Media Transformations in the Post-communist World: Eastern Europe's Tortured Path to Change 9780739174944, 9780739174951

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Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World

Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World Eastern Europe’s Tortured Path to Change Edited by Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Media transformations in the post-communist world : Eastern Europe’s tortured path to change / edited by Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7391-7494-4 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-7495-1 1. Mass media—Social aspects—Europe, Eastern. 2. Mass media—Europe, Eastern. 3. Mass media policy—Europe, Eastern. 4. Social change—Europe, Eastern. 5. Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. I. Gross, Peter, 1949– II. Jakubowicz, Karol. HN380.7.A8M43 2012 302.23—dc23 2012029658

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Preface 1

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vii The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune. When, How, and for What Purpose Is Media Transition and Transformation Undertaken (and Completed) in Central and Eastern Europe? Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz “Comparing Media Systems” between Eastern and Western Europe Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

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Freedom without Impartiality. The Vicious Circle of Media Capture Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

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From Political Propaganda to Political Marketing. Changing Patterns of Political Communication in Central and Eastern Europe Péter Bajomi-Lázár

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Media and the Birth of the Post-Communist Consumer Nadia Kaneva and Elza Ibroscheva

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The Intersection of Two Revolutions: The Role of New Media in the Development of Post-Socialist Europe in the First Twenty Years John Parrish-Sprowl

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Digital (R)evolutions? Internet, New Media and Informed Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe Inka Salovaara-Moring

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Freedom of Mass Information in the Post-Soviet Countries: Two Models of Regulation Andrei Richter

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Russian Media and Democracy Hedwig de Smaele

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Entertaining the People, Serving the Elites: Slovak Mass Media since 1989 Owen V. Johnson The Paradox of Journalistic Elites in Post-Communist Romania: From Defenders of Freedom of Expression to the Corrupted Moguls Mihai Coman

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Two Decades of Free Media in the Czech Republic: So What? Remarks on the Discourse of Post-1989 Media Transformation Jan Jirák and Barbara Köpplová

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“Islands in the Stream”: Reflections on Media Development in Belarus Oleg Manaev, Natalie Manaeva, and Dzmitry Yuran

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Preface Work on this publishing project dealing with the mass media’s transition and transformation in Central and Eastern Europe began, in a sense, at the end of 1989 when the final spasms of the communist systems in the region gave rise to the most optimistic and idealistic expectations for quick democratization of both political and media systems. Positive changes did indeed occur and most countries in the region are now far more open, offering freedoms and liberties, rights and opportunities the previous sociopolitical and economic systems, by their very nature and design, denied their citizens. Yet, the transformations of and in all societal institutions, including the mass media, have turned out to be slower than expected, uncertain, and unsatisfying to many when measured against the admittedly ambiguous and overly Panglossian expectations. A plethora of descriptive and analytical works dealing with various aspects of mass media evolutions in Eastern Europe have appeared since 1990. Our intentions here are to offer readers something different by giving our contributing authors an opportunity to take a step back and examine the mass media’s evolution in the region from a more holistic perspective. It is to be hoped that their chapters will contribute to answering what we consider the essential questions: Is post-Communist transition and transformation over? When can it be considered to be over? Each author contributes to answering these questions: some by offering theoretical overviews, others general oriented overviews, and still others country-specific studies. According to a popular phrase in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, no one had previously tried to turn an omelet back into the original eggs (i.e., transform a Communist into a democratic system), so the process was bound to be complex and the result uncertain. And yet, over nearly half a century we have seen three somewhat similar processes unfold: first in some of the European Mediterranean countries after the mid–1970s, then in post– Communist countries after 1989, and most recently in some Arab countries early in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The overarching conclusion from this collection of works is that democratic political change offers an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of successful corresponding change in the media system. How that opportunity is used depends on a multitude of factors specific to each country. Readers are invited to use this book to draw parallels and identify differences between the former two processes. Students of, and participants in, the “Arab Spring” can draw lessons for themselves on how to how to guide, what pitfalls to avoid, and what to expect from the media transformation process in their own countries. Judging from what Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini have to say in their “Comparing Media Systems” about the “polarized pluralist” (Mediterranean) media system, the process of change in that region is still unfolding. This book vii

makes it clear that the same is certainly true of Central and Eastern European countries. It has only just begun in “Arab Spring” countries. We hope this book will encourage informed comparative studies of this nature. For media scholars and those in related disciplines, the message of this collection is the certainty that the study of the mass media will continue to be central to understanding the nature and workings of democracy in the long-suffering nations of Central and Eastern Europe (and elsewhere). Future media scholars will, we hope, take what we offer here as a starting point for their research. We thank all authors for their many contributions to our understanding of Central and Eastern European mass media and specifically to this book of collected works. We also thank Dzmitry Yuran for formatting the book and readying it for printing, Lisa Gary for making corrections, Vera Gross for assembling the Index, and the editors at Lexington Books, Lenore Lautigar, Stephanie Brooks, Johnnie Simpson and Laura Grzybowski, for their able assistance in bringing this project to fruition. Peter Gross (United States) and Karol Jakubowicz (Poland), Editors 24 March 2012

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The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune. When, How, and for What Purpose Is Media Transition and Transformation Undertaken (and Completed) in Central and Eastern Europe? Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz ‘The past is never dead, it’s not even past.’ William Faulkner The predominant view among media scholars is that Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and their media systems have had to negotiate two major, separate but interrelated and society-specific stages in the last twenty years: transition and transformation. We will return to the respective meanings of these terms below, but let us immediately be clear that as far as the media system is concerned, ‘transition’ refers to the breakthrough moment when the old political and media systems collapsed, taking with them old legal and institutional methods of controlling the media. This is transition away from the Communist media system. ‘Transformation’ is the next stage. It could otherwise be called transition to another type of media system. ‘Transformation’ should properly be defined, in a neutral way, 1

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as evolution from one stable state of the media system to another, regardless of what that other state is like. Indeed, the extensive variety of situations that media transformation has produced in post-Communist countries dictates caution in imposing any preconceived, ideal end results on the process. Nevertheless, it is also true that in most former Communist countries both transition and transformation have theoretically been informed by, and were meant ultimately to create, a mass media system serving to support and further democracy. Furthermore, in a teleological vision of many Western observers, transition and transformation were to bring the mass media and journalism in CEE countries into a state of Gleichschaltung with those of their Western brethren, and help achieve the same in the sociopolitical and economic realms. And we know today, of course, that each of the terms and concepts used in summing up the goals of transition and transformation has been subject to different and conflicting interpretations. Those who believed in the speedy realization of the teleological vision outlined above proved to be as naive as those CEE dissidents whose ideas about the shape of the post-Communist social and media order failed to survive a collision with reality. With the passage of more than two decades since the beginning of the process, unraveling what those goals were and what went into formulating them (including the unrealistic idealism of dissidents, idealized visions of Western media, practically no knowledge of how market forces affect the media system, etc.) is proving to be a difficult task. We also know that in very many cases these goals were formulated by some political leaders as a way of paying lip service to a particular politically correct vision of transformation, certain to please public opinion at home, as well as international organizations and donors, while their real goals were quite different. This resulted in developments that could be called ‘transitioning backwards,’ or regarded as a display of what has been termed an ‘atavistic’ media policy orientation, serving to maintain or re-impose strict controls on the media. At the time of writing in October 2010, this tendency seems to have made itself evident in Hungary. Based on a legal review of new Hungarian media legislation (Jakubowicz, 2010), Dunja Mijatović, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, has said that ‘the media package is cause for very serious concern. If left unchanged, it would seriously restrict media pluralism, curb the independence of the press, abolish the autonomy of public-service media and impose a chilling effect on freedom of expression and public debate, all essential for democracy.’ And finally, as people in post-Communist countries found out more about Western media systems, they asked themselves whether their own media should be as good as they themselves had imagined the media in the established democracies to be, or as bad as they really may be sometimes. Thus, media transformation is proving to be a long and complex process, and its goals—if any were ever clearly defined—are proving more and more difficult to pin down. In any case, it is only natural that people in CEE countries, especially those who have joined the European Union, are tired of the status of ‘transition coun-

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tries’ and want to regard the process of transition/transformation as ‘over’ and their countries and societies to be recognized as having ‘arrived,’ being ‘grown up’ and ‘normal.’ Hence this book, designed to assess the progress (or lack thereof) that has been achieved since the collapse of the Communist system, and this introductory essay, seeking to consider three deceptively simple, but in fact immensely complex questions: What drives transition and ensures its success? When can it be regarded as having been completed? What drives transformation (generally and in the media and journalism in particular) and ensures its success? Is it (can it ever be) over? Does globalization affect the transition and transformation phases in CEE? As we consider these questions, we must, of course, remember that there was no model for the kind of transition and transformation on which the region embarked. Rather, there were as many models (despite the similarity of some of their features) as there are societies concerned. Moreover, they produced very different outcomes. Students of CEE accept that three kinds of political systems have germinated in the sociopolitical hothouse of post-Communism: democratic, autocratic and intermediate. None of the three political systems fits a pure definition of itself. Except perhaps for the democratic systems, whose construction has required considerable effort, the others were not created after 1989 but rather have emerged, as indeed have their economic systems, from the matrix of pre-Communist and Communist sociopolitical, economic, and cultural/psychological elements, constituting to differing degrees a passé qui ne passe pas. The same can be said of the media as an institution and journalism in each CEE country. They have not been deliberately designed and created fully in line with any blueprints, despite Western efforts and illusions, or perhaps more accurately put, despite them. They have emerged in the context of the national history, culture, sociopolitical and economic effects of the pre-World War II and Communist eras, and the realities of post-1989. This has meant challenges to the contemporary transition and transformation in which the CEE media and their journalism are still engaged. This makes our task here all the more difficult and prevents the formulation of conclusions applying equally to all countries in the region. Post-Communist transition/transformation is sometimes regarded as a test of the verity of Max Weber’s (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2009) notion that there is universality in the significance and value of cultural phenomena developed (but adhered to in unequal measure) by Western civilization, i.e., democracy, open markets and free trade, individual freedoms, civil and human rights, freedom of speech and of the press. This test is particularly important to CEE, because the nations making up the region consider themselves (and indeed are) a part of Europe (which, for all the arrogance of the European Union that delights in calling itself ‘Europe,’ is a much larger, historically and culturally shaped entity). We could also say that they are a test of Francis Fuku-

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yama’s (The End of History and the Last Man, 2006) concept of the ‘end of history,’ understood as the global triumph of political and economic liberalism. Not that we cannot and should not support liberalism. It is, after all, the only ‘ideology’ that offers flexibility and tolerance, as Vladimir Tismaneanu (1998) writes: Ideologies are all-embracing and all-explanatory: they refuse dialogue, questioning, doubt. In this respect liberalism is an ideology only in name: with its incrementalism and skepticism regarding any ultimate solutions to human problems, it lacks the soteriological, apocalyptic power of radical visions of change.

The reality is that, at least thus far, liberal democracy and all its associated notions and concepts have not been unequivocally and fully successful in postCommunist countries. Neither autocratic, nor intermediate post-Communist political systems seem eager to model themselves on the visions of society developed by Weber and Fukuyama. And the democratic systems themselves have a long way to go yet before they have fully embraced these visions, which can also be said of many Western ‘established democracies.’ Thus, the next question is: is something ‘wrong’ with these visions, given that their impact is varied and far from fully successful? Or is something ‘wrong’ with these post-Communist societies that have not proved receptive to this impact? Examination of the process of transition and transformation should bring us closer to answering these questions.

Transition As used here, ‘transition’ refers to the move away, in the process of collapse or overthrow of the Communist system (violent or otherwise), from a particular status quo, such as the Communist political and media system and its journalism that existed in CEE countries for over four decades (or more, as in the case of Russia). The key importance of this process springs from the fact that its essence and nature are the arbiters of what can be expected in the subsequent transformation processes. Many factors shaped the process of transition, its course and effects. Here we will concentrate on just a few of those that mattered most in setting the stage for democratic development, media change and journalism development. In most general terms, and simplifying things greatly, we could distinguish two kinds of transitions in CEE countries: genuine transitions, and copycat transitions (or faux transitions such as the ones found in the Central Asian republics). Genuine transitions happened in countries with earlier histories of political conflicts, liberalization attempts and oppositional activities, stronger attempts at pre-Communist democratization, and closer ties to democratic countries. Those

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were countries where political struggle and reforms engendered a learning process on the level of elites and society. There was, accordingly, sufficiently developed counter-elite capable of taking advantage of favorable domestic and external circumstances to bring about the collapse of the system and take the country over. Moreover, there was also sufficient awareness on the part of the then power elite that the system had become untenable. While transition was usually a bottom-up process, some top-down elements can also be detected. The prime example, of course, is Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika campaigns, involving some degree of media liberalization—though never intended to destroy the Communist system—that did ultimately lead to the collapse of the system in the Soviet Union. This also occurred in other countries where the Communist power elite was unwillingly forced to contribute to engineering the process of change, via Round Table conferences and other means. Some scholars interpret such Communist elite-led changes as a method for attempting to ensure elite continuity after the demise of the Communist system. Copycat transitions took place in the more autocratic Communist countries where brutal persecution prevented the growth of a counter-elite capable of leading the struggle against the system, or indeed of any dissident groups of any significance. In those countries, Communist governments, suddenly deprived of external support from Russia, were overthrown largely by other factions within the Communist elite, emboldened by the collapse of the system elsewhere and often playing the nationalist card. In the genuine-transition countries, the process—in line with path dependence and ‘initial conditions’ approaches to transition—ultimately facilitated faster transition to democracy, better quality of democratic institutions, and more extensive liberties and freedoms. In the copycat-transition countries, there was more of a likelihood of the development of intermediate and autocratic political regimes. Many of these countries could be described as being ‘stuck in the stage of inter-regime competition’ (Bunce, 1999, 242), unable to develop a clear new political identity. What this means, in fact, is that in such countries transition is not really finished; or we can contend that in these instances the transition has more than one stage and such countries are only in the first phase. As for the media, ‘transition’ implies in the first instance the dismantling of the old system of control over the media. In this sense, transition could, in favorable circumstances, be said to have occurred within hours of the end of the Communist regimes in the CEE. In Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, for example, some will argue that this occurred to a considerable extent even before 1989. In the general view of journalists from the region, the time immediately after transition was the only time when they felt really free: the old controls were no longer effective (even if in Poland, for example, the censors were kept on the payroll for many more months: they had absolutely nothing to do, as the system of censorship was effectively dead, but the institution of censorship was not formally closed down for some time) and the new ones had not yet been put into place (see Alina Mungiu-Pippidi in chapter 3 of this volume for an explanation on how the new ones work). Transition also meant the ap-

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pearance of many new newspapers and, with time, of private radio and television stations. Journalism’s transition from Communist styles was equally as quick, but perhaps not as complete as that of the media system, certainly among most of the old Communist journalists who continued to report and write in the post-Communist media. In any case, ‘transition’ was the easy part only once the fate of the Communist system itself was sealed, of course. All this leads to a number of general conclusions. First, for transition to be regarded as such, it must involve qualitative change, in this instance of political, judicial and media systems, sufficiently profound to go beyond the point of no return. Earlier we opted for a value-neutral definition of change, but of course, as a totalitarian or authoritarian system evolves, the only way is up: towards some degree of democratization. Change in the degree or shape of totalitarianism or authoritarianism cannot count as qualitative change. Only evolution of the system that significantly reduces the discretionary power of the political elite and introduces a measure of freedom of expression and of the media can qualify as such. Hallin and Mancini raise the matter of the normative framework of transformation (see chapter 2 and below in this introduction). Thus, the main criteria are qualitative change and its irreversibility (which can, of course, be known only in hindsight). Where these criteria are not met, we may have to do with partial transition, potentially producing an inconclusive result in terms of political or indeed media change, or with reversion to something like the original state of affairs. In chapter 8, Andrei Richter offers a valuable comparison of media regulation in post-Soviet countries, representing both successful and failed transition. As the situation in post-Communist countries is quite dynamic, we might also want to think of many of the countries in question as either featuring different political sequencing or as being at different stages of a democratization dynamic and thus occupying different locations on a continuum (Bunce, 1999), with the possibility of, as the case may be, moving ‘forward’ and ‘backsliding,’ ‘Colour revolutions’ are evidence that transition may reach a certain stage, remain in suspension for a considerable time, and then move forward, or reach completion, or even revert to the previous situation, which, at the time of writing, is what appears to be happening in Ukraine, years after it began. Russia is an example that the same country may at different times experience both ‘moving forward’ and ‘backsliding.’ After the chaotic democratization of the Yeltsin years, it reverted to Putin’s ‘sovereign democracy’ with its own ways of dealing with the media (see de Smaele’s chapter 9). When the country’s leaders finally realize that modernization and an opening to the West are necessary to put the country on a path of development, we may perhaps see a liberalization of the system. Transition was also the time when thousands of new journalists entered the profession. They were quite eager to practice a new journalism, many ready to imitate Western styles that they hardly knew or fully understood, and others who considered journalism simply an avenue for self-expression, or indeed for politi-

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cal advocacy. This last attitude was typical, but not exclusive, of people who had written for underground or samizdat media and paraphrased von Clausewitz’s maxim into ‘Journalism is a continuation of politics using other means.’ In that sense, they did not differ fundamentally from the kind of journalism that used to be practiced under the Communist system. Consequently, those who took up journalism had a supermarket of journalistic styles and definitions of the craft/profession available from which to choose, and the new shoppers made choices related to their personal ambitions for taking up the craft, political, ideological and economic goals, or simply the availability of another way of earning a living, one that was now divorced from the control of just one political party, the Communist one. The question of professionalization remained and remains unresolved, not only in the CEE nations but all across the world, including in the United States, where the notion of professionalism that held sway since the 1930s has now been watered down to suit the political inclinations of journalists, editors and owners alike, in a classic case of, in this case, partial or quasi ‘transitioning backwards.’

