ABSTRACT
Soviet officials made themselves available in places ranging from the conference halls to the coffee shops and provided a remarkably more interesting press conference than the United States on the results of the Secretary of State Shultz – Foreign Secretary Shevardnadze meeting. The restraints on western journalists are still pronounced and anyone who transgresses the Soviet taboos will meet with a deaf ear to a subsequent visa request, if not immediate expulsion if they are already in the USSR. The western broadcasting organizations, dubbed by a correspondent from the Novosti news agency as the ‘real masters of the black heavens’ at the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, circumvent the communist information stranglehold and do more for the free flow of information from west to east than all the official channels and exchanges sponsored over the past few years under the Helsinki Final Act.
