The Situation of the Media in Russia

Aita Romanova

ID #100080251

JMC 141a

Prof. Fortner

The situation of the media in Russia

The media in Russia is very diverse. According to "Media Landscape: Russia" article (ww.ejc.net) there are 2,168 TV and radio companies and 35,500 registered newspapers in Russia. In this paper I will examine the situation of the media sphere in Russia and argue that despite Russia is a democratic country the media sphere is highly censored and suppressed.

First, I am going to analyze the ownership of main media outlets. There are two state-owned main press agencies - ITAR-TASS and RIA Novosti . The main private one is Interfax . All-Russian State TV and Radio Company (VGTRK) is a big state-owned media holding company. It includes main nationwide channel Rossiya. In this company there are also radios "Radio Rossii" and "Radio Mayak" . National Media Group is one of the largest private media holdings. It has the largest nationwide broadcasting channel - Perviy Kanal (Channel One) 51 percent of which is state-owned and 49 percent is privately owned. The large private channel and media holding company Ren-TV is also in Nation Media Group. Company also owns the national newspaper Izvestia and Russkaya Sluzhba Novostey (Russian News Service). There are other national privately owned media like the third main nationwide channel NTV (Nezavisimoye Televidenie - Independent Television) and Echo Moskvi . Popular newspapers are mostly those which survived from Soviet Union but now are "yellow", like Komsomolskaya Pravda and Argumenti i Fakti. From that information I can make a conclusion that most of Russian television and radio is state-owned. This means the main media for common people are almost completely controlled by the government. Freedom House states that the press in Russia is not free (www.freedomhouse.org). Online media is comparably freer than other news outlets in expressing opinions and availability of most websites. However the authorities can remove unwanted content and manipulate opinions. After conducting this research I realized that the government still maintains a strong control of the media sources.

The tendency of governmental management of media is a remnant of the USSR. At the time of the Soviet Union media was totally controlled by the government despite the fact that in Constitution of USSR, 1977, Chapter 7, Article 50, all citizens are guaranteed with the freedom of speech and press. This kind of constitution is called by Giovanni Sartori as a "façade constitution" (Sartori, 1962, p. 861). By definition "façade constitutions" are only giving an appearance of "true constitutions", they are not reliable sources of information about the real governmental process. Officials of USSR government just removed independent outlets. Even until 1980s almost all of TV-programs were tools of propaganda highly dominated by the Communist Party, and remaining were high art, such as opera and ballet, or B-rated thrillers, as it is written in Britannica Encyclopedia (www.britannica.com). The same could be told about the press. The strong "iron curtain" of media started to fall in 1970-1980, became it became more difficult to control the "western" influence. And by 1989 with the fall of the Soviet Union, official censorship came to an end.

Then the new Russian Federation emerged in 1991 with the new constitution where it was said that everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech (the Constitution of Russian Federation, 1993, Chapter 2, Article 29). In first years of the new country many independent private-owned media appeared, but the main media outlets was still state-owned. Actually, it remains so now. There are other regulations of media sphere, despite the constitution; the Law on Mass Media, adopted in 1991, the Law on Communications (2003), and the Law of Information, Information Technologies, and Protection of Information (2006). The Law on Mass Media is repeatedly changed and updated. For example, most recent update was about limiting propagation of extremism, terrorism, violence and pornography into press. Also there are other more specific limitations, for instant, two laws that regulate media coverage of state authorities and political parties. But do that regulations work? Pervyi Kanal (Channel One) and Rossiya (Russia) always are praising ruling political party Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia), as it was when in the December 2003 Duma elections and then in the March