Transformation It could be said that all countries and societies are constantly undergoing change and transformation. True, but of course in the present context ‘transformation’ means the immensely complex process of reshaping post-Communist societies in practically all their aspects: ideological, economic, legal, institutional, cultural, etc. As already stated, prospects for real transformation were largely determined by the nature and success, or failure of transition. In most general terms, we could identify four main ideational wellsprings for the direction in which the general process of transformation leads: 1. One was the hope, cherished by some dissidents, that it would be possible to build a new system comprising ‘the best of’ both communism and capitalism; 2. Another was the concept of ‘rejoining Europe’ or ‘catching up’ with the West in general and with Western Europe in particular; 3. The third were the hopes of holdovers from the old regime, and of the new leaders of failed-transition countries, that the trappings of democracy could be perverted and used to retain many elements of the old autocratic systems; 4. And finally, the fourth was the classic concept of ‘liberalism,’ Jeffersonian liberalism in the American formulation, with an emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities. On the economic side, this quickly deteriorated into ‘wild capitalism’ in some CEE countries; and on the political side into a raw backalley fight instead of a bona fide contest for power, which itself was tied to the quest for economic benefits. This turn to the most negative exemplifications of liberalism can be blamed squarely on the absence of legal restraints, sociopolitical immaturity and corruption, limited and ineffective civil society, and an

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overall undemocratic culture and ethos that are shared by both elites and the public at-large. As already mentioned, the dissidents’ ideas were brushed aside immediately after transition. In a number of CIS countries, as well as in some Balkan ones (e.g., Croatia or Serbia) and in some Central European states (e.g., Slovakia), autocratic tendencies proved triumphant, though in some cases only temporarily so. All the remaining countries were left with the second option, for two main reasons: (1) neither the leaders nor the general population wanted any new systemic or economic ‘experiments,’ and so opted for ‘tried and true’ Western solutions, without necessarily fully understanding them or being able to foresee all the consequences of this choice, and (2) whichever international organization CEE countries wanted to join made conformity with ‘Western’ or ‘European’ standards, at least in legal and institutional terms, if not necessarily in the daily practice in the media, a condition of admission. Adoption of this perspective makes the job of assessing whether transformation has successfully happened and is ‘over’ a little easier from one point of view: post-Communist countries with intermediate and autocratic political regimes do not even enter the picture in this context. Where not even transition is successful and completed, consideration of transformation in these terms would be pointless (e.g., the nations of Central Asia). This is not to say that the power establishments of the new democratic states are above seeking to take advantage of the mechanisms of public life to gain as much arbitrary power—over the media, and in general—as possible. A more serious attempt to answer the questions we posed above must, of course, immediately raise the dilemma of what criteria to apply in assessing media transformation. Several interrelated possibilities exist, including: 1. Achievement of the objectives originally set for the process by its leaders, i.e., the new power establishment; 2. Conformity with ‘European’ or ‘Western’ standards; 3. Creation of a stable new media system, whatever its nature. The first criterion is difficult to apply for two reasons. First, it is the common complaint of CEE media scholars everywhere that the new postCommunist governments never actually formulated a full-fledged media policy and that in many countries the officially avowed principle of freedom of speech and of the media has been honored more in the breach than in the observance. Of course, general directions of systemic media policy, such as privatization of the print media and the establishment of a dual broadcasting system, combining public and commercial stations, have been pursued; but this hardly adds up to a full set of criteria by which to judge the progress of transformation. As concerns the second set of criteria, we need to ask, ‘which “European” or “Western” standards?’ Yes, there are general and somewhat idealistic ‘European standards,’ formulated by the Council of Europe, as regards media systems fully respecting and implementing freedom of expression, for instance, but it would be difficult to find a single Western European country whose media system is fully in line with them. The European Union does make conformity with

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Council of Europe standards a condition of admission, but is content with the pro forma transplantation of Western media laws, institutions and regulations and turns a blind eye to the non-Western nature of the laws’ applications, the non-Western functioning of the media and journalism practices. If we go beyond Council of Europe standards, and say that in general terms, CEE media and journalism are to become more like their Western European counterparts, then we need to ask: (a) which one of the many examples are they to emulate, and (b) why do we assume that any one of the many types of Western European media and of journalism is wholly adequate for a true democracy? Each Western European society has its own distinctive media system, some of them with shared elements, others not, and each will see the role of the media and their journalism in a slightly different light. Consequently, both the practice of journalism and the sociocultural and legal parameters differ from one country to the next. In any case, socially and technologically driven change in their media systems is so fast that trying to emulate them would be like trying to aim at a panoply of moveable targets. In chapter 7, Inka Salovaara-Moring shows how CEE media systems are assimilating and adjusting to the new technologies, even—we may add—as they seek to grapple with many unresolved issues from the past. What this means is that as regards media systems and traditions of journalism, there is no universal Western ‘template’ to which post-Communist media systems can be compared to see how advanced in their transformation they are. In their chapter, Dan Hallin and Paolo Mancini actually challenge the normative approach of judging whether CEE media do or do not ‘live up’ to ‘Western’ models is correct, as it often leads away from understanding Eastern European media systems in terms of their own logics, functions and patterns of development. They may be right, but it is also true that democratic CEE media systems are not developing in a void and are not, each one of them, an island unto itself and thus normative standards must be set up in order to enable any judgments as to whether progress is or is not made. It may be that each nation, given its own uniqueness, should have its own standards. But then again, they also share many features with those of other democratic countries, springing partly from similar axiological underpinnings, and also from a general similarity of political and economic factors that shape them, and are indeed required of them if they are to fulfill their roles as democracy-supporting institutions. Hallin and Mancini themselves accept that their analysis of media systems can be extended to CEE countries and that something like a ‘Mediterranean’ model, in their view, more along the lines of Iberian and Greek media systems, rather than of the Italian one, has emerged in the region. Furthermore, they lay heavy emphasis on various elements of the legacy inherited by former Communist societies and their media systems. That is certainly worth emphasizing. To paraphrase a concept they use, the media display ‘systemic parallelism’ in the sense that they are shaped by the socio-political and cultural features of the countries in which they operate, including notably the

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level of actual or potential societal conflict and the degree of democratic consolidation. It is important to note in this context that CEE countries missed out on Western European social-political, economic, cultural and industrial developments of the nineteenth century and thus are still burdened by the effects the varied feudal and autocratic regimes and their institutions had upon human character, psyche, thought, and action, to paraphrase the Marquis de Custine’s (La Russie en 1839, 2002 edition; first published in 1843) prescient meditation on Tsarist Russia in that same century. Thus formed (or deformed) did CEE suffer through one of the most devastating ignis fatuus of the twentieth century, which ‘left a heritage of ruin, not only in the economy, the ecology, health, politics, but also—and above all—in the minds and psyches of its citizens,’ as Robert Conquest (Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton, 2000, 188) so accurately summarized the legacy. Some, like François Furet (‘Preface,’ Le passé d’une illusion: essai sur l’idee Communiste au XXe siecle, 1995) argued that this legacy continued to retard sociopolitical, economic, and cultural development, because the Communist era also involved ‘a psychological investment, somewhat like a religious faith even though its object was historical.’ With such a historical legacy, transformation cannot be ‘over’ any time soon. Western ‘transitologists’ simply erred in their assumption that the postCommunist process meant a quick progression to a free mass media and journalism, and a gradual progression to a liberal democracy and a free market, aided in part by the former. We also recognize that nothing workable has yet replaced this vision. Hallin and Mancini point out that CEE countries most closely resemble other ‘third-wave’ democracies. This may be the reason why CEE societies, their sociopolitical and economic systems, and overall cultures are not yet really properly equipped to defend a ‘good’ media system and ‘good’ journalism, given (a) the present ownership and its reasons for having media outlets (b) the political influences, (c) the economic pressures, (d) the professional culture, and (e) the general culture. As these societies evolve in the process of democratic consolidation, these circumstances may change. And what this means is that ‘transformation’ is far from finished. This brings us to the third set of criteria: creation of a stable new media system, whatever its nature. In this instance, the argument could be made that the Putin era in Russia has stabilized the media system but in a retrograde fashion. The easy answer could be that transformation has simply not lasted long enough in Eastern Europe to have already produced such a stable situation. According to Harry Eckstein (2001), ‘A plan to democratize fully should probably cover some twenty-five years—more or less, depending on local conditions.’ However, Ralf Dahrendorf (1991) believes that it can take the better part of sixty years in post-Communist countries (and elsewhere) to lay the ‘social foundations . . . which transform the constitution and the economy from fair-weather into all-weather institutions which can withstand the storms generated within and without.’ At the time of writing, we are not even twenty-five years away

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from the beginning of the democratization process, to say nothing of sixty years. So, everything may still change: there may be both ‘backsliding’ and ‘moving forward,’ and the media are always the first to be affected by and to exemplify such change, for good or for bad. To probe a little deeper, media systems in democratic CEE countries operate on at least two levels: that of democratic theory, and that of not-alwaysdemocratic practice. Practice that departs from the normative ideal results from a variety of factors: official policy seeking to use the media for its purposes (see Mungiu-Pippidi and Péter Bajomi-Lázár in this volume); predominance of the media owners’ business and commercial objectives over general democratic ones (see chapters by Jan Jirák and Barbara Köpplová and Mihai Coman) and so on. Some of the harm inflicted by these tendencies may already be beyond repair. Other aspects may still be waiting for the process of ‘ontogenesis’ to run its course. Just as Western ‘transitologists’ erred in assuming that ‘transition’ would quickly achieve a preconceived result, i.e., liberal democracy and market economy, so both they and policymakers in CEE countries were mistaken in assuming that it is enough to transplant a law or institution copied on Western patterns for it to operate properly. In reality, such an act of transplantation only launches a process that, in propitious circumstances, will retrace the developments that ultimately led to its successful operation in the country of origin. CEE countries must therefore repeat—albeit probably in an accelerated form— the experience as well as all the mistakes that Western European countries went through before they were able to achieve something close to the desired results as concerns the shape and operation of the media system. It is almost like the process of ontogenesis in biology—and ontogenesis takes a long time, more on the scale of Dahrendorf than Eckstein. Again, this indicates the precarious stability of the new media order. In addition to the chapters already mentioned, Nadia Kaneva and Elza Ibroscheva focus on the media ‘consumer’ in Bulgaria in chapter 5; John Parrish-Sprowl’s chapter 6 takes us through the role of new media in the region under consideration; Owen Johnson in chapter 10 examines the dubious contributions of the Slovak mass media; and Oleg Manaev, Natalie Manaeva and Dzmitry Yuran outline the Belarus mass media system’s ‘transitioning backwards’ in chapter 13.

Conclusion We lack a framework of reference and a set of criteria by which to assess whether transformation is ‘over’ or not. At a superficial level, i.e., in legal, institutional and market terms, media systems in democratic CEE countries are, formally speaking, close enough to those in Western Europe to convince those who want to be convinced that media transformation is ‘over.’ However, when one looks a little closer, it becomes obvious that the general and professional

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cultures in the region, and many of these laws and institutions are sometimes empty shells, far from capable of performing their leadership and supporting functions properly. It has been said that due to their histories, including the recent forty to eighty years of Communist rule, post-Communist societies now face a policy overload, in that they must simultaneously resolve contemporary as well as four centuries’ worth of business their histories prevented them from dealing with at the right time: from seventeenth-century issues of freedom of speech to twenty-first-century issues of the Information Society, and everything in between. That is the price a society pays for late development and late democratization. If so, then transformation has a long way to go yet. Thus, we offer this collected volume as an aid to understanding media systems and forms of journalism that are but a way station to a future obscured by the unknown vicissitudes that may befall them and by the insufficiently understood effects of a past that will not die for a long time, if ever. And let this prediction serve as an explanation for the title of this introduction, taken from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. CEE societies have every reason to point out that they have had to suffer ‘outrageous fortune’ for centuries on end. Now they have won an opportunity to free themselves from it. A great deal depends on how they use this opportunity.

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References Bunce, Valerie (1999) Lessons of the First Postsocialist Decade. East European Politics and Societies 13(2): 236-243. Dahrendorf, Ralf (1991) Rozważania nad rewolucją w Europie. Warszawa: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza. Eckstein, Harry (2001), Lessons for the “Third Wave” from the First: An Essay on Democratization, www.democ.uci.edu/publications/papersseriespre2001/lessons.htm. Jakubowicz, Karol (2010) ‘Analysis and Assessment of a Package of Hungarian Legislation and Draft Legislation on Media and Telecommunications.’ Vienna: OSCE, http://www.osce.org/documents/rfm/2010/09/45942_en.pdf Tismaneanu, Vladimir (1998), Fantasies of Salvation. Democracy, nationalism, and myth in Post-Communist Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 28.

Chapter 2

“Comparing Media Systems” between Eastern and Western Europe Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini Do we need a new version of Comparing Media Systems to observe media and politics in Eastern Europe? Or can the framework of our analysis of eighteen media systems of Western Europe and North America be extended to cover the emerging systems of what is now a wider European Community? We have stressed that the analysis we put forward in Comparing Media Systems is not intended as a universal framework; it is based on the concrete historical experience of a particular set of nations, and any attempt to extend the analysis beyond that set of cases is likely to require significant modification of the conceptual framework. The analysis is probably more easily transferable to Eastern Europe than to almost any other part of the world, aside from Australia and New Zealand. Much historical experience, after all, is shared between Eastern and Western Europe. Austria-Hungary was an integral part of the European state system; parts of Poland were once integrated into Prussia: the boundary between Eastern and Western Europe far is from natural or absolute. And today, of course, Eastern European media systems are powerfully shaped by European Community policy frameworks and European media markets. Nevertheless, we think the interpretive framework we propose in Comparing Media Systems would have to change in important ways to be adequate to the study media and politics in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

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Methodological Caveats We will try to outline in this chapter some of the ways in which we think the framework of our analysis does apply to Eastern Europe, and also some of the reasons we think Eastern Europe is different from the three groups of countries on which our analysis was based. We want to stress at the outset, however, that the ideas we present here are very tentative. Neither of us has done extensive research on Eastern European media, nor do we read any of the Eastern European languages. Beyond our personal limitations, moreover, it seems to us that the research literatures on Eastern European media systems are still in the process of emergence. Certainly in some sense there has been an abundance of writing on Eastern European media since the collapse of the Communist system. The change was so dramatic and, to a large extent, unexpected, the novelty was so relevant for the new world landscape that many scholars from West and East jumped to understand what was going on. A large part of this literature comes from Western scholars studying Eastern Europe, and we have the impression that the “autochthonous” literature is still limited, if beginning to grow—obviously all the more so to those like us who are confined to what has been published in English. For decades, of course, under the Communist system, there was little significant social science research on the mass media, and there is still an enormous gap of historical knowledge about the nature of media systems under Communism. Even if some works have been recently published that try to fill the vacuum, there is not a consolidated corpus of research on the relationship between mass media and politics in the Communist era. In Comparing Media Systems we lament the way Four Theories of the Press eclipsed the analysis of empirical differences among Western media systems. In a similar fashion, we think the one-dimensional analysis of the Communist media in terms of the suppression of press freedom by Party control is surely too simplistic a basis to understand the historical legacy of that era. There is still little empirical research about mass media professionalization in the Communist era, about reporters’ working routines and self-perceptions, about how journalists interacted with officials and citizens, and so on. With the fall of Communism, media scholars in much of the region have had to build scholarly institutions more or less from the ground up, just as journalists and media managers have had to do with media institutions, and it is not surprising that this has not happened overnight. As Karol Jakubowicz himself recognizes, “The peoples of the region did not really know enough about themselves” (Jakubowicz, 2007, p. IX). The scarcity of media research in and about Eastern Europe is evidenced by the fact that so many of the works on these countries are edited volumes and, as everybody knows, edited volumes rarely

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contain sustained original research, full documentation about particular cases, or unifying theoretical frameworks. Most of the time they are full of interesting interpretive suggestions and theories that nevertheless are not supported by field studies. The fact that several of these books are edited together by a Western and Eastern scholar reinforces the idea that there has been an effort to jump-start research in the region through a joint effort by scholars coming from different experiences—again similar to what has often happened with the media themselves (Paletz, Jakubowicz and Novosel, 1995; Bajomi and Hegedus, 2001; Paletz and Jakubowicz, 2003). This has been useful in many ways, certainly, but has also had costs. Much of the early work by Western scholars, particularly the work that appeared in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, is inevitably heavily dependent on conceptual tools derived from Western models. And much of the scholarship by both Western and Eastern European writers seems to us marked by the same kind of normative bias we criticize in Comparing Media Systems, that is, it is heavily focused on the “failure” of Eastern European media to live up to a normative ideal of “Western style fact-based journalism” (Gross, 2002, 93), a preoccupation which, in our view, too often leads away from understanding Eastern European media systems in terms of their own logics, functions and patterns of development. Another limitation of the existing literature arises from the simple fact that democratic media systems in Eastern Europe are so new, and the pace of change has been so rapid. Researchers have been studying a rapidly evolving reality in which a trend that seems powerful at one moment—a proliferation of party newspapers in the 1990s, for example—may seem irrelevant a few years later. Books that came out in the early 2000s, based essentially on the first decade of democratic media in Eastern Europe, may seem obsolete by the time the second decade comes to a close—or perhaps not; it is not clear we understand the logic of the process of development well enough to know. Finally, another challenge to theorizing about media in Eastern Europe is the diversity of cases, and the ambiguity about what cases should be encompassed in the analysis. One of the things we wanted to do in Comparing Media Systems was to explode the idea that there was a single “Western” model of media system development, showing instead that a number of distinct models had developed within Western Europe and North America. The same is obviously true of Eastern Europe, as many scholars have noted, and even more true if we try to extend the boundaries of the analysis to the former Soviet Union—which would certainly push us well beyond the bounds of the kind of “most similar systems” approach we follow in our book. Jakubowicz, just to give one example, distinguishes Competitive Democracies, Concentrated Regimes, War-torn Regimes and Non-Competitive Regimes among the countries he discusses. Obviously Comparing Media Systems dealt only with competitive democracies. Here we will confine our analysis more or less exclusively to the Central European countries that have become members of the EU, and even within this group we will not be able to deal with the diversity of cases in any serious way.

