ABSTRACT
John Keane notes that, in debates on the media, the bodies of Tom Paine and other modern protagonists of "liberty of the press". The Communist Party state sought to achieve unity of power and ownership, that is, absolute power subordinating political, economic, military, ideological, police, and judiciary powers and the media to a centralized command system of government it controlled. In some countries of the region, the quite sudden and totally unexpected triumph of neoliberalism and the free market created a clear preference for a media system based on the value of freedom. In Poland and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, the language of liberty of the press is not old, but new—at least as part of the official discourse. A. Rychard argues that the paradigm of transition to market and democracy, applied to the process of transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, can at best be regarded as its ideological rationalization rather than as an accurate description.
