Overview of the mass media in Russia: between obedience and radical opposition
Almost all the media in Russia fall into two opposite camps. The first, which the majority belongs to, are those who accept the unspoken rules of the regime and follow the directions of the Administration of the President. They take orders on how to present news and follow them strictly, out of fear of losing money or running into a more personal kind of trouble. Generally speaking, the only way for a journalist to criticize a large figure in the world of politics or business, is to first secure the support of a higher-standing person.
Such kind of media legitimizes the government by shaping the information background to support all kinds of political decisions or law-making initiatives. They can be seen as shepherds that lead their flock of sheep, the general public, in any direction their superiors order them to. They do nothing to control or contest the government and represent the interests of society.
As for the second camp — it’s the opposition media. They are relatively unpopular, to begin with, often lack funding, and are not faultless either. They often tend to oppose the pro-government media for the sake of opposing them in a very biased way. Very often this weakness is used by the media of the first camp to undermine the opposition and their media platforms. In fact, the image in the eyes of the general public is that the opposition media are traitors and sellouts to the West.
The mistrust towards the opposition media, who are seen as agents of the enemy, makes people compromise the freedom of speech and ignore all kinds of violations of human rights, all in the face of this imaginary enemy. The audience of such media can do next to nothing to turn this situation around, because as things currently stand, they have no tools to control, monitor, or influence the media in any way, and they are as non-transparent for them as the pro-government media.
Here’s a glaring example to back it up: meduza.io, which has its editorial team located in Latvia, on the territory of the EU, due to safety concerns, was at the epicenter of a scandal the year before last. It became known that the chief editor of this well-respected opposition media sexually harassed the wife of another employee of meduza.io. The readers of Meduza were outraged and the consensus was that the chief editor compromised his reputation irreparably. However, he kept his position after the general director of the media, Galina Timchenko, personally insisted on it. The image of the whole media took a hit, and the loyal audience just stood by, unable to take any measures due to the sheer lack of control.
We can safely conclude, that neither of the two types of media properly fulfill their functions by representing the public interest or being an instrument of control over the government’s actions. One group of the media blatantly serves the corrupt government and their oligarch associates, while the opposition media is vilified, underfunded, supported by a relatively small number of people, and does not in any way affect the public opinion.
A lot of people are completely right to distrust either type of the media, as they share a whole spectrum of problems — the lack of transparency in governance and decision-making, information manipulation, agenda bias, absence of information about the source of funding and/or beneficiaries, and last but not least — definite lack of concern for the public interest. Every kind of media sees their audience as some kind of asset or product that they produce, and that is a great flaw of the mass media market as we know it.