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If these paragraphs seem like a sort of apology, well, that is just what they are. We have had many discussions over the last few years with colleagues from Eastern Europe,1 and we have tried to catch up on the existing literature in English as well as we could, but we have to acknowledge that what we know about Eastern European media is frankly superficial and observations we make here should be taken as very tentative.

“Mediterraneanization” and the Relevance of the “Polarized Pluralist Model” Scholars working on Eastern European media systems have for some time been writing about the obvious parallels between Eastern and Southern Europe, and when our book came out, many were quick to endorse the suggestion we make briefly near the end of our book, that our analysis of what we call the “Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model” would have the most relevance to the understanding of Eastern European media, compared with our other two models (Splichal, 1996; Jakubowicz 2007, 297; Dobek-Ostrowska, 2011; Wyka, 2008). As we have observed the reception of our book by media scholars around the world, we have become aware that our subtitle, “Three Models of Media and Politics,” has encouraged a particular way of using our analysis that we consider very problematic: it has encouraged scholars in different parts of the world to try to label their own cases according to our three models. Our three models, however, as we note at the beginning of this chapter, were intended to summarize and to contrast distinct patterns of historical development we had observed in particular groups of cases among those we had studied. We worry that attempts to fit other cases into these models may limit rather than encourage the development of new theory as scholars study other parts of the world (Hallin and Mancini, in press). Nevertheless, as we read the literature on Eastern European media systems, we run across so many points of similarity between Eastern European and Southern European patterns that it makes sense to begin with that comparison. When, for example, Coman (2004) describes journalism in Romania as historically “an activity placed closer to the arts and political action and less . . . an economic or civic activity”; when Hrvatin and Petcovic (2008) describe the alliances of Slovenian media owners with particular political factions and the use of media for purposes of political intervention; when Coman (2004, 54), says that “in such a fragmented environment [among Romanian journalists] there could be no . . . generally accepted codes of ethics”; and Gross (2002, 108) adds “Eastern European journalists have not developed a professional culture strong enough to counterbalance the political forces that dominate their societies”— these are things that seem instantly familiar and comprehensible to anyone who has worked on Southern European media systems. That there should be similari-

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ties in the development of media systems between Eastern and Southern Europe makes sense given the history of European society. Those who write about the idea of Southern Europe as a region identify characteristics of historical development that Southern European countries generally share, characteristics that distinguish them from the northern part of Europe. These include a strong persistence of a social structure based on landed property, a counterreformation cultural tradition based in the Catholic or Orthodox Church, and a later, more contested transition to liberal political and economic institutions compared with Northwestern Europe, an important political legacy of which is a relatively high degree of ideological polarization persisting into the modern period. In broad terms, all of these things are true of Eastern Europe as well. At the most fundamental level, what we call the Polarized Pluralist media system model is characterized—to express it in terms of Bourdieu’s field theory—by a high degree of proximity between the media field and the political field, and a relative domination of the former by the latter. This is manifested in a high degree of “political parallelism,” with journalists and media owners often having strong political motivations and alliances, political and media elites often overlapping and interpenetrating, and strong political battles for control of public broadcasting and sometimes private media as well. It is manifested in strong state intervention, often partisan in character. And it is manifested in a relatively undeveloped professional culture among journalists. It is also associated with a significant degree of clientelism, a relatively weak development of rational-legal authority and the cultural norm of impersonal, “neutral” expertise that comes with the development of rational-legal authority. Often scholars of Eastern European media have focused on Italy as a point of comparison; for a while it was common to talk about “Italianization” of Eastern European media systems. It may be that this simply resulted from the fact that there was more literature in English on Italy than on other Southern European countries. Despite some general similarities, however, Italy is probably not as apt a comparison as the “third wave democracies” in Southern Europe, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Italy not only has a longer history of democracy but also a history of strong mass political parties with deep social roots, a strong welfare state and, since the 1970s, a pattern of consensus politics based on powersharing, all of which distinguish it from the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Spain, Portugal and Greece, on the other hand, became democratic as neoliberalism was beginning to displace corporatism and the welfare state; they also have party systems with shallower roots, and majoritarian rather than consensus politics. All these characteristics they share with Eastern European media systems. To the extent that something like the “Mediterranean” model has indeed emerged in Eastern Europe, therefore, it is probably more in its Iberian or Greek than its Italian form. We suspect, however, that the comparison with the Mediterranean countries included in our study can only be pushed so far, and that the media systems of Eastern Europe are distinct in many ways from our “Polarized Pluralist Model”

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in its Southern European form.2 We also believe, more generally, that advancing comparative analysis requires going beyond the kind of labeling involved in the discussion of the “mediterraneanization” of Eastern European media systems, to more systematic reflection on some of the variables that distinguish or shape media systems, and we try to do that very tentatively in the following pages, focusing on some variables that may differentiate Eastern European media systems from those of Southern Europe and require new theoretical development for the analysis of those systems.

A Sudden and Dramatic Change One of the most basic elements of historical experience that shapes the development of Eastern European media systems is surely the rapid and dramatic pace of change. Within about two years all the countries that had been part of the Communist system passed suddenly from “state socialism” to capitalism and liberal democracy, even if in a form initially that involved many limitations and deviations from the ideal liberal model and theory. Within this short time journalists experienced a period of unprecedented freedom from centralized political control, and the mass media were transformed from state property to private ownership and were plunged into a form of market-driven competition almost completely unknown to them. Within this period too political parties began to form and to contend, and the fundamental legal and institutional structure of society began to be restructured. In some countries the change did not come completely out of nowhere; one of the elements that distinguishes Eastern European countries from one another is the degree to which some form of liberalization existed prior to the collapse of Communism, and some development of a “second society” took place previously, as was the case, for example, in Estonia, Poland or Hungary. But even in these countries, the pace of social change was by comparative standards extremely rapid. This is not a factor we foreground in Comparing Media Systems. Most of the countries we consider there went through gradual historical developments lasting centuries through which they passed from feudalism and absolutism to capitalism and liberal democracy. The story was somewhat different in Southern Europe, of course, and particularly in the “third wave” democracies of the region, and that is an important reason the evolution of their media systems, like their social and political system more generally, is different from that of Northern Europe. But even for these countries, the change was not as dramatic as it was in Eastern Europe. They shifted suddenly to liberal democracy after as much as forty years of dictatorship, to be sure. But their economic systems remained capitalist, and they remained more integrated into the Western world than the countries of Eastern Europe. The Cold War separated the countries of Eastern Europe from their counterparts in the West just at the time modern mass

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communication and journalism was in formation there, the years when broadcasting transformed the media landscape and an ideology of press freedom (largely dominated by the American conception [Blanchard, 1986]) spread through most of the world. The change that took place in Eastern Europe was clearly of a different order than anything that occurred in the West. How does this historical fact of rapid change shape the relation between media and politics? Probably one of the most important effects—as in Southern Europe but to a stronger degree, particularly where there was no earlier history of liberalization—is to heighten the degree of politicization of the media. There are a number of reasons why this should be the case. First, the rapid character of social change in Eastern Europe meant that the stakes of politics were extremely high. With the rules of the game by which power and resources were to be divided themselves up for grabs, with property shifting from the hands of the State into private hands and the legal and institutional structure being fundamentally transformed, it is not surprising that the struggle for power was—and perhaps continues to be—fierce, and in this context conditions were not favorable for the field of journalism to become autonomous of or differentiated from the field of politics. Politicians and would-be oligarchs were motivated to extend their power to the field of media; media owners were motivated to intervene in the world of politics, and journalists themselves were likely to perceive the stakes of politics as too high not to become engaged, even if they were fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter. The fact that political parties were hastily organized, without strong rooting in civil society, often by intellectuals, former Communist officials, or rising oligarchs (see, e.g., Gross 2002, 45–46) meant that, as Jakubowicz (2007, 180) puts it, they “felt cut off from public opinion and unable to deliver their message to the population. Many were beleaguered and insecure and their power base in society was by no means stable.” As a result, they saw control of the media as exceptionally important. Culture and ideology were in flux just as much as political and economic structure, and it is not surprising that with the collapse of the old order in Eastern Europe, shared norms and frames of reference were not easily established. Both commercialization and political competition surged forward in Eastern Europe in the context of a normative vacuum, in the absence not only of institutional regulation (anti-concentration rules, ownership transparency, etc.) but also of professional culture (codes of ethics, professional routines) and of general normative consensus. In this context it is not surprising that we find the mixture of unrestrained commercialization and partisanship that has been underlined by many scholars. One analytical issue that arises here concerns whether we focus, in a sense, on space or time for purposes of comparative analysis. To the extent that they seem distinct, should we see the media systems of Eastern Europe as distinctively Eastern European—in contrast to other regions, for example? Or should we see them, as Voltmer (2008, 2011) suggests, as distinctly transitional, marked

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by characteristics that are unique to periods of extremely rapid social change? All media systems change, of course, and all comparisons must take into account the historical dimension. But it is possible that the historical conjuncture really needs to be taken as the central element under circumstances like we find in Eastern Europe, which would imply that we should not expect the analyses we make today to be relevant, say, fifteen years in the future, as we might with other systems.

The Legacy of the Communist System In Comparing Media Systems, we stress the “path dependent” character of media system development, the fact that media systems are deeply shaped by the historical context in which they evolved. In principle, it is possible that historical legacies are essentially erased in certain kinds of transitions; to a large extent it could be argued that this happened with the Nazi legacy following the stunde null, in which media institutions were rebuilt in Germany during the occupation period (Humphreys, 1994). But probably Voltmer (2008, 37) is correct that in most democratic transitions, including those in Eastern Europe, it is crucial to examine “how the role of the media during the autocratic regime determines their structure and performance in the process of democratization.” The countries of Eastern Europe share much with those of Western, and especially Southern Europe in terms of historical experience. But there are important differences. They have more of a history of foreign domination than the countries of Western Europe (Greece and Ireland are exceptions). They have less history of democratic politics (Czechoslovakia is the main exception on the Eastern side). And, most dramatically, they were incorporated for forty years into a Communist system that pursued an alternate route to modernity in contrast to that of the West. The free media that evolved in Eastern Europe in the 1990s were not born out of nothing. There were already reporters and media managers during the years of Communist dictatorship; they had developed professional ideologies and routines, become accustomed to particular conventions for interaction with news sources and other social actors, invented and performed specific ways of gathering and processing news that of course did not disappear with the fall of the wall. Surely the legacy of the Communist period makes a difference, and it is often referred to in the literature on Eastern European media systems. But it does not seem to us that this legacy is very fully theorized in that literature, and certainly it has not been incorporated into a real comparative analysis, in the sense that we can say clearly how it differentiates Eastern European systems from those of Southern Europe, or other cases we might chose for comparison. What is this legacy of the Communist period? It includes of course the “‘deep conviction’ that the media exist to serve the government or the state,” as Gross (2002, 58) puts it, referring specifically to the attitude of politicians to-

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ward broadcast media—though we should not forget that Charles de Gaulle believed something rather similar about television in the 1960s. It also includes a conception of journalists as agents of mobilization and shapers of public opinion that analysts typically connect with the ethos of advocacy and partisanship so common in Eastern European journalism. Gross (2002, 111) quotes Polish scholar J. Zakowsi as saying, “This ‘civic attitude’ inherited from the [Communist era now leads] editors and journalists to do their utmost to promote the cause of their own political camp and its version of reality.” The media, and journalism, specifically, were important and prestigious institutions in the Communist system; they were expected to play a central role in social transformation. The Communist system was in this way quite different from the authoritarian systems of Spain or Portugal, which sought to control the media but did not assign them a positive social role. These are gross characterizations of the Communist legacy. There is a real need, in our view, for more extensive analysis of the Communist period itself, of the varieties of roles journalists played in the different countries, including the ways in which they became involved in some cases, not only in the functioning of the party-state but also the development of alternative culture and counterelites (Curry, 1990; Bennich-Björkman, 2007). It is clear that the simplistic characterization of Four Theories of the Press—which after all was published just three years after the death of Stalin—is no more adequate to understanding Communist media systems than Western ones. And there is a need for more extensive analysis of how ideologies and conventions rooted in that period have interacted with new ideologies imported from the West or developed under conditions of transition. Here we have focused only on those aspects of the Communist legacy that have to do specifically with media and politics, but there are no doubt other elements of Communist-era political culture which are relevant to understanding the post-Communist development of the media.

The Role of State Under the Communist system, with market institutions and independent civil society barely in existence, the State was everything and the media fully integrated into it. In the transition period as well, as Gross (2002, 24) puts it, “the State still has overwhelming power and everything is still politicized.” This strong role of the state in society is presumably tied not only to the ideological and institutional legacy of the Communist period, but also to the situation of the transition, in which the entire legal and institutional framework of society and the distribution of property are up for grabs, and the sphere of politics—of “authoritative allocation of values—is therefore extremely large. It is no doubt also connected with the fact that neither the market nor civil society was strongly de-

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veloped, nor media, in particular, were often fragile enterprises, unable to sustain themselves economically without state subsidies and sometimes investment. In Comparing Media Systems, we consider the role of the state as regulator and funder of media systems, usually in the context of strong welfare states, strong traditions of rational-legal authority and strong media markets, though these did vary to some degree among the systems we analyzed. We also discuss the role of the state as a “primary definer” of news, a role it seems to play even where its potential for direct intervention in the media sphere is quite limited. In the Mediterranean countries, to be sure, we more frequently encounter another role of the state that is more interventionist, controlling, and also more partypoliticized, in which the state may intervene, directly or indirectly, though politically-connected private actors, to bolster media enterprises seen as politically friendly and punish those seen as hostile. But we would clearly have to put state intervention much more at the center of the analysis if we wanted to study the media in Russia and most of the former Soviet Union; and probably its role in most of Central Europe also remains more central and more politicized—in the sense of being directed not at a conception of the general interest on which there is some broad agreement by particularistic interests both economic and political—than anything we find today in Western Europe. There may be considerable change over time in the role of the state in Eastern Europe, and also considerable variation among countries, even if we set aside the former Soviet Union. Sükösd (2000), for example, tells a story in which media professionals and their political supporters had significant success in resisting the efforts of politicians to impose political control, and Gross (2002, 88) describes the efforts of politicians at consolidating state control as generally unsuccessful. Hrvatin and Petkovic (2008), in contrast, describe a situation in Slovenia in which the state is able to use ownership ties, developed through a politicized privatization process, advertising by state-run enterprises, selective provision of state subsidies and politicized appointment to the board of public broadcasting (something which remains common across most of the region [e.g. Dobek-Ostrowska 2011], as it is also in the Mediterranean countries) to exercise substantial control over most media, print and broadcast.3 In Comparing Media Systems, we observe that there are two sides to the role of the State in the Mediterranean countries. It is historically more interventionist than in Northern Europe. But at the same time is weaker in many respects, enforcing less in the way of public service regulation of media markets than one finds in Northern Europe, resulting in a pattern of what Traquina (1995) called “savage deregulation,” in which commercialism develops with less state regulation than in other parts of Europe. We trace this pattern to clientelism4 and political polarization, which in many cases undercut effective regulation. It is important to keep in mind that state inaction is often itself a form of political intervention, as politicians support media enterprises politically aligned with them by exempting them from legal regulation. We also believe the weakness of public service regulation in Southern Europe is connected with sus-

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picion of the state in the aftermath of authoritarianism and in a situation where trust in the ability of the state to serve a “public interest” transcending particular interests is low. And we believe it is connected with the timing of the democratic transitions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, which coincided with the global shift to neoliberalism. There seems to be evidence that this pattern applies to a significant extent in Eastern Europe as well.

