I. Introduction This master’s thesis represents study of female newspaper and magazine editors in Azerbaijan based on Western and Soviet definitions of journalism with explanation of local national features of this p

Table 3: Soviet system according to Siebert’s Four Theories of Press¹³

Lenin being a materialist argued that since all societies are divided along economical, political and cultural class boundaries, the idea that there is a room in journalism for an absolute truth is completely false. Bourgeois journalists wrote something what was true for bourgeoisie and was not necessarily true for others. Thus to obscure their work to be objective was according to Lenin, an ideological fiction sole purpose of which was to prepare wide social acceptance of dominant bourgeois world view¹⁴. (McNair 2004:73-74) Rutger von Seth in his The language of the press in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia quotes Daniel Tarschys: “The Soviet press did not address the concerns of the broad population since if anything media were “above all a mouthpiece for propagating the regime’s official political standpoints and for expressing the managerial class’s perspectives on the practical implementation of the official policies”. (Tarschys, 1979: 183)

What happened to the values of the Soviet journalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union? According to the Russian scholar Andrei Richter independence and abolishment of state censorship in the 1990s brought the sharp decline of morality among journalists in Russia as well as other ex-Soviet republics. Many assumed that press freedom meant total lack of restraint resulting in, as points out (Zasurski 1998:68), journalism operating outside boundaries of ethical principles. The immorality of press resulted in the sharp decline of readership base that logically crashed circulation numbers and newspaper revenues all over the ex-Soviet republics. (Richter 2007: 286-287)