Russia is a peculiar media market which, though, exactly corresponds to the idea of state-media parallelism, rather than media-political parallelism. This country’s political arena does not correspond to the idea of left-right divisions well-known in the West. Instead, the major division is between the pro-establishment (today often called ‘patriotic’) and pro-Western liberal-oppositional powers (today mostly in exile). More precisely, the division lies between what is known as sistema (Ledeneva, 2013) and the political spectrum (from radical right to radical left) that is not part of it. Sistema includes the three branches of power, including the President, the two-chamber parliament (State Duma), the government and government-affiliated federal agencies, the local administrations and regional governments, the judiciary sub-system, the security services, the army, the major think tanks affiliated with the government, the state-owned media, and the major state-owned economic entities, including oil&gas, civic and military machinery production, construction and development, transportation, and some other business branches. Hence, the ‘system/counter-system’ divisions shape both the structure of polarization in the country and the structure and ownership on the media market.
In accordance with this, as well as with the legacy of perestroika times, the 1990s, and the 2000s, the Russian media sphere has undergone deep fragmentation, which only partly could be called ‘polarization.’ In the 2010s, Toepfl (2011) has noted that there were ‘four media systems’ instead of one; later writings emphasized the formation of a disjunct media system with alternative-agenda (Bodrunova & Litvinenko, 2015) or parallel (Kiriya, 2012) media that joined the openly oppositional media in their social and political critique.
Besides the aforementioned fragmentation, the second major feature of the Russian media system of the years 2000 and later has been the lack of public affairs media that could organize autonomous and multi-faceted deliberation on major issues. The federal newspaper market includes quality business dailies, post-Soviet ‘popular’ tabloids, and several new papers, mostly of tabloid nature; thus, the newspaper market lacks a major public affairs daily. Newspaper ownership is mostly formally not affiliated with the state, but several major newspapers are owned by large-scale businesses which realize well the red lines not to cross. The same may be stated about the federal TV where state-owned and state-affiliated federal channels neighbor entertainment channels, with a lacuna of an independent public affairs channel of enough viewership.
Interestingly, Runet remained practically unregulated in terms of ideological or political restrictions nearly till 2017 (Vendil Pallin, 2017). In terms of socially-mediated communication, it became one of the most diverse markets in the world as early as in the mid-2000s. Before 2022, US-based social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Viber lived next to local-grown (and regionally weighty) VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, and later Telegram. However, several scholars noted that fragmentation was also a feature of this market segment, as platform-wide political echo chambers formed on Facebook and Twitter (see Bodrunova & Litvinenko, 2016, for details). Therefore, neither Runet has become an opinion crossroads and an influential deliberative milieu.
After 2022, the so-called ‘consolidation’ of the media market has happened, being a part of a wider social process of anti-Western one-sided polarization accompanied but a wave of emigration of a big share of the liberal opposition. Just as well, many online media of oppositional stance changed their official residence after the introduction of a law on foreign agency, after which lists of foreign agents, both persons, media entities, and NGOs, started to be compiled by Roskomnadzor, a federal agency in the field of public communication. Today, one may find oppositional voices in the online realm, but virtually not in print or on TV.
Given all described above, our choice of newspapers is (1) Rossiyskaya Gazeta and (2) Kommersant. Rossiyskaya Gazeta is the official state newspaper. While it is not the highest-circulation one, it is the official voice of the state and is read throughout the political circles and big businesses. It publishes statements of President, new laws etc. For this newspaper, political parallelism is high. Kommersant is a trickier case. This is the most influential newspaper in the elite circles, representing both business interests and some quality public affairs journalism, even if it remains appealing only to a small stratum of the population in big cities. The paper has made a reputation by exploiting relations in the elites and sources ‘close to Kremlin’ for gaining exclusive and insider information. It is considered more or less autonomous, though it belongs to billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who is known for having good enough relations with the Russian President. For Kommersant, the political parallelism is low.
Given that all the oppositional media (they were not papers, anyway) have been ousted from Russia, we have no oppositional papers (or any other media) of substantial readership. In this case, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Kommersant are the obvious choice. Most studies like this one choose these two papers in Russia to represent the kind of Russian state-media parallelism.
References
Bodrunova, S. S., & Litvinenko, A. A. (2015). Four Russias in communication: fragmentation of the Russian public sphere in the 2010s. In Democracy and Media in Central and Eastern Europe 25 Years On (pp. 63-79).
Kiriya, I. (2012). The culture of subversion and Russian media landscape. International Journal of Communication, 6, 446–466.
Ledeneva, A. V. (2013). Can Russia modernise?: sistema, power networks and informal governance. Cambridge University Press.
Toepfl, F. (2011). Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia. New Media & Society, 13(8), 1301-1319.
Vendil Pallin, C. (2017). Internet control through ownership: The case of Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs, 33(1), 16-33.