Globalization and Foreign Influence Cross-national influences have always been important to the history of media systems. They are in part responsible for the regional patterns summarized by our three models, as Napoleon and English ones to Ireland and North America by British colonialism exported French journalistic practices to Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. We also have argued that cross-national diffusion has been a significant factor that has tended to diffuse the liberal model to Continental Europe and other parts of the world in recent decades, and more generally to diminish differences among national media systems. But foreign influence seems much more central to the process of development of Eastern European media systems than to those of Western Europe. Eastern Europe has for much of its history been a peripheral region, developing under the influence of one outside hegemonic power or another—Russia, Prussia, the Napoleonic Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, and today the European Union. In the media sphere, both foreign ownership and the importation of professional models from outside the region are clearly major factors affecting the development of media systems. Nothing like the extensive foreign ownership that characterizes Eastern European media systems today has ever existed in Western Europe. In Poland, German, Norwegian and English investors have extensive holdings (DobekOstrowska, 2008). “In Baltic media investments the capital from Scandinavian media companies predominate: Orkla Media (Norway), Schibsted (Norway), Bonnier Media (Sweden). Schibsted and Bonnier Media have a strong presence in Estonia. Orkla fully owns Kauno diena in Lithuania. Bonnier Media partly owns the national Latvian daily Diena (49%)” (Balčytienė, 2002). Since 2002 the Czech press market is in the hands of two major German groups: RheinishBergische Druckerei and Verlagsgruppe Passau (Waschkova Cisarova, 2008). German and British corporations own a large part of the Slovak media system (Ondrasik, 2008). And so on for other countries, both in print and in broadcasting. There is still relatively little research on how foreign ownership affects media development in Eastern Europe. Comparative research is clearly needed that would give some sense of the range of variation in the behavior of foreignowned media, and the factors that condition the influence of foreign ownership. Some studies have suggested that foreign ownership does not dramatically affect

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the content of the news and does not produce any significant bias in favor of the owner corporation’s country (Roeger, 2007; Waschkova Cisarova, 2008). But the most important questions for study have to do with the effect of foreign ownership on the relation of media to politics, the evolution of professional norms, and similar issues. How does foreign ownership, for example, interact with patterns of clientelist ties connecting media owners and journalists with politicians—does it undercut them, or become integrated into them? One can imagine a number of possible hypotheses about the effect of foreign ownership on the ties between media and politics. It might increase media autonomy by giving media an economic base separate from the politicized business class within a particular country. It might be integrated into patterns of partisan alliance. Or it might be that foreign-owned companies would tend to ally with whichever party was in power, and perhaps tend to limit political coverage that might lead to conflict with local politicians. Another set of questions has to do with the way foreign ownership affects professional culture. Does it enhance professionalization, as strong professional cultures are imported from other regions? Or does it undercut it, as foreign owners see media properties in Eastern Europe purely as commercial enterprises, and resist the countervailing power that would result from professionalization of journalism? Even where media ownership is domestic and not foreign, the media cultures of Eastern Europe—as in other “peripheral” regions—are heavily influenced by the importation of foreign models of professional practice. And there is a need for more research about how imported models are transformed as they interact with local culture and conditions, since the real conditions of everyday activity may contradict the assumptions of the system—Scandinavian, German, British—in which that model originated. Latin American scholars have observed that American journalistic ideologies and practices imported to the region are often transformed in the process (Waisbord, 2000; Albuquerque, 2005). This may well be true in Eastern Europe as well.

Civil Society, Political Parties and Political Parallelism One of the most fundamental tasks of comparative analysis of media systems is to understand the pattern of relations among media, civil society and political parties. This requires media scholars to know and to enter into dialogue with the literatures in political science and political sociology on party systems and the structure of civil society. Though our knowledge of the literatures on Eastern European politics and society is limited, it appears to us that there are significant differences with the Western European cases we studied. Civil society is an important focus of attention in much writing about democratic transitions in Eastern Europe. Indeed, to some extent these transitions put

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the concept of civil society on the agenda of social science research worldwide, as many of the early democratic activists in Eastern Europe put forward visions of a social and political order centered around a re-engaged civil society. We do not refer directly to the concept of civil society, for the most part, in Comparing Media Systems. If we translate our analysis into those terms, however, civil society enters the picture in important ways. The early development of the press particularly in Northern Europe was connected with emergence of civil society in the formative years of capitalism. And the development of both media systems and party systems in twentieth-century Western Europe was profoundly influenced by the central role in these societies of organized social groups, which had strong institutions of socialization and social mobilization. This form of “organized pluralism” contrasts with the pattern of “individualized pluralism” that has prevailed particularly in the United States, based on more loosely organized interest groups and on political entrepreneurship that aims to attract the votes or support of individual citizens. Neither of these patterns seems to fit Eastern Europe particularly well. Many scholars stress the weakness of civil society in Eastern Europe (Gross, 2002; Klvana, 2004; Jakubowicz, 2007), not a surprising conclusion given the historical disruptions that hindered its development—though there are of course significant differences among countries. Certainly the pattern of highly organized social groups with strong internal solidarity that characterized the twentieth-century history of Western Europe is not present. The social groups of Western Europe were in some cases organized around language or religion, but to a very large extent they were organized around social class and other patterns of common economic interest. Jakubowicz notes a tendency in Eastern Europe “for civil society groups to coalesce around political, religious or other similar identities, leading to the emergence of autarchic groups closed to others.” One important difference between Eastern and Southern Europe, according to Malefakis (1995), is the fact that in the East national and ethnic conflicts were more central to political history than the conflicts over liberalism and democracy which dominated political history in the West; perhaps this difference accounts in part for the different characters of civil society in Eastern Europe (Balčytiéne, 2011). Finally, it should be noted that many researchers point to a tendency toward political demobilization of society following the initial transition period, with public interest and participation in political life declining significantly (Gill, 2002, 116; Klvana, 2004). It is also common to argue that with civil society in Eastern Europe relatively weak and a relatively unmobilized public, and with the social role of the state simultaneously strong, political parties tend to dominate public life. Parties, moreover, have taken a distinct form: they have been coalitions of elites, sometimes quite personalized, without strong rooting in segments of society which would see them as representative of their interests, and without the roles of information providers and consensus builders that mass parties performed in Western Europe in their heyday. “The newly established political parties,“ wrote Splichal (1994, 132) are more authoritative institutions than they are bridges be-

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tween state and civil society.” In most countries they have tended to be unstable, with new political parties established only to change their nature, membership or framework of connections with voters or to disappear within a short time. Political scientists write in this regard of “electoral volatility” represented by both voters’ choices that tend to shift from election to election and poor social basis of party organizations (Mair, 1997). Much of the time parties represent particularistic interests that easily shift from election to election, and are linked to specific interest groups or even to particular individuals (Grilli di Cortona and Pasquino, 2007). As Jakubowicz writes, because of the legacy of the Communist period parties in government have always relied heavily on the resources of the state in order to consolidate their power. Patronage has thus remained a crucial means for mobilizing and maintaining political support (Jakubowicz, 2008). To the extent that parties do become stabilized, it is as “electoral-professional parties” (Panebianco, 1988) of the sort that have emerged also in Western Europe in recent years, with strong elite structures but shallow social roots—in that sense it could be said that Eastern European democracies skipped the phase of mass parties which was so central to the development of political and media systems in Western Europe. Some elements of this pattern Eastern Europe does share, once again, with some of the countries we discuss under the Polarized Pluralist Model. Political parties tend to dominate public life in all the Southern European countries we discuss. In France and Italy, however, parties had deep social roots and connections with a wide range of allied social organizations. Here again the Eastern European pattern is more similar to that of Spain and Portugal, which are often described by political scientists as “partidocracies” (Colomer, 1996) and which have parties with relatively weak social roots and relatively demobilized mass publics. Despite this parallel, we suspect that the conceptual apparatus of Comparing Media Systems—the concepts of “organized” and “individual pluralism” we employ, for example, or of political parallelism as a stable relationship between media and parties, both of which are rooted in broad and stable social interests or ideologies—will not be adequate to conceptualize the relation of media to politics in Eastern Europe, and will require an expanded analysis of the relations among media, civil society, private capital, political parties and the state. One hypothesis that suggests itself is that the media may be more central to the process of opinion formation in Eastern than in Western Europe or in North America, given the relative weakness of competing institutions of socialization and communication, particularly parties and civil society. One final issue is worth raising here: the question of how to evaluate the role of politicized media in democratic transitions. Near the end of his book Gross (2002, 148–9), responding to comments of Andrew Arato on media and civil society, writes, “The position that politicized, partisan media, ‘whether private or state owned, are clearly not the best method to serve the creation of civil society,’ merits serious reconsideration in Eastern Europe.” He goes on to argue “that the highly politicized, pluralistic, opinionated and judgmental journalism

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with neither shared standards nor a professional, democratic-minded culture that prevails in Eastern Europe not only represents civil society, but is civil society.” It is a bit of a surprising turn in his analysis, much of which seems centered on the contrast between Eastern European media realities and the dominant Western—really North American—normative model. But this point seems to us very important, and it is related to an issue we raise in Comparing Media Systems in relation to the partisanship of media in Southern Europe. The role of media in the democratic process in Eastern Europe has to be understood in the actual context of Eastern European political development, and not by comparison with abstract normative models. And certainly the possibility that media partisanship is a necessary part of the evolution of a pluralist political system given the political context of Eastern Europe deserves careful consideration by researchers.

Conclusion Comparing Media Systems was based on a “most similar systems” design, and was deliberately limited to a relatively homogeneous group of advanced capitalist democracies in Western Europe and North America. Scholars working on Eastern Europe, however, were very quick to begin using our framework to begin thinking about their own region in relation to Western Europe. We began this chapter by posing the question whether the boundary of our analysis could, like the boundary of the EU, move east. The answer is clearly mixed. As many scholars have observed, there are many strong parallels between the media systems of Eastern and of Southern Europe, and much of the pattern of what we called the Polarized Pluralist model can be found in the East. Since marketbased institutions were embraced rapidly in Eastern Europe, we can also think of them as hybrid systems, to some extent, falling, somewhat like Spain and Portugal, up the line of our triangle toward the liberal model. And some countries— Estonia, for example—have also borrowed significantly from the Democratic Corporatist model. But this kind of effort to project Eastern European media systems onto the space of our analysis of Western Europe can only take scholarship so far. Ultimately, we hope that scholars working on Eastern Europe who seek to engage with our work will think not in terms of applying our framework, but of rethinking and thus extending it, conceptualizing clearly both the similarities and the differences between the media systems of Eastern and Western Europe, and their political roles.

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Notes 1. In particular most of the suggestions we propose in this chapter are the fruit of meetings and discussions that we have had with colleagues from different countries in Eastern Europe (Boguslawa Dobek Ostrowska from Poland, Aukse Balčytiené from Lithuania, Elena Vartanova from Russia, Miklos Sükösd from Hungary) with whom we are working on a project to explore the relation of our analysis to media systems beyond Western Europe and North America (Hallin and Mancini, 2012). Of course, we have been enriched by meetings with many other colleagues from Eastern Europe. 2. Some differences in historical development between Southern and Eastern Europe are outlined by Malefakis (1995). 3. Gross (2002), p. 59, lists many of the forms of state intervention that prevail accross the region. 4. Grzymala-Busse (2007) distinguishes state exploitation, which he sees as central to the pattern of political development in much of Central and Eastern Europe, from clientelism, in part on the grounds that the latter involves a more stable relationship with a political base. He shows that the degree of state exploitation is related to variations in the effectiveness of party competition among Eastern European countries. It might be useful to see if that variable would also be related to media system variables, perhaps, most directly, to the degree of independence of public broadcasting.

References de Albuquerque, A. (2005) “Another ‘Fourth Branch’: Press and Political Culture in Brazil.” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 6: 486-504. Bajomi-Lázár, P., and Hegedus, I. (Eds.) (2001) Media and Politics. Budapest: Uj Madtum. Balčytienė, A. (2011) “Culture as a Guide in Teoretical Explorations of Baltic Media.” In D. Hallin and P. Mancini (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World, pp. 51-71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balčytienė, A. (2002) “Lithuanian Media. A Question of Change.” In P. Vihalemn (Ed.), Baltic Media in Transition. Tartu: Tartu University Press. Bennich-Björkman, Li (2007) “The Cultural Roots of Estonia’s Successful Transition: How Historical Legacies Shaped the 1990s.” East European Politics and Societies 21 (2): 316-47. Blanchard , M. (1986) Exporting the First Amendment. New York: Longman. Colomer, Josep M. (1996) “Spain and Portugal: Rule by Party Leadership.” In J. Colomer (Ed.), Political Institutions in Europe. London: Routledge. Curry, J. (2005) “Eastern Europe’s PostCommunist Media.” In R. A. May and A. K. Milton (Eds.), (Un)Civil Societies: Human Rights and Democratic Transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Curry, Jane Leftwich (1990) Poland’s Journalists: Professionalization and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobek-Ostrowska, B. (2011) “Italianization (or Mediterraneanization) of the Polish Media System? Reality and Perspective,” In D. Hallin and P. Mancini (Eds.), Comparing

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Media Systems beyond the Western World, pp. 26-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, G. (2002) Democracy and Post-Communism: Political Change in the PostCommunist World. London: Routledge. Grilli di Cortona, P., and Pasquino, G. (2007) Partiti e sistemi di partito nelle democrazie europee. Bologna: Il Mulino. Gross, P. (2002) Entangled Evolutions. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Grzymala-Busse, A. (2007) Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallin, Daniel C., and Mancini, Paolo (in press) “Comparing Media Systems: A Response to Critics.” In F. Esser and T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of Comparative Communication Research. London: Routledge. Hallin, Daniel C., and Mancini, Paolo (2011) Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hrvatin, S. B., and Petkovic, B. (2008) You Call This a Media Market? The Role of the State in the Media Sector in Slovenia. Ljubljana: Mirovni Institut. Humphreys, Peter. (1994) Media and Media Policy in Germany: The Press and Broadcasting since 1945. Oxford: Berg. Huntington, S. (1993) The Third Wave. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Jakubowicz, K (2007) Rude Awakening. Creskill: Hampton Press. Jakubowicz, K. (2008) “Riviera on the Baltic? Public Service Broadcasting in PostCommunist Countries.” In B. Dobek-Ostrowska and M. Glowacki (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems in Central Europe: Between Commercialization and Politicization. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego. Klvana, T. (2004) “New Europe’s Civil Society, Democracy and the Media Thirteen Years After: The Story of the Czech Republic.” Press/Politics 9 (3): 40-55. Lauk, E. (2008) “Comparing Journalism Cultures after the Fall of Communism.” Paper presented at the conference Comparative Journalism Studies: Approaches, Methods and Paradigms, University of Tasmania, Hobart, June 25-28. Mair, P. (1997) Party Systems Change: Approaches and Interpretations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malefakis, E. (1995) “The Political and Economic Contours of Southern European History.” In R. Gunther, P. N. Diamandouros and H. Puhle (Eds.), The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective, 33-76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ondrasik B. (2008) “Media Ownership, Regulation, Concentration and Competition in the Slovak Republic.” In B. Dobek-Ostrowka and M. Glowacki (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems in Central Europe: Between Commercialization and Politicization. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego. Paletz, D., and Jakubowicz, K. (Eds.) (2003) Business as Usual. Creskill. Hampton Press. Paletz, D., Jakubowicz, K., and Novosel, P. (Eds.) (1995) Glasnost and After. Creskill. Hampton Press. Panebianco, A. (1988) Political Parties: Organization and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roeger, M. (2007) “Fakts about Germany? The Polish Tabloid Fakt, its News Coverage of Germany and the Influence of German Ownership,” paper presented at the Conference “East Meets West,” Wroclaw, April 25-27.

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Splichal, S. (1996) “Between State Control and Commercialisation: Media after the Fall of Communism.” In P. Glenn and O. Soltys (Eds.), Media ‘95: Experience and Expectations—Five Years Later. Prague: Karolinum Charles University. Splichal, S. (2001) “Imitative Revolutions. Changes in the Media and Journalism in East Central Europe.” Javnost-The Public 8: 31-57. Splichal, S. (1994) Media beyond Socialism. Boulder: Westview Presss. Sükösd, M. (2000) “Democratic Transformation and the Mass Media in Hungary: From Stalinism to Democratic Consolidation.” In R. Gunther and A. Mughan, Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective. Cambriodge: Cambridge University Press. Voltmer, K. (2008) “Comparing Media Systems in New Democracies,” Central European Journal of Communication 1(1): 23-41. Voltmer, K. (2011) “How Far Can Media Systems Travel: Applying Hallin and Mancini’s Comparative Framework outside the Western World.” In D, Hallin and P. Mancini (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World, pp. 224-245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waisbord, S. (2000) Watchdog Journalism in South America: News, Accountability and Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Waschkova Cisarova, L. (2008) “Development of Czech Local and Regional Press. Impact of Foreign Owners on Local and Regional Press Market in Czech Republic.” In B. Dobek-Ostrwska and Michal Glowacki (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems in Central Europe. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego. Wyka, A. (2008) “In Search of the East Central European Media Model—The Italianization Model? A comparative perspective on the East Central European and South European Media Systems.” In B. Dobek-Ostrowka and M. Glowacki (Eds.), Comparing Media Systems in Central Europe: Between Commercialization and Politicization. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.

Chapter 3

Freedom without Impartiality. The Vicious Circle of Media Capture Alina Mungiu–Pippidi The 2008 Freedom House survey marked the sixth straight year of overall deterioration in press freedom across the globe (Freedom of the Press, 2008). Incremental improvements in selected countries seem overshadowed by a relentless assault on independent news media by a wide range of actors, in both authoritarian states and countries with relatively open media environments. These findings seem particularly puzzling in Eastern Europe, previously considered the world champion of democratization. By the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, only eight out of twenty-eight former communist state entities had succeeded in being awarded a rating of ‘free’ by the Freedom House, with ten others ‘partly free’ and ten ‘not free.’ Free elections, however, were held in more than eight—in fact, free elections are organized in all ‘partly free’ countries and even in some ‘unfree’ countries in the region. An IREX–USAID study on media sustainability published in 2008 raised serious concerns regarding the press of the region. Regular regional surveys, such as Freedom House’s Nations in Transit in 2008, reported that nine countries, including some that are already EU members, showed a decline in media independence ratings. The average for all former Soviet Union republics, comprising eight countries, gradually declined between 1999 and 2008. However, as post-Communist countries evolved to become democratic after 1989, with ten of them eventually becoming members of the European Union, a linear positive evolution seemed the logical prediction. And indeed, a rough 33

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correlation between advances in overall democratic development and mass media development can be found. At the same time, however, it seems that, first, the overall the evolution of the media has been less linear than expected, and, second, that it is strongly influenced by factors other than democracy itself. In a very influential book, Hallin and Mancini (2004) identified stable connections between media and political systems, comparing across four features: state intervention, journalists’ professionalism, mass media market structure, and media political partisanship (they call it ‘parallelism’). Their empirical model is convincing, but it is based only on developed countries and consolidated democracies. The goal of the present chapter is to show that the intermediate variable missing from this puzzling picture is media corruption. Far from being incompatible with democracy, corruption is the inseparable companion of democratization. In fact, I will argue that corruption is bound to increase in a certain phase of democratization and that media corruption is a systemic phenomenon in a large number of countries that are considered relatively free and plural in political terms. The existence of systemic corruption greatly subverts the media system. It is not enough, therefore, to analyze it in classic terms of the actions of government (repressed/unrepressed). If we know where a country stands on elections and corruption that should be enough to predict what kind of media it has, and also to explain more accurately how the media work. As part of my analysis, I will try to offer a theoretical model of systemic corruption, as well as a qualitative instrument to diagnose media corruption.

