. I would also like to thank Dr Volkov, Professor Downing,
Professor Nordenstreng and Professor Mickiewicz for academic advice during my research and
critical comments on the drafts of this article.
1. Understanding the conventional character of the notion of the West and its possible
antonyms, I shall apply this word to countries traditionally referred to as ‘developed’ and
‘democratic’, that is Western Europe and North America.
2. ’New audience research’ based on various cultural approaches (e.g. Lull, 1988) has made
media studies of the ‘Third World’ much richer than those of the former ‘Second World’.
3. For example, during the last three years they showed constant disagreement about Russia’s
preferable path of development: western-type – ‘capitalist/democratic’ (from 47 to 39 per-
cent at various times) – Soviet-type (21–25 percent), or a unique way (17–25 percent).

References

Belin, Laura (1997) ‘Politicization and Self-Censorship in the Russian Media’, paper presented
at the national conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies,
Seattle, WA; available at website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc.: www.rferl.org/
nca/special/rumedia4/index.html