ABSTRACT
At the time the communist systems collapsed, there was no generally shared vision of the future of freedom of the media. There was a widespread agreement that privatization was desirable and that the media should be free, but how to operationalize this in practice and what would freedom of the media look like? Almost everyone had a vague notion of freedom, which extended to freedom of the press. Yet as in some other policy spheres, Western models were of only limited help. Most major newspapers in the West – for example, the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – had all been founded as private concerns. In undertaking to privatize state-owned (in Socialist Yugoslavia, the term was “socially owned”) media, including the official party news organ, the post-communist societies of East Central Europe (ECE) had to chart their own course. Inevitably there were disputes about how to proceed. In Slovenia, for example, it took 3 years before there was enough agreement that a Law on Broadcasting could finally be passed in 1994 – and that, only after the major broadcasting frequencies had already been assigned. Much the same thing happened in Romania. Interestingly but, perhaps, inevitably, there was more discussion about how privatization should be effected than about the shape of and limits to the freedom to be achieved. Who would be free in the media? Would it be the journalists themselves, the editors, the general public, the owners of the media, or, perhaps, politicians, who would find a way to exert their influence and/or control over the press and broadcasting stations? Ultimately, the shape adopted by the media was determined, to a great extent, by money, whether by the purchase of the media by interested foreign or domestic actors or by the use of state advertising to keep otherwise insolvent media outlets afloat. The result, thus, is a mediascape that has less in common with the mediascape of the United States or Western Europe than some locals might have hoped for. 1