Does Corruption Matter? None of the instruments meant to measure freedom of the media includes a direct corruption dimension. First, corruption in general is difficult to measure, and the corruption of a particular profession even more so. But this difficulty could be overcome simply by asking experts if they feel that a profession is corrupt or not, in the same way they are asked about countries in many surveys on corruption, all of which measure perception. Second, it is important to remember that before the last extensive waves of democratization, the main problems encountered by the media were primarily seen as official repression of the media. Therefore, most monitoring agencies perceive governments as the sole threat to media freedom and design their analytical instruments accordingly. Now that the number of democracies has increased so dramatically, the model seems to have become more complex than just this bivariate relation, even if the government remains an important threat to the liberty of the media in many countries. To account for an absence of progress in media freedom in the many electoral democracies, new dimensions need to be included in the picture we sketch out. The Freedom House Nations in Transit, for instance, includes three media

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market-related questions on its scorecard of ten. First: are the majority of print and electronic media privately owned and free of excessive ownership concentration? Second: is the private media’s financial viability determined only by market forces (that is, is it free of political or other influences)? And third: is the distribution of newspapers privately controlled? Similarly, as its name implies, the IREX ‘sustainability’ index reflects a concern to measure more than just ‘freedom.’ In the absence of other conditions, freedom is in fact just a potentiality. IREX therefore also includes a number of items on the scorecard which measure more than just repression. This includes ‘professional standards of quality’ binding on journalists; the existence of ‘social norms’ to protect and promote free speech and access to public information; and the business management of the media ‘allowing editorial independence.’ These indicators seem quite difficult to apply and measure. After all, professions do have varying standards of ‘quality,’ which are dictated by the public. Measuring both social norms and management styles is quite problematic. No feature related directly to corruption exists on any of these scorecards, although both journalists and scholars have increasingly signaled pathological processes in the media in recent years. A review of the most frequent features of corrupt media systems would include the following: The main goal of most of the mass media is not information, but public relations, particularly what Alena Ledeneva calls ‘black and grey’ PR, which frequently amounts to disinformation, rather than information. This is the source of a whole array of pathologies that she describes in her book, such as disinformation campaigns, ‘kompromat’ (blackmail targeted at politicians), etc. (Ledeneva, 2006). As this is the primary goal, most media cannot and do not attain profitability, as readers appear to know propaganda when they see it. Nevertheless, bankruptcies are rare, and low-audience media persist, heavily subsidized by their owners, and are quite influential over time. Media market institutions do not operate properly. Advertising from private sources is not highly correlated with audience size, for instance, and tax breaks or other forms of subsidy distort the media market. Though a plurality of sources exists, most media owners belong to vested interest groups and/or negative social capital networks linking business and politics. Frequently, the same individuals move from one side to another, so there is no de facto separation between the business of media, politics, and business more generally. In this landscape, one would be hard pressed to find a media investor who makes a profit from the media alone. More frequently, one finds businessmen owning media in order to promote their other business or political interests by blackmailing and intimidating others. Informal rules, rather than formal ones, dominate the media profession, with media owners frequently acting as a cartel directly opposed to the autonomy of the journalistic community. That community is, in any case, usually weak and poorly organized, due to the presence of so many mercenaries or plain ‘disinformation’ agents, accountable only to media owners.

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As the general picture is so removed from the standards of Western journalism, a wide range of other individual acts of corruption can be found, too. Ethical norms simply do not exist. Guests pay producers to be invited on to talk shows, and reporters benefit financially from covering particular business events. Even technicians use most of their working time and company materials to manufacture pirating devices for household cable television1 to sell on the black market. The above qualitative diagnostic tool results in some clear, though indirect, indicators of media corruption. One is very likely to find systemic media corruption in a media environment displaying the following features: nontransparent ownership; a majority of nonviable media entities which seem nonetheless to show considerable staying power; a poor correlation between ratings and advertising; a hugely crowded market; wide differences in front–page contents across newspapers or newscast headlines; direct or indirect government subsidies; and no media ethics regulations (whether formal or informal). This does not preclude the existence of free, more market–oriented outlets, but they will not be in the majority. Once they manage to become a majority, if indeed they might do as the system evolves, this will be evidence of the consolidation of a genuine competitive market. The landscape can shift, and across Central and Eastern Europe we find a combination of a real media market and the vicious media market I have outlined above. But can the media market be any better than the general state of market relations in a society? In their classic book Four Theories of the Press, Fred. S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm claimed that ‘the press always takes on the form and coloration of the social and political structures within which it operates. Especially, it reflects the system of social control whereby the relations of individuals and institutions are adjusted’ (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm, 1956, 1–2). My argument is precisely in line with this insightful and lasting observation. Corruption of media systems can be encountered wherever one finds systemic corruption in a society. Although some media outlets may try to combat corruption, the mass media system as a whole will accurately reflect the state of affairs in that society as a whole. Corruption in post-Communist Europe is of two kinds: (1) graft, in other words individual infringements of norms of impartial government, very much like in Western Europe, and (2) systemic corruption, that is, a form of particularistic social organization where the norm is corruption itself. All the latter cases also involve systemic media corruption as well. Evidence from surveys of mass media, corruption and democracy confirm this picture. We find a very strong correlation between press freedom as measured, for example, by Freedom House and the corruption perception index compiled by Transparency International for the twenty-seven countries of the region. It is a correlation as significant and strong as the classic democracy/freedom of press correlation (see table 3.1).

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Table 3.1. Correlations between press freedom, corruption and democracy (N = 28) Freedom of the press

Significance

Pearson

Corruption Perception Index x10

***

– 0.891

FH Civil Score

***

– 0.886

Liberties

Freedom of the media is not, however, influenced by democratic evolution alone. It is strongly dependent on the development of a country as well. In a linear regression model, controlling for development as well as democracy, we find that there is a strong association between media freedom and corruption (see appendix).2 The relationship is reciprocal, so it is present if the two are used interchangeably as dependent variables with the same controls, although the development and civil liberties scores lose their significance when corruption is the dependent variable. It seems that the relationship does indeed work both ways.3 However, optimists have always emphasized only one side: how a free media contributes to curbing corruption. In practice, there is every likelihood that in a corrupt society the media will be corrupt as well. Several definitions of corruption exist (Heywood, 2008), but most of them come close to that offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, as the ‘perversion or destruction of integrity in the discharge of public duties by bribery and favour.’ This definition of corruption rests on the presumption that the state operates under norms of universalism and impartiality, suggesting that public integrity necessitates the equal treatment of citizens or subjects, which can occasionally be undermined by favoritism. However, societies where the private and the public spheres are clearly delimited and where governments treat their subjects equally have been scarce until modern times, and remain a minority even today.4 Under classic full patrimonial rule, in the premodern society as well as in societies where modernization is still under way, the norm is either not universalism or has not yet been established. If modernization and democratization do indeed result in greater corruption, as authors such as Joseph Nye (2002, 191– 200) and Samuel Huntington (1968, 57–59) believe, it is mainly because prior to them the universal delivery of public goods by the state neither existed nor was presumed to exist. One can begin to discuss ‘corruption’ in Europe in the modern sense of the word only in cases where the modernization of a European state has been completed, and the government has become firmly based on some public interest legitimization, with the assumption that public goods (from law and order to jobs in the public sector) should be distributed equally and fairly as a norm. For many societies, modernization does not mean a passage from a

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patrimonial regime, where inequality is part of the norm, to a modern impersonal society, but a passage from patrimonialism to particularism.5 As it expands in scope and functions, the state—which used to be the monopoly of a monarch or a group—becomes the object of political competition; but any accountability framework does not limit this competition. It is a competition for state–capture, and the first decades (if not centuries) of democratization resemble this model much more than the current standards of Western liberal democracy. It is this specific social organization mode that I call ‘particularism.’ In such a society, the way people are treated depends on their distance from power holders in their society. By contrast, in societies based on universalism, the norm and practice are such that equal treatment applies to everyone regardless of which group one belongs to. In this type of society, individuals expect equal treatment from the state. A culture of privilege reigns in societies based on particularism, making unequal treatment the accepted norm in society. Individuals struggle to belong to the privileged groups rather than change the rules of the game. Norms of impartiality and fairness are widely infringed upon. Influence, not cash, is the main currency, and the gain of an individual anywhere in the chain is hard to measure: favors are distributed or denied as part of a customary exchange, with rules of its own. Bribery often occurs as a means of circumventing inequality, and for the many people with little or no power status, bribing an official is the only shortcut to equal treatment (Médard, 2001). Of course, the world does not divide neatly into particularism and universalism, as in the ideal types classified and described in table 3.2. Rather, societies can be placed on a continuum between these two ideal types. In today’s world we may actually encounter full–fledged particularism, where no public assets are distributed in an open and transparent manner and citizens have no chance of being protected equally by the law or taxed equally by the tax authorities. More frequently, however, we find a mixture of varying proportions of particularism and ‘modern’ corruption. The important policy lesson drawn from this is that particularism is a systemic problem, which cuts across the judiciary, mass media, police, and so forth. That is why one cannot design programs based exclusively on any of these pillars, as they are likely to be as corrupt as the rest of the system. Once freed from communist despotism, countries in Central and Eastern Europe joined this transition, already ongoing in the older electoral democracies from the Third World. The end point of this transition ‘from authoritarianism’ might be uncertain, as Thomas Carothers (2002) has shown, but passage through a particularistic phase seems to be almost inescapable, particularly for Central and Eastern European countries. It is largely due to the fact that political pluralism can be achieved quite early; in fact, in many cases it precedes the transition, but it takes much longer to build up government accountability in an erstwhile authoritarian society.

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Table 3.2. Types of regime, by impartiality of government Type of Power DisIdeal Society tribution

State ‘ownership’

Power moPatrimonial- nopoly / One or few ism / Pure hierarchy / owners particularism status society Top status Competitive disputed particularism among groups

Universalism Equal

Up for capture by various groups

Distribution Social acof public ceptability / goods Legitimacy Unfair but predictable

Moderate / traditional and neotradi- No tional

Unfair and Low / charunpredictable ismatic/ bureaucratic

Autonomous from private Fair and interest predictable

Public / private distinction

Very low / bureaucratic

Poor

Sharp

The Path to Media Capture The question remains as to what determines the choice made by East European states of one transition path rather than of another. Following the fall of communism, nearly all East European countries embarked on building up a new, free media. The countries that made the most rapid progress in terms of reform were those that also privatized the state media, ended their financing from the budgets of national and regional authorities, and pursued economic and regulatory policies aimed at creating an environment in which the media business could take hold.6 As in Western Europe, there was one great exception to this—state broadcasting that was transformed (if sometimes only in name) into public service broadcasting. At the same time, alternative, unauthorized, and unregulated media emerged in many of these countries soon after the collapse of the communist system, sometimes preceding the privatization of state media. The growth of this ‘informal’ sector proved a persistent feature, and what started out as an attempt to secure freedom evolved rather differently. By and large, we can identify two initial phases common to all the countries. First, liberalization, or the passage from total control to limited pluralism, with censorship and repression replaced by self–censorship and partial control. The second phase is of deregulation, mixing planned and spontaneous elements. From here on, national paths diverge. The explanation for this goes far beyond the role of the media and falls within more general democratization theory. The trajectory of a country is greatly influenced by its proximity to the West and all that derives from it (Western interests, extent of foreign direct investment), and by its own degree of social pluralism (development of civil society, itself influ-

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enced by a range of other factors). However, it is fair to argue, as Way (15–16 November 2002) has, that a phase of pluralism by default in the early 1990s (due mostly to the inability of incumbents to enforce authoritarian rule) has been followed by a divergence of paths, with post-Communist countries becoming either more democratic or more autocratic. Figure 3.1. Divergent paths from communist media control

Path 1. Open competition

Path 3. Return to censorship Censorship Media control

Glasnost Selfcensorhi

Media pluralism

Deregulation Media anarchy Path 2. Controlled, limited competition

Media capture

Figure 1 traces the evolution of post-Communist media from full control to partial control during glasnost, and then to deregulation, either partial or total. This process was common to most post-Communist societies, excepting some Central Asian countries. The collapse of the communist system brought fast deregulation and anarchy, with unlicensed or unregistered underground newspapers surfacing, pirate radio stations being set up, as well as strong Western pressure to liberalize the media. State–owned media were first demonopolized; then liberalization followed as state frequencies were auctioned off to the private sector. This deregulation was more rapid and penetrated more deeply in Central Europe than in the former Soviet Union, except for the Baltic States. In any event, more decisive steps were taken to protect the new nascent free media in countries where anticommunists won the first round of free and fair elections. As shown in figure 1, from deregulation onwards three different paths were available following the demise of communism. As national political systems travelled different journeys, so too did their respective media systems. In some countries, politics became more and more competitive, and the media more and more pluralistic, although the media have remained a complex mixture of professional and partisan media. In others, control of the media returned, as the media were captured again, either directly by governments or by vested interest groups strongly tied to politics. Despite a promising beginning, at the extreme end of path 2, the media ended up being captured in some FSU countries. At the other end of the scale, in countries with very competitive politics, the media landscape has gradually become more plural and mostly free, with considerable partisanship and only limited capture. By ‘media capture’ I mean a situation in which the media have not succeeded in becoming autonomous and manifesting a will of their own, nor

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able to exercise their main function, notably of informing people. Instead, they have persisted in an intermediate state, with vested interests, and not just the government, using them for other purposes. State capture in a post-1989 context designates the situation in which the post-Communist state has not succeeded in becoming an autonomous actor vis–a–vis interest groups or vested interests. Media capture in post-Communist Europe is therefore not necessarily a capture by the state, although there is an important correlation between state and media capture. Hellman’s state capture model, where business captures politics, is oversimplified (Hellman, 1998). Rather, the model is closer to what Donatella della Porta and Alberto Vannucci (19–20 May 2005) describe in their paper on corruption as a normative system, with strong linkage and overlapping between all the groups concerned, and a veritable entanglement of media, business, politics, and even the judiciary. Capture distorts the main role of the media: captured media outlets emerge to trade influence and manipulate information rather than to inform the public, a phenomenon hard to fit into the classic government–perpetrator and media– victim paradigm. Paradoxically, media capture proves that media matter and have an effect both as the result of disinformation and the lack of proper information. Russia, Albania, Macedonia and Romania abound in such examples. When media practices range from sheer disinformation to blackmail, the media can be remarkably influential in politics. A good media investment can make a minister or an MP, as well as unseat one. The extent of media capture varies across the spectrum of countries taking path 2. Scandals have surfaced even in the most advanced democracies in the region, revealing evidence to document ‘capture’ attempts. In the Polish Rywingate scandal, Adam Michnik, the editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland’s largest daily newspapers, needed a change in draft government legislation in order to be able to buy the Polsat television network, and was offered (but rejected and publicized the whole affair) an informal ‘deal’ by a self–described government intermediary in return for a bribe. Such deals are actually carried out in other countries and nothing more is heard of them. Paths 2 and 3 (simple regression to censorship) can exist separately, or coexist. The private media may take path 2, for example, with the public media returning to path 3. In Ukraine and Russia, the system was ‘mixed’ during most of the transition. Prior to the 2004 Orange Revolution, the Ukrainian government reverted to the old communist practice of issuing temnyky, written instructions telling the media how to report and interpret the news. In leaked transcripts of meetings of the Romanian government held between 2000 and 2004, two major government officials compared the two types of control: capture (indirect control) and open censorship (direct), considering the latter to be much more effective. In the words of one of them: ‘I keep wondering why we continue to support the media with the old tax breaks, with sponsoring and advertising, when all we get in return is that attacks on the party continue, and only some of us may sometimes be spared criticism’ (Standing Committee of PSD, 20 October 2003, 2004).7

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What can help us predict whether a country will follow path 1, 2 or 3? Development matters considerably. The Human Development Index, which captures growth, life expectancy and education, is a powerful predictor of media freedom. It also highlights the fact that the public, a weak actor in less–developed societies, is not capable of effectively demanding accountability from the government or the media. The group of twenty-eight countries varies widely in terms of development, with Central Asia at the bottom and Central Europe at the top. In Central Asia, average life expectancy is ten years less than in Central Europe. The Balkans is in the middle. Despite communist efforts to achieve uniformity, structural development legacies persist and matter. The more developed a country, with an autonomous public demanding government accountability, the more likely we shall encounter less corruption and greater media freedom. The communist legacy seems to matter as well. In fact, different types of communism operated in Eastern Europe. Censorship in the Soviet Union, Romania and Albania was far harsher than in Poland and Yugoslavia, and this facilitated the formation of a class of real journalists with aspirations to be more than just propagandists for the party. Otherwise, censorship was a general rule, broken only by Gorbachev’s decision to replace outdated apparatchik censors with professional editors tasked with imposing self–censorship on the journalists themselves. In the end, countries whose populations are less autonomous and which experienced longer and harsher periods under communism, seem to revert to authoritarianism—not a clean, Pinochet–type one, but rather a sultanistic one. Countries with intermediate development figures take the media capture path, with formal institutions subverted by informal processes. And countries that had lighter versions of communism and are more developed evolve towards a real media market, though islands of media capture may persist for a while. Governments unable or unwilling to resort to direct media control contribute to media capture either directly or indirectly. State subsidies, debt bailouts, preferential distribution of state advertising and tax breaks for media owners are traded in exchange for favorable treatment of the media. The government regulates the media through formal regulations, but as those are influenced strongly by international actors and so have to conform to certain European standards, it also uses less–overt means of controlling the media. External influence of various types varies greatly across countries. Unlike in other regions of the world, however, Western influence mattered enormously in post-Communist Europe; first, by providing an accessible cultural model to be followed by journalists and politicians alike; secondly, because of the conditionality related to Council of Europe, NATO, and EU accession; thirdly, through the permanent channels of communication between professions, contributing to the resocialization of Easterners according to Western standards. Mostly, this third type of influence was brought to bear directly on the media, through training and assistance programs.

