Constructing Political Reality in Russia

Abstract

Democratization of public communication not only requires the institutional reorganization of the mass media, but also the adoption of new journalistic practices in political reporting. These practices include a new conception of the role of journalists in society and new standards of the quality of news reporting. This article takes the Izvestiya, one of Russia's quality papers, as an example to discuss the specific problems Russian print media are confronted with when struggling for independence. A quantitative content analysis of the political coverage of the Izvestiya, which compares front-page news in 1988 and 1996, elucidates how the paper informs its readers about political matters today and how the structure of news has changed over the last decade. The findings show the coexistence of old and new journalistic norms. There are clear signs of growing professionalization with the news becoming more factual, more timely and broader in the selection of topics. At the same time, we still find a high degree of subjective evaluations indicating the persistence of the historical legacy of Russian journalism.

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