News Production in Contemporary Russia

This article offers a new approach to power relations in the sphere of mass media production in Russia. The analysis focuses on television news - an object of the fiercest struggle among various agents of power (including news producers themselves). Unlike previous works, mostly done as institutional analysis, the proposed approach emphasizes the informal and dynamic character of these power relations, and describes the practices through which they shape the news. This approach avoids the normative categories widely used in previous studies. The empirical research based on this approach reveals a certain set of practices of influence on news production; their most striking difference from those in the `West' is in their explicitness. This suggests, however, not only that Russian journalists are more controlled than their western colleagues, but also that they seem less dominated.