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How Resilient Is Media Capture? Though the model of state capture I describe here seems rather stark, it is by no means unique or unprecedented. Indeed, to a large extent this is how the media worked in developing Western democracies a hundred years ago or more. We have a remarkable account of the role of the media in one of the best– documented corruption stories ever, that of Tammany Hall, which dominated New York City politics. Although the ‘Ring’ of corrupt local administrators (who were also running the local Democratic Party, and who controlled the judiciary) was eventually brought down with the help of the media, it was also the media that had helped them survive so long. Most New York newspapers seem to have been on the Ring’s payroll (Miller, 1996): ‘On some sheets. . . there were six or eight staffers who drew stipends from the city ranging from $2,000 to $2,500 a year. Their jobs were to write blurbs in the guise of news stories. Some specialized in writing letters to out–of–town papers extolling the accomplishments of Mayor Hall’s administration.’ The minority market–oriented media, exemplified by the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly, fought this system for years. But it was only when, due to a stroke of luck, they were able to publish on their front pages the financial accounts of the city that they succeeded in curbing the power of the Ring. Eventually, a few Ring members were jailed, and very slowly the city moved away from corrupt politics. Could this nineteenth–century New York story inspire today’s anticorruption fighters? Certainly, if young journalists aspire to resemble George Jones, the publisher of the New York Times, or Thomas Nast, the brilliant Harper’s cartoonist, rather than settling for a well–paid PR job, an apartment, and a car. However, idealism aside, democracy promoters would be wise to consider systemic corruption a major problem hindering media freedom, and coordinate their efforts with anticorruption work more generally, instead of just training journalists. Only systemic approaches can solve systemic problems.

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Appendix Table 3.3. Determinants of press freedom B

Variable Legend Constant CPI

TI index 1 to 10 (multiplied by 10), with 10 least corrupt

CL–FH

Civil liberties score 1 to 7, with 7 least free

HDI x 10 Human Development Index by UNDP

Std error

Sig.

131.684

29.776

.000

–0.830

.323

.017

5.272

1.872

.010

–0.879

.241

.001

*Linear regression with dependent variable: freedom of the press 0 to 100, with 100 not free. **Adj. Rsq 0.865; N=28

Notes 1. These examples are not based on Russia only. Such cases are widespread in the Balkan media too. The technicians’ example is taken from the experience of Romanian public television (1997– 1998). 2. As a proxy for development I have used life expectancy, which captures historical development as well as transition difficulties. 3. A two-stage least squares regression confirms the reciprocal influence. 4. For a comprehensive account of this see Tiihonen (2003, 5-41). 5. For a full model, see Mungiu-Pippidi (2006); North, Wallis and Weingast (2006). 6. On media in transition see Gross (2002); Sükösd and Bajomi-Lazar (2003), 11; O’Neil (1998), 143. 7. The leaked transcripts of meetings of the PSD (then in government) were investigated by the country’s national anticorruption prosecutor from early 2005. The former Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana acknowledged the genuineness of the transcripts on the BBC World Service. Several other PSD members made similar statements to the Romanian press. The then Prime Minister Adrian Năstase (who in January 2005 became President of the Chamber of Deputies) denied their authenticity. See the review of the transcripts in the Romanian Journal of Political Science, 2004, pp. 54-56.

References

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Carothers, Thomas (2002), “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy, 13: 5-21. della Porta, Donatella, and Alberto Vannucci (19-20 May 2005), “Corruption as a Normative System.” Paper presented at the International Conference on Corruption Control in Political Life and the Quality of Democracy: A Comparative Perspective Europe-Latin America, CIES-ISCTE, 19-20 May 2005, available at http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:yaF4PB9h0xEJ:home.iscte.pt/~ansmd/CCDellaPorta.pdf+dela+donatella+porta+model+state+capture&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 Accessed 7 December 2008]. Freedom of the Press (2008), A Global Survey of Media Independence, www.freedomhouse.org. Gross, Peter (2002), Entangled Evolutions: Media and Democratization in Eastern Europe, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003. Hallin, Dan, and Paulo Mancini (2004), Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hellman, Joel S. (1998), “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” in World Politics, 50:203-234. Heywood, Paul (2008), “Corruption.” In Landman, Todd and Robinson, Handbook of Comparative Politics, London: Sage, 2008. Huntington, Samuel (1968), Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 57-59. Ledeneva, Alena (2006), How Russia Really Works, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Médard, Jean-Francois (2001), “Corruption in the Neo-Patrimonial States of Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Michael Johnston, Political Corruption, 379-402. Miller, Nathan (1996), Stealing from America: A History of Corruption from Jamestown to Whitewater, New York: Marlowe & Co. Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina (2006), “Corruption: Diagnosis and Treatment,” in Journal of Democracy, 17: 86-99. North, D. C., J. J. Wallis, and B. R. Weingast (2006), “A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History,” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Nye, Joseph (2002), “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.” In A. J. Heidenheimer and M. Johnston (eds), Political Corruption: Concepts & Contexts, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 281-300. O’Neil, Patrick, ed. (1998), Communicating Democracy: The Media and Political Transitions, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm (1956), Four Theories of the Press, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Seppo Tiihonen, Seppo (2003), “Central Government Corruption in Historical Perspective.” In S. Tiihonen, ed., The History of Corruption in Central Government, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 5-42. The Standing Committee of PSD, Oct. 20, 2003. Stenogramele PSD, (2004), 3 vols., Bucharest: Editura Ziua. Sükösd, M. and P. Bajomi-Lázár, eds. (2003), Reinventing Media: Media Policy Reform in EastCentral Europe, Budapest: Central European University Press. Way, Lucan W. (15-16 November 2002), “Authoritarian State Building and Transitions in Western Eurasia.” Paper presented at the workshop on Transitions from Communist Rule in Comparative Perspective, Encina Hall, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, CA.

Chapter 4

From Political Propaganda To Political Marketing. Changing Patterns of Political Communication in Central and Eastern Europe Péter Bajomi–Lázár

Changes in Media Freedom Throughout the 1990s, a series of media wars swept across the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and especially Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Despite the formal declaration of media freedom during the political transformations in 1989–1991, the new (sometimes new–old) political elites, convinced that the media could shape public opinion, continued to exert pressure on the news media in an effort to gain votes. Although their attempts to control media generated wide–scale protest with the opposition of the day, parts of the journalistic community and civil society, analysts and activists unanimously described a deficit of media freedom1 during this period in the region’s countries, and noted that the performance of the news media was falling short of both 49

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normative expectations and the standards set by the media in more advanced democracies. They called for the emergence of independent and plural media that enable citizens to make informed choices when casting their ballot (Splichal, 1994; Paletz et al., 1995; Sparks & Reading, 1998; Gross, 2002; Jakubowicz, 2003). From the early 1990s up until the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the status of media freedom improved gradually but hectically in the region’s countries. As of 2010, Freedom House’s quantitative data listed most of them among the ‘free press’ countries, the exceptions to this rule being Bulgaria and Romania, which were described as ‘partly free.2 Qualitative analyses published toward the end of the 2000s also drew an increasingly optimistic picture of the status of media freedom in the region (Czepek et al., 2009), even though they noted that a certain deal of political pressure had persisted, especially on local media outlets and public broadcasters (Hrvatin & Petković, 2004; Dragomir & Thompson, 2008). Because the Freedom House surveys primarily address issues of political intervention,3 a greater deal of media freedom is arguably indicative of a lesser extent of political pressure on the media, as compared with the early posttransformation period. The consolidation of media freedom4 has begun in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, yet it proved to be a long process uncompleted to date: the status of media freedom is, as a general rule, still poorer in ‘new Europe’ than in ‘old Europe.’ Analysts in search of factors delaying the consolidation of media freedom argue that the legacy of a communist past dies hard; institutional and cultural change does not occur overnight. The institutions—laws, supervisory structures and funds—that had ensured the political control of mass communication systems under the late state socialist regimes need time before they are fully transformed into buffers that protect and enhance media freedom. Politicians’ attitudes toward the media also need time before they meet normative expectations; they must learn the rules of the democratic game, including respect for the media’s independence (Bajomi–Lázár, 2008). To use Karl Popper’s terms: it takes time for closed societies to turn into open ones (cf. Popper, 1966). This chapter looks into changing patterns of media politics and political communication in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe over the past twenty years, focusing on Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.5 First, it gives an overview of some of the major changes that have occurred in the region’s media landscapes, and then it argues that political communication has undergone a major paradigm shift in that classic techniques of political propaganda have given way to modern methods of political marketing. Finally, it describes some of the findings of a series of interviews conducted with spin doctors and senior politicians in the region in 2011 in order to assess politicians’ attitude toward and uses of the media.

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Changes in the Media Landscape Media landscapes are transforming rapidly across the globe, and analysts focus on various aspects of the ensuing changes. Here, only those issues will be recalled that seem to be relevant to media politics and political communication in Central and Eastern Europe. Firstly, the media landscapes of the region’s countries went through substantial institutional change in the 1990s, when the former communist countries that were to join the European Union needed to adapt their legislation to European standards. On the one hand, this institutional change implied the deregulation of the print press and the broadcast media. The privatization of newspapers and broadcasters, controversial as it was, allowed multinational media conglomerates and domestic investors to purchase news outlets in the countries of the region. Political elites could no longer interfere with media content directly through funding or the appointment and removal of top media personnel, and they frequently encountered resistance from media investors, for it would be against the business interests of private companies to associate themselves with any of the political forces; this would amount to losing those parts of their audiences that advocate different views. (There are, however, some notable exceptions to this rule. Some domestic investors have purchased news outlets with the intention of backing various political forces, i.e., their motivation to invest in media was political, rather than economic, in nature. This was especially the case in Bulgaria, Romania and, to a lesser extent, in Hungary).6 On the other hand, institutional change included the re–regulation of the supervision and funding of public broadcasters in such a way that most governments have lost their means to interfere directly with the daily management of these outlets, even though some efforts to designate politically motivated members to their boards of trustees have persisted to date. Even more importantly, institutional change has brought about a plural media landscape in which public broadcasters have lost their monopolies; of the countries studied here, dual broadcasting systems emerged in 1992 in Lithuania, in 1994 in the Czech Republic, in 1995 in Romania, in 1996 in Latvia, in 1997 in Hungary, and in 2000 in Bulgaria. As the public media were losing audiences, their presumed impact on voters’ decisions declined significantly, and so did their political importance. In short, institutional change has impeded direct political interference with news reporting, and political communication needed to be adapted to this new institutional environment: political elites had to seek new methods to appeal to voters. Secondly, the media landscapes have been transformed by technological change. Satellite broadcasting with a multitude of foreign television channels reached the region’s countries in the late 1980s, and Central and Eastern Europe’s ‘FM revolution’ in the mid–1990s brought about the launch of hundreds of local and regional radio stations. Cable television networks and the Internet

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became widely available in the early and mid–2000s, especially in urban areas. These developments have enriched audiences’ choice; new communication channels have proliferated, and now transmit a quantity of information that is nearly impossible to control by political and administrative means. Censorship is now a technological challenge that would imply the mobilization of a huge apparatus, as is illustrated by the example of China’s Internet police. The abundance of news sites, weblogs, public discussion forums, chat rooms and e–mail lists, as well as of mobile telecommunication platforms, has eased citizens’ participation in the discussion of political matters. The political elites also profit from the new channels of communication: through many of them, they can reach voters directly, i.e. without mediation by professional journalists who might want to ask uncomfortable questions. Thirdly, news outlets and information programmes have undergone a process of tabloidization. Institutional and technological changes have resulted in a proliferation of all sorts of news media. Whereas news outlets mushroomed, the audiences have not grown in their numbers; as a result, news competition has accelerated. In an attempt to obtain, preserve and increase their audience share, news outlets, including quality newspapers and public broadcasters, have started publicizing an increasing number of popular news items. They tackle issues that are of interest to mass audiences, speak the language of the masses, and approach political issues from the perspective of ‘the man of the street,’ as opposed to the perspective of the intelligentsia that had once been imposed by quality newspapers and public broadcasters (cf. McNair, 1998; Schudson, 2003). Mainstream news outlets focus on S themes: sensation, scandals, stars and sports, rather than public interest stories. The ‘sound bites’ that politicians get to deliver their messages to the public are shorter and shorter. Political communication had to adapt to this new media environment: messages must be designed in such a way that they fit the news selection criteria that tabloid outlets set. They need to be bombastic and, preferably, visually transmissible. Otherwise, tabloid newspapers and commercial television channels, the primary sources of information for the majority of voters, would not report them. Obviously, the region’s countries have been affected differently by these changes. In particular, while the institutional setting was harmonized with European directives on paper across the region, the implementation of legislative changes, including the establishment of buffers that would protect media freedom and pluralism, was lacking in some of the countries, and especially Bulgaria and Romania, where political pressure on the media, oftentimes coupled with economic pressures, notably those exerted by domestic oligarchs, persisted more intensely than in the rest of the region’s countries. Hungary is an outlier to regional processes in that a second wave of media regulation, passed in 2010, resubmitted nearly the entire media spectrum to direct political control.7

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Changes in Political Communication In the changing media landscapes, political elites have had to revise their media politics and political communication, and adapt them to the new media environment. This chapter suggests that a paradigm shift has occurred in many of the former communist countries: practices of old–school political propaganda have been gradually discarded, while new techniques of political marketing have emerged. For the purposes of this chapter, political propaganda will be defined as a set of systematically designed activities aimed at influencing the opinions and behaviour of large numbers of people without the use of physical force. Propaganda applies such techniques as stereotyping, the use of double standards, the substitution of names, outright lying, repetition, assertion, the pinpointing of the enemy, the appeal to authority, and is frequently associated with censorship and brainwashing (based on Brown, 1971). Political marketing will be defined as the assessment of voters’ political needs and the elaboration of information campaigns that help to mobilize them in support of a political programme, party or candidate (based on Newman, 1994). During the period of media wars in the 1990s, governments interfered directly with media freedom in an attempt to subordinate media outlets to the propaganda role ascribed to them. In particular: They launched newspapers, radio stations and television channels of a clear pro-government bias through state–owned banks, formally independent foundations and other legal entities. They purchased, via state–owned banks and companies, the publication rights of critical outlets, and closed them down. They interfered with the privatization of the print press in order to help enterprises loyal to their policies obtain media ownership. They distributed terrestrial radio and television frequencies on the basis of political considerations. They interfered with the removal and nomination of top media personnel in state–controlled newspapers and broadcasters. They distributed financial subsidies in the form of advertising by state– owned companies, donations by ministries, and funding by state–owned banks and media authorities on the basis of political considerations, discriminating against critical outlets. They withheld information shedding a bad light on their policies, and provided selected media outlets on an exclusive basis with information that was to be received positively by the public. They exerted judicial pressure on some critical journalists and outlets (e.g., Trionfi, 2001; Sükösd & Bajomi–Lázár, 2003; Bajomi–Lázár & Sükösd, 2008). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as part of the lately adopted political marketing strategies, political elites and their spin doctors introduced a number of communication methods that were new in the region. In particular:

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They organized pseudo events such as press releases, interviews and public speeches, as well as media events such as street demonstrations on national holidays, in an attempt to set the media agenda (cf. Boorstin, 1961; Dayan & Katz, 1992).8 They released or leaked information in such a way that they could frame the coverage of their policies in news outlets (cf. Herman & Chomsky, [1988] 1994). They focused their resources on publicly ‘assassinating’ senior characters of rival political parties (see Kiss, 2002). They disclosed the bright side of their family lives in talk shows and entertainment magazines as part of their image construction strategies (see Jankovics, 2008). They disseminated short, mostly visual, messages to reach audiences through tabloid newspapers and commercial television (cf. Kunczik, 2001). They used public opinion polls and various forms of party–voter consultation extensively when designing their political programmes and campaign strategies (cf. Norris, 2000). They applied techniques of relationship marketing and micro–targeting such as text and e–mail campaigns, interactive weblogs and community sites to reach prospective voters (see Kiss, 2006). Country cases may obviously differ, yet there are some patterns of the paradigm shift above that seem to be recurring across the region; these changes are summarized in the table below: Table 1 Political propaganda (Roughly the 1990s) Method Position Structure Strategy Channel Ideology

Media capture leading public opinion unified message suppressing negative voices public media, quality press seeking ideological hegemony

Dissemination Model

top–down campaigns communication–as– transmission

Political marketing (Roughly the 2000s) Media manipulation following public opinion diversified messages creating positive image commercial media, tabloid press acknowledging ideological pluralism grass–root campaigns communication–as–ritual

The changes summarized in the table above can be specified as follows: Rather than capturing independent media outlets, political elites today attempt to manipulate them. In particular, they seek to influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness when planning political communication and action in such a way that their public occurrences fit news selection criteria. Spin-doctors,

