ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the broader historical arc of media politics in East Central Europe. The historian Philip Longworth has asserted that the current differences in the political circumstances of Eastern Europe and Western Europe resulted in part from fundamental social and political differences that go back as far as the "Dark Ages." His basic argument is that Western Europe experienced an early separation between religious and secular power. The role of newspapers also bears a legacy from the First Republic. The Office of the Council of Ministers published its own daily newspaper, while the various political parties, including the Communist party, published their own papers. Poland's media experience before communism differs substantially from Czechoslovakia's. Where the Nazis simply took over the existing media institutions and structures in the Czech lands, the healthy and relatively independent Polish press had to be eradicated by the Germans.
