| Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork among political journalists in a mid-size Russian city in 2001-2002, this dissertation tells the story of a simultaneous "privatization" and de-professionalization of journalism in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contrary to conventional liberal wisdom, Soviet journalism exhibited a significant degree of professionalization, manifested in peer judgment of journalistic excellence, shared ethical norms, and an historically-specific orientation toward public service. Soviet journalists (unlike official speechwriters, with some individuals managing to perform both jobs at once) remained in constant tension with the Soviet authorities---a tension that was "thinkable" and practicable due to a complex relationship between the sources of moral and political authority and responsibility within the Soviet governmental project, of which Soviet journalism was a part. The post-Soviet transformation broke open and left unanchored the meanings and institutions of "the public" (obshchestvennoe) around which Soviet journalists' moral, intellectual, and civic agency was organized. The economic and moral uncertainty unleashed by the privatization of mass media in the early 1990s resulted, on the one hand, in the creation of spaces for economic, political, and moral "free-for-all," spaces into which various media-political actors, pursuing their diverse agendas and goals, and guided by equally unanchored meanings of "the private," did not hesitate to move. In the short span of the early to mid-1990s, these both calculated and haphazard actions by politicians, government officials, media proprietors, advertisers, managers, and journalists led to unprecedented alienation of journalists from one another, creating a perception among them that everyone is "on their own" and is working primarily "for themselves." All of these developments led to a sharp de-professionalization of journalism after socialism and to its current and widespread discursive equation with "prostitution" (the second oldest profession). Not surprisingly, by the mid-2000s the newly-consolidated Russian state was able to take advantage of such parcellized journalistic field, reclaiming significant control over it under President Putin. |