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aware of the mechanisms of news production, take into consideration the media’s foreseeable reactions when designing political campaigns. Rather than leading public opinion, political elites follow it. Public opinion is monitored, especially during election campaigns. Prospective voters are invited to take part in the elaboration of their rhetoric and policies. Political messages are tested and tried with audiences before they are publicly released. Rather than delivering one and the same message to all target groups, political elites today appeal to voters’ different groups with diversified messages, trying to give everybody what they want to hear. Rather than suppressing critical voices and outlets, political elites attempt to enhance a positive coverage. Critical investigative reporting that discloses abuses of power is published mainly in small circulation weekly magazines, and is, more often than not, ignored by those involved. Instead, political elites focus their communication on nationwide media outlets and channels of direct contact with prospective voters such as the social media. Rather than using quality newspapers and public broadcasters whose audience share has been declining steadily over the past two decades, political elites rely more and more extensively on tabloid newspapers and commercial broadcasters with massive reach. Most notably, politicians make appearances in quiz shows, talk shows, reality shows and even soap operas on commercial television in an attempt to reach citizens with little interest in politics. Rather than seeking ideological hegemony by imposing their own particularistic values on the entire society, political elites today acknowledge ideological hegemony, i.e., the diversity of views characteristic of modern societies. Rather than controlling political campaigns to the full and from above, spindoctors now often apply grass root campaign techniques, i.e., they involve prospective voters in the dissemination of their messages and in the mobilization of fellow voters. To use the terms of Durkheimian media sociology: communication–as– transmission methods have been largely discarded, while communication–as– ritual methods are on the rise (cf. Carey, 1989; Rothenbuhler, 1998). Acts of modern political communication are deeply ritualistic in nature. Unlike political propaganda, political marketing relies on the active feedback and participation of voters in both political communication and political action. The public is offered the chance to define key political issues and values, and to form joint opinion platforms. In other words, political communication in Central and Eastern Europe has largely been Westernized, or professionalized, while, it should be noted again, some of the old techniques of political propaganda, inherited from the pretransformation period, have also persisted. The methods of political marketing have evolved gradually and organically in Western Europe and in the United States of America. Norris, for example, distinguishes three successive, yet partly overlapping, phases of the development of campaign techniques in many of the old democracies. Pre-modern campaigns relied on low–budget communication strategies that were organized

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mainly on the local level and based on the use of the party press, as well as such methods of interpersonal contact with voters as local rallies and door–to–door campaigning. In the United States, this period lasted from the mid–nineteenth century until the 1950s. Modern campaigns relied on higher budgets and were organized on the national level in an attempt to reach audiences through nationwide television networks. This period, when public opinion polls were of growing importance, lasted from the early 1960s until the late 1980s. And finally, high–budget postmodern campaigns focused on a multilevel dissemination of diversified messages through cable television and the Internet. This last period, in which spin-doctors came to play a key role, began in the early 1990s (Norris, 2000). For obvious reasons, no such organic development could take place in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, where free and plural political competition and media have no tradition, except for brief periods. As a result, a few years after the political transformations of 1989–1991, the techniques of premodern, modern and postmodern campaigns were adopted roughly simultaneously, and seem to have coexisted to date in the region. When speaking of the paradigm shift defined above, some conceptual specifications may be needed. Firstly and most obviously, political propaganda and political marketing are not mutually exclusive categories; they should be seen as dominant paradigms, or the main rules to which there are exceptions, during the respective periods. For example, the government capture of public broadcasters has persisted in some countries such as Hungary and Romania, while marketing techniques are now also being deployed in these countries. Further, political parties within a country may differ: big and small, rich and poor, governing and opposition, catch–all and programmatic, unitary and factionalized, mass–based and elite–based parties may differ in their communication strategies, depending on the resources that they have access to and the constituencies they wish to appeal to. It is also to note that, despite their differences, political propaganda and political marketing have similarities as well. Both methods of political communication mobilize significant financial resources in an attempt to reach their goals. Also, both political propaganda and political marketing rely heavily on the power of political ideologies. People have an innate desire to make order out of chaos, to understand and to categorize the world that surrounds them, and to develop political identities. Political ideologies, whose key function is to structure reality, meet this need (cf. Heywood, 2003). The political elites’ messages do not focus upon ‘reality’ as an objective given, but on a series of subjective realities perceived through the lenses of political ideologies. As a result, political messages are simplistic and populist in nature in both propaganda and marketing campaigns. While the paradigm shift suggested above seems to be characteristic of most countries across Central and Eastern Europe, there is no reason to believe that it should be an irreversible one. Hungary, which is an outlier to regional processes

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in that the government change in 2010 generated a major backlash in the status of media freedom,9 seems to display a clear pattern of return to the old–school methods of political propaganda (for details, see Bajomi–Lázár, forthcoming/a).

Research Methodology While political campaigns in the former communist countries have been widely, but not extensively, studied by media analysts, little attention has been devoted to show how spin-doctors and senior politicians relate to the media. The following sections will give an overview of some of the findings of a series of interviews conducted with those designing and executing political campaigns. The research team of the Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe project—including Václav Štětka, Henrik Örnebring and me—has made over three hundred semi-structured interviews with media professionals, regulators, spin doctors and senior politicians in the ten former communist countries that have joined the European Union since 2004. Of these interviews, forty-five will be analyzed here. These were conducted with political communicators (mostly former journalists and/or politicians) and active party politicians in two Central European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary), two South–East European countries (Bulgaria, Romania) and two North–East European countries (Latvia, Lithuania) between April and October 2011. Among other things, the interviews aimed at gaining a better understanding of the following issues: What do politicians think of the media’s influence on public opinion and voting behaviour? Do politicians monitor public opinion before making ideological and policy choices? Do politicians/spin doctors pretest messages before releasing them? Do politicians attend media trainings? Do politicians use the social media to reach voters? Do politicians/spin doctors take advice from Western spin doctors when elaborating their communication strategies? The interviewees have been selected in such a way that both governing and opposition party spin-doctors and politicians are represented, including major as well as minor political forces, and of a variety of ideological stances. The interviews have been anonymised; for this reason, only the country of origin will be indicated when quotations are used. (It should be noted that the interviews, whose lengths varied between thirty minutes and two hours, covered a wide range of issues, not just political communication.)

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Findings Even the superficial observer may note politicians’ preoccupation with the media, while at the same time media effects research and reception studies suggest that the impact of mass communication tends to be overestimated, and other factors such as voters’ personal experiences and interpersonal communication are widely believed to be less influential than they actually are (e.g., Lazarsfeld et al., 1948; Klapper, 1960; Hall, 1974; Morley, 1992). The dissonance between common wisdom and empirical findings raises the question: how much influence, in the politicians’ view, do the media have on public opinion and voting behaviour? Below are some answers that occur to be typical of many politicians: ‘The media’s role cannot be overestimated. It is the strongest among the various agents that shape public opinion.’ (Hungary) ‘We [. . .] live in a mediatized democracy, and the various political actors who use the media [. . .] first consider what the ‘mediability’ of the action is.’ (Hungary) ‘It is a fact in the Czech Republic that the mass media have an incredible influence on the way politics is perceived by the citizens.’ (Czech Republic) ‘At least one third of people really vote under the influence of the mass media.’ (Lithuania, referring to the local Russian population) When answering a control question (‘Do people believe the media?’), politicians confirmed that the media, in their views, had people’s trust. 10 As one of them put it: ‘The viewers and readers have a kind of over-trust in media.’ (Lithuania) Of all media outlets, television is still believed to be the most influential: ‘The role of media is huge. And especially the role of television.’ (Lithuania) ‘Viewers do not decide rationally, but on the basis of their impressions.’ (Hungary) However, for new and small parties, which the traditional media largely ignore or treat unfavorably, the Internet is of a growing significance. This seems to be the case with the Freedom and Solidarity Party in Slovakia and the Green Party in the Czech Republic, among other political forces. At the same time, some politicians were more prudent, or ambivalent, when asked about the media’s impact: ‘I believe that my party, like any political party, overestimates the role of the media.’ (Romania) ‘The relationship between the press and people’s behaviour is often unpredictable. [. . .] It is indeed very difficult for the media to influence politics in line with their intentions. [. . .] Often these attempts turn against them, and their outcome might be very different from what was intended.’ (Czech Republic) This prudence or ambivalence could also be observed when politicians were asked about whether the government capture of public broadcasters pays or not.

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Some Czech, Hungarian and Lithuanian politicians admitted that media capture may actually have a boomerang effect in that it can actually alienate voters: ‘I don’t think [government control over public broadcasters] pays. Even in totalitarian systems, where the regime tries to control the Internet, such attempts are not efficient for very long. Besides, the past twenty years are evidence that those who submit the public service media to tight government control will lose the next elections.’ (Hungary) ‘I would say that pro-government propaganda could pay, had it been done in a smart way. The invasion of the public service media, however, is without doubt counterproductive.’ (Hungary) ‘I believe [the political control of public broadcasters] doesn’t pay.’ (Czech Republic) ‘[Attempts to control public broadcasters can] backfire very easily. The political parties observe this very cautiously.’ (Lithuania) Several of the interviewees suggested that the media have a direct impact not only on public opinion but on the political process and on politicians’ personal careers as well: ‘Of course media are important, very important players, they are shaping politics’ (Latvia) ‘A newspaper can kill a fly and a politician.’ (Bulgaria) ‘Part of the media [are] of extreme toxicity. [. . .] There is unsubstantiated aggression and distortion of truth, absolutely clearly.’ (Romania) ‘The climate in general of the media is the climate of war, with insinuations, different mixtures of real scandals and fake ones, and the arena of media have become some kind of place for psychological warfare where you fight your opponents, not just trying to advertise how good you are yourself, but also to buy fake stories, humiliating stories about your opponents.’ (Lithuania, emphasis added). It is important to note that, in addition to the media’s perceived influence on public opinion, the political process and politicians’ careers, there might be other reasons why politicians exert pressure on media outlets, and especially public broadcasters. The capture of the state media allows them to control the resources that the media have, including production funds, infrastructure, and well–paying positions, which they can use for party building, organization, and patronage; for example, jobs in the media and the media authority can be allocated to party supporters in exchange for past and future services (Bajomi– Lázár, forthcoming/b). The interviews also showed that most politicians and parties rely on opinion surveys, especially during election campaigns. Surveys are usually commissioned to professional research institutes. Their reliability, however, is an issue in some countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, where it is a widely held view by both politicians and spin-doctors that survey data and findings are manipulated. Interestingly, the Labour Party in Lithuania, established by a local businessman, keeps an eye on survey results to such an extent that even its name is

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based on survey findings: this is the name and profile that there has been a public demand for. Some of our interviewees, for example the representative of the Bulgarian Ataka Party, mentioned that they also used focus group research to pretest messages. In Hungary, the Fidesz Party uses direct mail surveys to monitor public opinion. In the Czech Republic, some of the senior politicians go out every now and then with voters to discuss current issues over a beer. And, of course, press leaks are also widely used across the region to see how the public would react to new policy ideas. Importantly, though, most politicians observe survey results to a certain extent only, and do not base their decisions solely on them. Different parties display different patterns in this respect. Not very surprisingly, populist parties rely more heavily on survey findings than programmatic parties do. (The number of programmatic parties seems to be decreasing across the region, while that of populist ones appears to be increasing. In other words, there may be a growing number of populist, or pragmatic, or cross–over, parties that change their positions ‘with the wind’, that is, with public opinion–especially in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.) Small parties keep an eye on their own constituencies only (as the examples of the late Free Democrats’ Alliance in Hungary and of the Ataka Party in Bulgaria show), whereas big ones follow more closely the will of the general population. Not only are messages tested via opinion polls and occasionally via focus group research, but politicians also keep an eye on feedback from various social groups. Party programmes are elaborated in close collaboration with different organizations gathering prospective voters, including party members among whom draft programmes are circulated through various channels, as well as stakeholders such as nongovernmental and professional organizations, including trade unions that party officials consult with on a more or less regular basis. Politicians and parties use different channels when communicating with various target groups. In particular, - communication with party members is still dominated by traditional methods such as the official party newspaper, internal flyers, face–to–face meetings and telephone calls to local party officials, but it increasingly relies on such new channels as the party webpage, electronic newsletters and mailing lists; - party sympathizers are addressed via nonofficial party newspapers and the social media (Twitter, Facebook, and its local versions); - other voters are mainly addressed via television (including talk shows, quiz shows, reality shows and soap operas). It is to note that parties that are the leading forces in coalition governments have different organizational units to take care of government and of party communication, even though the division line between the two is often blurred (as it is in Hungary, for example). Politicians’ and parties’ positions define their communication strategies. Young and small parties with weak organizational structures and limited re-

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sources often struggle with internal communication. And, especially when in opposition, they find it difficult to get media attention. Extreme right parties are an exception to this rule and seem to intentionally break societal taboos in order to make the news (as do the Movement for a Better Hungary Party and the Ataka Party in Bulgaria). Further, small and opposition parties usually do not have the money to commission opinion polls (such is the case of Politics Can Be Different in Hungary), or not on a regular basis (as is demonstrated by the cases of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania and of the Green Party in the Czech Republic). Speaking of the social media, the interviews showed that many of the senior politicians have either Facebook profiles or Weblogs, which they primarily use to reach young urban audiences. The way the social media are used is usually not decided centrally; most often it is politicians themselves who make their posts as they see fit. Top politicians, such as prime ministers, are an exception to this rule as their posts are managed by their communication teams. At the same time, the interviews revealed a certain deal of skepticism with regard to the use of this communication channel. As one politician put it: ‘New media [are] a communication channel for young people, but they never go to vote.’ (Lithuania) Some interviewees have also noted that the use of the social media may backfire, as it attracts hostile comments. The use of the social media may also imply difficulties for governing parties and politicians: ‘When you create a Facebook profile, you make it possible for anybody to start communicating with you, in an informal way. And if you want it to work, you have to answer in an informal way, too. But the Ministry has no informal information!’ (Czech Republic) Some interviewees have mentioned that Facebook may bring more profit to opposition forces than to governing ones, because of its mobilizing impact; it is an ideal means to organize demonstrations and flash mobs in order to protest against government policies. For example, the press freedom rallies in Budapest in March and October 201111 and the Sofia protests in September 2011 after the Katunitsa murder12 were to a large degree organized via Facebook. Spin-doctors stressed that they also listen to feedback from journalists. They start their working day reading the press and, every now and then, they socially meet with journalists whom they seek to maintain good personal contacts with. As one spin-doctor put it, ‘I also got familiar with the ‘demand’–what the journalists want to know. Therefore I try to adjust our service to this perceived demand, so the journalists don’t get things from us which they don’t get to use.’ (Czech Republic) In a similar vein, all politicians interviewed reported that members of parliament attend media trainings every now and then, during which they are taught how they should communicate with journalists. Importantly, some mentioned that spin-doctors from western countries also take part in the elaboration of campaign strategies and, occasionally, in trainings. In particular, the names of Jacques Séguéla (Bulgaria) and Ron Werber (Hungary, Romania) were men-

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tioned. One spin-doctor has noted the businesslike nature of the relationship between communication advisers and political forces: ‘What is the most funny thing is that some of [the United States–based communication consultancy companies] worked in a campaign for one party, and then in another campaign for another party—for the Social Democrats in 2004, for the Liberals in 2008, and for [President] Băsescu in 2009.’ (Romania) Trainings are usually held at the beginning of parliamentary mandates and before election campaigns.

Concluding Remarks Most politicians still believe that the media are an efficient means to influence public opinion and voting behaviour, yet they tend to rely on the refined techniques of political marketing, rather than the rudimentary methods of political propaganda—this is how the major findings of the interviews can be summarised, in line with the proposition that political communication has been largely Westernized in the former communist countries. Political rhetoric and practice are increasingly based on feedback and, as a general rule, political elites try to follow, rather than lead, public opinion; spin doctors disseminate diversified messages through different channels to different target groups in an attempt to appeal to voters. Political elites now attempt to manipulate, rather than capture the media. This paradigm shift in political communication is connected with the fact that the intensity of political pressure exerted on the media has decreased in Central and Eastern Europe, and the status of media freedom has improved since the early post-transformation period. Yet, despite similarities, the region’s countries also display major differences in terms of both political communication and media freedom. While in Bulgaria, Romania and, more recently, Hungary, the status of media freedom is quite poor and direct political pressure on the media is a daily practice, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Lithuania perform better in terms of media freedom, and political pressure is less marked.

Notes 1. The deficit of media freedom will be defined as the recurring prevention by pressure of the publication of information detrimental to individual politicians and political groups in order to hinder their control by the electorate. 2. See the Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press Historical Data at http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=274 (last accessed on October 24, 2011).

