Abstract
An examination of Izvestiya's coverage of five key news events2 during the 1996 Russian presidential election campaign from a comparative, stylistic and historical perspective shows how the newspaper deliberately and voluntarily distorted news in order to help Boris Yeltsin defeat his communist opponent, Gennady Zyuganov. In sacrificing notions of journalistic integrity for the sake of a ‘cause’ ‐ the avoidance at all costs of a communist victory ‐ Izvestiya, in co‐operation with the other pro‐Yeltsin media and Boris Yeltsin's re‐election campaign team, had occasion to revert to pre‐1991 Soviet journalistic norms, according to which the end justified the means. Izvestiya, and the other pro‐Yeltsin media, in effect became the thing they said they would become in the event of a victory for Zyuganov, namely creatures of the government.
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