Dominoes in Dreamland

Michael Hedges November 13, 2009 Follow on Twitter

The fall of the Iron Curtain was a drama acted on many stages. One by one, countries in Central and Eastern Europe reset political scripts all of which were given new airing on radio and television and in newspapers. There were dreams.

Falling dominoes – part of the November 9 celebration in Berlin - are an appropriate metaphor for changes in the media landscape as much as the Iron Curtain was for the East-West divide. Through the decade beginning in the mid-1980’s one domino after another fell. State broadcasting was transformed. Private sector broadcasting arrived. Many of these acts were tragedies.

After parliamentary elections displaced the Communist Party, Lithuania declared itself independent from the Soviet Union in March 1990. Immediately, workers at Lithuanian Radio and Television (LRT) – formerly the media organ of the Central Committee – took up the mantle of independence, reporting on the new openness and the subsequent economic and military blockade by the Soviet Union, which maintained a military garrison in Lithuania. It became symbolic for Lithuanians of changes in their country’s basic institutions.

The independence of shown by the Lithuanian broadcasters – and its critical stance on the former regime and the continued presence of Soviet troops – gained wide popular support On the night of January 13, 1991 Soviet Special Forces moved into Vilnius and deployed at LRT ‘s broadcast center. Thousands of LRT supporters – without the aid of mobile phones or Twitter – gathered at the Vilnius television tower. Soviet troops shelled the tower, opened fire and drove tanks through the assembled demonstrators, killing fourteen and injuring 700. The television signal, which was carrying the events live, went dark at 2 am.

Remarkably, a technician at a remote television studio brought back a signal and began broadcasting as much as possible, including a threatening telephone call from a Soviet military officer. By 4 am a technician at Swedish public broadcasting picked up the signal from Lithuania and the story was heard around the world. Three weeks later Iceland formally recognized Lithuania as independent from the Soviet Union. LRT became a member of the European Broadcasting Union in 1993.

All state broadcasting organizations once part of the former Soviet orbit underwent transformations – to varying degrees – to the vague European public service broadcasting model. The International Radio and Television Organization (OIRT) had been left with mostly East block members when Western State broadcasters formed the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in 1950. By 1993 OIRT ceased to exist, merged with EBU. Broadcasters once under the thumb of State mechanisms benefited from the newly enfranchised independence.

“Central and Eastern European media enjoyed the most unrestrained freedom in the interim period, during and following the collapse of the Communist system,” writes Dr. Karol Jakubowicz in Index on Censorship (see end note). “Once the old methods of media and content control weakened, the opening up of the media was very fast, foreshadowing general transition. With time, as new power elites introduced new (or revived old) forms of control of the media, media independence may have actually fallen behind the general process of democratic consolidation. The situation may actually be deteriorating.”

Dr. Jakubowicz, an authority on media law and public broadcasting, is not alone in the view of a recent return of ‘bad old ways.’ A recent report on media in Central and Eastern Europe by the Open Society Institute Television Across Europe notes “a worrying determination on the part of political elites to reaffirm their influence on broadcasting.” In its annual Press Freedom Index Reporters sans Frontiers (RSF) judged a marked deterioration in European media independence not limited to States formerly in the Soviet orbit.

“A number of possible directions for media policy emerged in post-Communist countries after 1989,” writes Dr. Jakubowicz. “There was the idealistic notion, first advanced by the dissidents, that the old command- and-control media system should be replaced by a participatory one, where everyone has the means freely to join the public debate and the media are managed by, and accountable to, society at large. However, idealism was in short supply, so that was soon rejected. Some traces of this remained in visions of an idealized version of the western media, but involving more elements of citizen participation. There was also talk of directly importing a western media model. After all, Western experts were soon swarming all over us, proffering advice and blueprints of a sanitized, wart-free version of their media. Some Central and Eastern European authors, convinced that the State could never be trusted to respect media freedom, proposed a ‘materialist’ orientation - outright privatization of all media. That did not find favor anywhere. And finally, there is everywhere, though to different degrees, what one might call an ‘atavistic’ orientation identified by the OSI report – a desire to return to tried-and-true methods of media control.”

Public broadcasting organizations in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary found themselves “political footballs” kicked into submission by political parties. Dr. Jakubowicz notes, however, that in recent Polish history the political party seizing control of public broadcaster TVP tends to lose the next election. And, too, legal and financial restructuring of public broadcasting organizations in France and Austria has overtones of media control. Even in the UK, with the BBC as bastion of the public service broadcasting ideal, Conservative Party leaders expecting electoral gains next year have announced plans to scuttle the BBC Trust, which protects the BBC from political influence.

“Perfect media freedom and independence are no more than a dream,” concludes Dr. Jakubowicz, “an ideal everywhere honored more in the breach than in the observance.”

“Back to the Future? Media Independence in Transition Countries,” Karol Jakubowicz, Index on Censorship, Vol.38, Issue 3, 2009. The article is excerpted with the permission of the author.