Deception, impotency, and dependence. What is the Russian media like today?

At first glance, the Russian media seems to be somewhat distant from the rest of the world. But in fact, they exist according to the same laws as the media in other countries. The extreme conditions in which the Russian media exist simply make it easier to analyze the causes of the general media crisis.

Let us first analyze the context in which Russian media operate and analyze the role of factors that affect media.

Media is at the core of the structure: it produces content, which, in its turn, creates an audience, with the sole purpose of “selling” it to either businesses as potential leads or clients, or the government, that is seeking to legitimize its decisions.

Note: Legitimacy of decisions is determined by an unspoken public consensus about the current government and its actions. Legitimacy is possible only on the condition that the majority of media outlets support the government’s decisions by depicting them from a positive perspective.

The media industry is regulated by two major factors — firstly, and officially, it’s the law, the sum of laws and legislative acts that define the rules for media. Secondly, a major role is played by censorship from the part of political forces and large capitals.

Under such circumstances, the audience can hardly influence the media, even by refusing to use their services (to consume information), because there’s no real alternative. Speaking figuratively, the modern Russian media market is a closed ecosystem, within which audience can migrate from one media to another, while the differences between the latters are purely cosmetic, due to the fact that at the end of the day the media end up “selling out” to the same limited number of “buyers” — the government and a few dozens of large corporations.

Currently, most media consumers use the services of one of the media that form the consensus, however, a lot of the consumers of various political views are under the delusion that at any given time they can actually switch to media with an opposing point of view, to get some alternative opinions on current issues. This delusion only serves to reinforce the overall stability of the system.

This is exactly how government and capital can not only present their version of every specific bit of news but project and shape long-term trends and images.

Even if a particular media holding company isn’t under the direct influence of the government, there are tons of fail-proof indirect ways to pull the strings. It leads us to a grim conclusion — no socially-active person can avoid using media, they’re inescapable, but it’s a one-sided interaction and the system of mass media can not be influenced.

In the next part, we will talk about specific examples of censorship in Russia. For obvious reasons, these cases are unknown to a wide range of people.