ABSTRACT
Studies on television in Eastern Europe so far have been consistent in understanding television through notions of political control that have reiterated the East–West opposition of the Cold War. Whether political control has been acknowledged, denied or complicated, television in this European geopolitical space has been limited to conceptual structures that have prioritized politics at the expense of attention to the medium itself. This is not to deny that politics have played an important role in Eastern European television, nor to deny that politics do form an important contextual situatedness for understanding television. However, limiting television to political understandings loses sight of the very object of study: the medium of television. Even though scarce, scholarship on television in Eastern Europe has so far fit into a politically reductionist trend that has produced political stories of television, rather than television histories. Emerging scholarship in this area needs therefore to initiate such television histories by attempting to first understand the medium before discussing its relations to politics.
