Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

4. Foreign Agents According to the Russian Media
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The new law on non-commercial organizations (NKO) was arguably processed very fast by the
State Duma in the early June 2012 (Echo 2012a) and there was fairly little time for public debate on
the issue during the legislative process. The debate on the new amendments on the law introducing
the norm of foreign agents started quickly and it continued through the next 12 months making it
clear first of all that no matter if foreign agents were defined in the law, which was signed and set in
force, the concept was still very much politicized and questioned. Obviously the juridical statements
of foreign agents were in conflict with the ideas and beliefs of some segments of the Russian public
creating various resistance, debate, discontent, appeals, threats, foreign critique and practical acts of
protests.
The importance of mass media is recognized in the contemporary information world. It is
said to be the fourth state power or branch of government due to its significant ability and power to
distribute information and knowledge. The quantity and quality of the news is often more important
in modifying discourses than the actual events but they are still strongly conditioned by the already
existing discourses. Addingly the Russian public does not fully trust on media information as I
noticed in the Introduction chapter. How do the media stories describe foreign agents? What kind of
ideas does the news reports embed and produce on the subject? Here the two qualifications of
foreign agent, the foreign assets and political activity are especially important but there is more in
foreign agents than only these features. What kind of assumptions are there and in what context are
the foreign agents presented? What kind of action does the foreign agent label produce? How do the
discourses of foreign agents in Russian language and society reflect to the discourses of the foreign
agents in the NKO law? How and in what ways are foreign agents defined? What kind of
discoursive reality do the media create? All of these questions help to formulate conception of the
overall discoursive body of foreign agents. Here I remind that media is known to seek and report
controversial news perhaps making a relatively extreme picture of the subjects they report. Hence
my hypothesis is that foreign agents are most often reported in rather controversial contexts.
However most of the public does not see ”foreign agents” themselves so the statements given by
media are in any case the most popular discourse formers.
This chapter has special emphasis on hermeneutics – interpreting the text and discourses on
it. I follow the principles of Foucauldian discourse analysis and focus on describing the material.
However by analyzing them I also codify discourses myself. In previous chapters I have presented
theories on the research subject that can be considered in the presented news. However to avoid
over interpretation I reflect the news material and theory only after first describing the material
alone.