Russian Journalism’s Time of Troubles

Abstract

The battering endured by Russian journalism in the last eight years goes way beyond anything experienced by their Western colleagues. True, the introduction of new technologies in Britain was bitterly resisted, with ugly scenes of public disorder, but such opposition did not take place in conditions of political and constitutional collapse. Russian journalism’s problems go much further than the need to grapple with new technologies. Journalists have been caught up in sweeping and often violent change, as well as being beset by powerful corporate and criminal interests, the two frequently being indistinguishable from one another. Four main challenges can be noted. The first has been the need to find a new set of political principles to replace the coerced certainties of Marxist-Leninist ideology; a thoroughly discredited and bankrupt ideology, to be sure, but one whose replacement with the principles of liberal democracy has turned out to be fraught with difficulties, as Soviet journalists themselves have discovered in their metamorphoses to Russian journalists. The notion of a tabula rasa is beguiling but illusory. The past does not easily relinquish its grip, as the Bolsheviks discovered after 1917. The second challenge is to be found in the nature of the new vested interests, corporate and criminal that are fighting to control, among other things, the huge advertising revenues of the electronic media.

Political control over mass media in Russia occurs in the forms of prior restraint, pre- and post-publication pressure and censorship; government and corporate secrecy; state and corporate advertising and lying.

Mikhail Gulyaev

If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.

James Fenimore Cooper