Institutional Legitimacy and Russian News: Case Studies of Four Regional Newspapers

This article explores institutional influences on Russian news media at the regional level and adopts a new institutional approach to help explain media's response to increased control by local elites. Media in the province operate partly in a clientelist system in which journalists and their organizations provide services to political and economic elites in the region in exchange for desperately needed resources. The poor economic condition of the province and the strongly centralized local government help explain the media's dependency on elite patrons. Yet, the clientelist model is not a perfect fit. Strong influence by local powers tends to erode newspapers' public legitimacy, which both newspapers and the area's elite also need. To stem this erosion, news organizations attempt to buffer themselves from clientelist influences by pursuing practices that reflect the legal-rational ideal type. They pursue ceremonial, skin-deep scrutiny of officials; they engage in artificial forum "roundtables" with officials; and they emphasize the publication of many brief stories to connote progressiveness. Journalists also maintain connections across news organizations, which undermines the organizational boundaries of the newspapers and helps patrons establish individual relationships with journalists, but also allows some semblance of an occupational community. Keywords: Russian journalisminstitutionalismclientelism Notes 1. For reasons not very applicable to this study, this framework is called "new institutionalism" to distinguish it in from traditional "institutionalism," a framework first adopted by social scientists in the first half of the 20th century. An essential difference is an emphasis on cognitive typification in new institutionalism as opposed to normative socialization in traditional institutionalism. 2. CitationWaisbord (2006) argues that journalism's legitimacy is a consequence of public expectations of journalism and of the political arena rather than a consequence of journalists abiding by some standard set of professional norms, and so clientelism might not erode legitimacy because it would be expected. Yet several scholars indicate that rational-legal expectations persist in Russian society (CitationKoltsova, 2006; Roudakova, 2007), and journalists interviewed suggested readers still looked to them to perform something of a watchdog role. Still, shifts in what constitutes "legitimate journalism" are worth watching. 3. The region under study in this article falls in the "not free" category.