Economical Forms of State Pressure in Russian Regional Media

This paper focuses on different new forms of state pressure in media, in particular – economical forms based on commodification of loyalty and different mechanisms of financing media. The peculiarity of Russian situation is that state-owned media (the simulacrum of “public media” because they are controlled by the state power and not by the social groups) are first players on the advertising market and uses the purely commercial model of financing. From the other hand to promote the manipulation and translation of state-oriented content the State should adopt the mechanism of distribution of this content to commercial model. The distribution of this content became a kind of “service” that media provides to the state organism and this service is paid by the State. So, the model of broadcasting and distribution of this “propagandist content” became absolutely the same than classic advertizing model of financing media. In this situation such kind of financing represents the parallel market and mechanism of control of editorial content without control of media ownership. The persistence of this model depends on regional peculiarities which structure very heterogeneous map of media market in Russia.