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3. The questions assess the constitutional guarantees of free speech, the independence of the judiciary, the independence of media authorities, government’s control over information, access to information, self–censorship, state ownership, the transparency and concentration of private media, the state’s role in allocating advertising revenues and subsidies, etc. For a detailed description of the Freedom House research methodology, see http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=350&ana_page=348&year=2008 (last accessed on October 24, 2011). 4. The consolidation of media freedom can be defined as the process that aims at completing the behavioral and attitudinal foundations of media freedom. Thus the concept denotes the continuous marginalization of behaviour patterns incompatible with the baseline of media freedom and the stabilization of those in harmony with it. This is not to suggest that there can be no deviations from media freedom in a democratic system, but to say that media freedom must be the main rule, while the institutions, behaviour patterns and attitudes that challenge the freedom of the media are widely considered undemocratic and are marginalized accordingly. 5. The manuscript was submitted in November 2011. 6. See the Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe project’s country case studies at http://mde.politics.ox.ac.uk/index.php/publications (last accessed on October 24, 2011). 7. See the Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe project’s country case studies at http://mde.politics.ox.ac.uk/index.php/publications (last accessed on October 24, 2011). 8. Following Max Weber’s theory, it is largely held that power actually is the attribution of power: one has power when people accept his or her authority. Thus power and its representation are closely interrelated. It is for this reason that pseudo-events and media events may work as self–fulfilling prophecies; in order to become big, one must look big (cf. Boorstin, 1961). 9. Hungary’s press freedom index fell seven points on a hundred–point scale according to Freedom House’s annual press freedom report: for the year 2009, Hungary received twenty-three points; for the year 2010, thirty points; see http://www.freedomhouse.org/images/File/fop/2011/FOTP2011GlobalRegionalTables.pd f (last accessed on October 24, 2011). 10. Note that this is not the case. As a worldwide survey conducted by Gallup in 2006 and 2007 has shown, public trust in the media is quite low in both Western and Central and Eastern Europe, see http://www.gallup.com/poll/103300/Quality–Integrity– Worlds–Media–Questioned.aspx?version=print (last accessed on November 2, 2011). 11. See http://www.eubusiness.com/news–eu/hungary–media.93mand, http://thecontrarianhungarian.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/hungarian–government–to– block–protest/ (last accessed on October 31, 2011). 12. See http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132481 and http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132480 (last accessed on October 31, 2011).

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References Bajomi–Lázár, Péter (2008): The Consolidation of Media Freedom in Post–Communist Countries. In: Jakubowicz, Karol, & Sükösd, Miklós (eds.): Finding the Right Place on the Map. Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective. Chicago; University of Chicago Press. Bajomi–Lázár, Péter (forthcoming/a): From One–Party to Multi–Party Media control– and Back. Paradigm Shifts in Hungary’s Media Politics. Manuscript. Bajomi–Lázár, Péter (forthcoming/b): The Colonisation of the Media. Media Freedom and Party Systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Manuscript. Bajomi–Lázár, Péter, & Sükösd, Miklós (2008): Media Policies and Media Politics in East Central Europe: Issues and Trends 1989–2008. In: Alonso, Isabel Fernández, & Moragas, Miquel de (eds.): Communications and Cultural Policies in Europe. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2008. Boorstin, Daniel J. (1961): The Image. A Guide to Pseudo–Events in America. New York: Atheneum. Brown, J. A. C. (1971): Techniques of Persuasion. From Propaganda to Brainwashing. London: Penguin Books. Carey, James (1989): Communication as Culture. London: Routledge. Czepek, Andrea, Hellwig, Melanie & Nowak, Eva, eds. (2009): Press Freedom and Pluralism in Europe. Concepts & Conditions. Bristol, UK, & Chicago: Intellect Ltd. Dayan, Daniel, & Katz, Elihu (1992): Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dragomir, Marius, & Thompson, Mark, eds. (2008): Television Across Europe: More Channels, Less Independence. Follow–up Reports 2008. New York & Budapest: Open Society Institute. Gross, Peter (2002): Entangled Evolutions. Media and Democratization in Eastern Europe. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press. Hall, Stuart (1974): The Television Discourse—Encoding and Decoding. In: Gray, Ann, & McGuigan, Jim (eds.): Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold. Herman, Edward S., & Chomsky, Noam ([1988] 1994): Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media. London: Vintage. Heywood, Andrew (2003): Political Ideologies. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Hrvatin, Sandra B., & Petković, Brankica (2004): Regional Overview. In: Petković, Brankica (ed.): Media Ownership and Its Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism. Ljubljana: Peace Institute. Jakubowicz, Karol (2003): Social and Media Change in Central and Eastern Europe: Frameworks of Analysis. In: Paletz, David, & Jakubowicz, Karol (eds.): Business as Usual. Continuity and Change in Central and Eastern Europe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Jankovics, Zsanett (2008): A személyek jelentősége a politikában [The importance of personalities in politics]. Médiakutató, Spring. Kiss, Balázs (2002): Marketingszemlélet a kampányban [A marketing approach to political campaigns]. In: Sükösd, Miklós, & Vásárhelyi, Mária (eds.): Hol a határ? Kampánystratégiák és kampányetika 2002. Budapest: Irodalom Kft.

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Kiss, Balázs (2006): Missziótól marketingig. Fejezetek a propaganda elmélettörténetéből [From mission to marketing. Chapters from the history of propaganda theories]. Médiakutató, Spring. Klapper, Joseph (1960): The Effects of Mass Communication. New York: Free Press. Kunczik, Michael (2001): Media and Democracy. Are Western Concepts of Press Freedom Applicable in New Democracies? In: Bajomi–Lázár, Péter, & Hegedűs, István (eds.): Media and Politics. Conference Papers on the Interplay of Media and Politics. Budapest: Új Mandátum Publishing House. Lazarsfeld, Paul, Gaudet, Hazel & Berelson, Bernard (1948): The People’s Choice. How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Electoral Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce. McNair, Brian (1998): The Sociology of Journalism. London & New York & Sidney & Oakland: Arnold. Morley, David (1992): Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Newman, Bruce I. (1994): The Marketing of the President—Political Marketing as Campaign Strategy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Norris, Pippa (2000): A Virtuous Circle. Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paletz, David, Jakubowicz, Karel, & Novosel, Pavao, eds. (1995): Glasnost and After. Media and Change in Central and Eastern Europe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Popper, Karl (1966): The Open Society and Its Ennemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. (1998): Ritual Communication. From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony. Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage. Schudson, Michael (2003): The Sociology of the News. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company. Sparks, Colin, with Anna Reading (1998): Communism, Capitalism, and the Mass Media. London: Sage. Splichal, Slavko (1994): Media beyond Socialism. Theory and Practice in Central Europe. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sükösd, Miklós, & Bajomi–Lázár, Péter (2003): The Second Wave of Media Reform in East Central Europe. In: Sükösd, Miklós, & Bajomi–Lázár, Péter (eds.): Reinventing Media. Media Policy Reform in East Central Europe. Budapest: CEU Press. Trionfi, Barbara (2001): Freedom of the Media in Central and Eastern Europe. In: Bajomi–Lázár, Péter, & Hegedűs, István (eds.): Media and Politics. Conference Papers on the Interplay of Media and Politics. Budapest: Új Mandátum Publishing House.

Chapter 5

Media and the Birth of the Post–communist Consumer Nadia Kaneva and Elza Ibroscheva On the morning of May 31, 2003, four thousand people showed up on a grassy field outside Prague for the opening of a new hypermarket with the seductive name “Czech Dream” and the populist ad slogan, “The hypermarket for better life.” The grand opening had been preceded by an advertising blitz on TV, radio, and billboards, in fliers, and newspapers. As the crowds gathered and looked out at the rainbow–colored storefront in the distance, a special song recorded for the campaign blasted through loudspeakers: “It will be a nice, big bash/And if you got no cash/Get a loan and scream/I want to fulfill my dream” (Czech Dream, 2004). But the eager shoppers were in for a surprise: the giant, colorful façade looming in the distance was just that—a façade, behind which stood nothing but an empty field. When they discovered the elaborate hoax, some people laughed and others grew angry with the two young “executives” who had welcomed them to the field. It turned out that the executives were two film students who had set out to make a documentary about the lure of consumerism and the power of advertising that, in their view, were transforming post-Communist Czech society. What does this episode tell us about the post-Communist subject? Were the people drawn to the field that day clueless dupes who had fallen prey to the manipulative powers of advertising? Were they moved by residual impulses, inherited from a communist past of deficits and rations, to pounce on and hoard any available consumer goods? Or does this event indicate a profound transformation in post-Communist subjectivity, which is expressed through the pleas67

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ures and frustrations of consumerism? In our view, the “Czech Dream” experiment illustrates, above all, that consumption and consumerism have become important factors in post-Communist societies. Broadly speaking, consumerism can be understood as an ontological characteristic of societies where “people formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do not need for subsistence” and where individuals “take some of their identity from a procession of new items that they buy and exhibit” (Stearns, 2006, vii). In other words, consumerism relates to human behaviors, values, and dispositions and presupposes particular forms of subjectivity. In this chapter, we are interested in how consumer–subjectivities come into being in the post-Communist world and, more specifically, we want to examine the role played by the media in this process. At the outset of our discussion, we would venture the following thesis: namely, that the adoption of consumerist values east of Berlin would have been impossible without important media transformations in the past twenty years. In the rest of this chapter, we will try to illustrate how and why the media have been involved in the birth of the post-Communist consumer.

Communist Consumption vs. Post–communist Consumerism As we begin, let us clarify what we mean when we talk about consumerism and how we relate this notion to the post-Communist context. In a general sense, consumerism is a phenomenon linked to the project of modernity and its ideals of individual freedom, choice, and happiness. It is also inseparable from modernizing processes, such as the industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization of social life. Communist societies, just like capitalist ones, were committed to a program of modernization and, in that sense, consumption and consumerism were not alien to communism. Writing in 1979, Vaclav Havel pointed out exactly that in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” when he argued that (Havel, 1985, 26–7): [T]he hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society (the long period of coexistence with the West has only hastened this process). In other words, what we have here is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social, intellectual, and psychological consequences.

The popular film Good Bye Lenin! (2003) provides an apt illustration of Havel’s diagnosis. In the film, the mother of Alex, a young East Berliner, falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and wakes up in the “new world” after 1989. Determined to protect his frail mother from a fatal shock,

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Alex decides to keep her from finding out that East Germany, as she knew it and was committed to, no longer exists. For a while he succeeds in his plan and does this in two main ways: he surrounds his bed–ridden mother with consumer goods from the communist period, and shows her videos of fake television newscasts, created by himself in typical communist style. This fictional example reveals the centrality of both consumption (or, indeed, lack of it) and the media in the communist experience. Those of us who grew up in communist countries during the late years of the system have fond memories of their first, much coveted pair of jeans; we might recall the excitement of getting a third–generation tape of a Pink Floyd album, smuggled in by someone who had visited the West. This consumerist drive has been colloquially described as the need for “BMWs and bananas,” both of which were extremely scarce in communist times. After the opening of the Wall, Western Berliners watched with bemusement as droves of Easterners stormed the grocery stores and bought large quantities of bananas. On the flipside, Easterners were frustrated when their favorite, familiar, communist–era products disappeared from store shelves and were replaced by imports that carried unknown foreign labels. This drove a wave of nostalgia marketing, which resurrected some of the product brands of communism and cashed in on their emotional appeal. All of this is to show that the communist system was not inoculated against consumer impulses. Indeed, some commentators have argued that the 1989 “velvet revolutions” were revolutions of consumers, who were more enticed by the West’s material prosperity and popular culture than by lofty ideals of freedom and democracy. Still, the practices of consumption under communism had to be contained within the system’s ideological program. The relationship of communist ideology with consumption was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, communism condemned opulent consumption as “decadent,” “bourgeois,” and “morally corrupt.” On the other, the system sought legitimacy by promising to improve the material conditions of people’s lives (Aldridge, 2003). Thus, communism cultivated consumer desires in its subjects, while at the same time it inspired a sense of guilt and moral apprehension related to such desires as a way to control and subsume them within its ideological doctrine (Dichev, 2007). To counteract the dangerous and subversive temptations of Western consumerism, communist ideologues developed the alternative notion of “rational consumption.” It fit in better with the communist ideals of collectivism and social egalitarianism, as well as with the strictures of planned economies (Reid, 2002). In this context, the media and advertising were called upon to educate the communist “rational” consumer in matters of style, fashion, and good taste. This was part of a larger project of engineering the “Socialist Man” and “Socialist Woman,” who would together build the “Bright Socialist Future.” State–run media served as essential propaganda tools in advancing this goal. At the same time, the ontology of the “socialist way of life”–derived from Marxist–Leninist

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doctrines—postulated that the source of human happiness was to be found in the acts of creation and construction, and not of consumption (Bankov, 2009, 227). What, then, are the key differences between communist consumption and the post-Communist consumerism we wish to examine? Reid (2002, 215–216) describes Soviet consumer society as one where the regime continued to privilege production over consumption; and despite increased attention to living standards in the 1950s, this remained a culture of shortages—requiring of the consumer strategies of procuring, hoarding, and making do—rather than one of boundless and conspicuous consumption.

By contrast, when we refer to post-Communist consumerism, we wish to point to the ideological reorientation of society from a focus on production, conservation and sacrifice to a focus on consumption, luxury, and pleasure. We would argue that in the post-Communist period consumption is no longer merely an outlet for the repressed desires of private individuals. It has become a fundamental and publicly valorized way for ordering the world and for constructing personal and collective identities. In other words, we see a difference between the ontological claims of communist consumption and those of post-Communist consumerism, where the latter has been liberated from the ideological straightjacket of communism. This is not to suggest that post-Communist consumerism serves no ideological purpose. On the contrary, in the political environment of the “transition,” consumption was employed to legitimize the new capitalist order. PostCommunist ruling elites, regardless of their political colors, promised to elevate their countries to levels of economic prosperity enjoyed in the West. In this context, consumption was normatively revalued in public discourse and became a measure of social status and success. Mediated displays of opulent consumption and luxury offered “proof” that capitalism was “better” than communism and nourished the fantasies and aspirations of audiences. In short, the media were centrally involved in the rise of post-Communist consumerism as a dominant value in society. Let us examine in more detail how this happened.

How Post-Communist Media Promote Consumerism A critical aspect of the post-Communist “transition” was reflected in the transformations of the media systems of former Eastern Bloc countries. The full scope of these transformations cannot be addressed in this short chapter, but we will discuss two dimensions of media change, which can be broadly characterized as structural and discursive. Developments along these dimensions illumi-

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nate how the media have contributed to the production of the post-Communist consumer–subject.

Structural Transformations The structural dimension concerns the dramatic economic restructuring of the media sphere, which was related to an overall push to privatize and marketize the economies of post-Communist countries. The path of rapid privatization and market liberalization—known also under the revealing name of “shock therapy”—was promoted, in large part, by Western financial interests represented by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). These institutions, guided by what has become known as the “Washington consensus,” underwrote the transition from planned to market economies with loans that contained strict requirements for structural changes. In this way, they ensured that borrowing countries would be able to repay their debt and, further, that their “emerging markets” would be opened swiftly to global capital. That also applied to post-Communist media systems. Previously controlled by the state, the media industries were subjected, apart from the transformation of state into public service broadcasting, to rapid privatization, which in turn opened a host of opportunities for local and international investors. While the exact amount of foreign investment in the media across Central and Eastern Europe is difficult to establish, it is certainly no secret that transnational media corporations today own some of the most successful media outlets fully or partly. Initially, the influx of foreign capital was hailed as a break from the stifling control of the state. However, the commercial elements of a media system, which operates in the interest of business profits and shareholders, quickly began to raise concerns about the independence and quality of public discourse in the media. Some critics have sounded the alarm that the takeover of many postCommunist media markets by global conglomerates has the potential for cultural imperialism through the imposition of commercially motivated programming, which does not necessarily reflect local cultures or serve democratic purposes. A 1995 study of broadcast media in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Russia, and Slovakia revealed that programs originating in the West represented over 40 percent of content, with movies, serials, music, and documentaries dominating. Notably, this number did not include locally produced copies of Western programs (Coman, 2000). An illustration of the latter can be seen in reality TV shows, such as Big Brother and Pop Idol, which have been cloned in Eastern Europe by using local casts and production teams. In sum, the influx of Western capital and content into post-Communist media markets has important consequences not only in terms of the quality of programs or the availability of

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choice, but also in terms of long–term political, economic, and cultural influences. As Downing (1996, 224) puts it, [W]ithout having to tie oneself to many of the doom–laden prophecies of cultural homogenization intoned by typical exponents of the cultural imperialism thesis, the realties of accountability—or rather, of its loss—become potentially even more troubled if major control of the media is vested outside national borders.

Such legitimate concerns notwithstanding, post-Communist countries saw an unprecedented growth in the number and diversity of media outlets, and these new media entities relied on advertising revenues, rather than state subsidies, for their survival. For example, in Bulgaria, which prior to the collapse of communism had thirteen newspapers, two TV stations, and two radio channels, all under state control, in 1996, only seven years later, there was a record 1,053 newspapers, of which 46 were national with 1,464,000 readers, and 635 other periodicals. Electronic media witnessed their own unprecedented growth; since 1991 Bulgaria has licensed 80 radio stations and 18 national and local television stations, and it is argued that there are over 700 local cable operators for both radio and television. With two notable exceptions—Bulgarian National Television (BNT) and Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), which still receive some state subsidies—Bulgarian media outlets operate with financing by private capital and advertising revenue. In 2008, Bulgarian media generated revenues of over $386 million, compared to $52 million in 2004, registering a 742 percent growth over a period of only four years (International Research & Exchange Board, 2008). Notably, the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute reported that the number of television hours devoted to commercials grew from a mere 144 hours in 1993 to 16,698 in 2000—an increase of 11,500 percent (cited in Ghodsee, 2007, 33). Similar trends could be observed across Central and Eastern Europe. The explosion of commercial media outlets led to a diversification of media formats and genres. One category that grew rapidly in the post-Communist period consisted of “lifestyle publications,” which focused on such topics as fashion and entertainment. The virtual absence of such media formats during communism was quickly replaced by an array of glossy magazines. Some of them were homegrown, but borrowed heavily from Western consumer–magazine concepts; others were licensed extensions of global magazine megabrands, owned by international media conglomerates. For example, the Hearst Corporation’s flagship Cosmopolitan magazine launched a Russian edition in 1994, which soon became the circulation leader among Cosmopolitan’s international editions, second only to the original U.S. edition (True, 1999). Releases of localized Cosmopolitan editions followed in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, and many other post-Communist countries. A Bulgarian example will serve to illustrate the domestic variant of lifestyle magazines and their role in displaying a new set of cultural values related to

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consumption and hedonism. Founded in 1996, Egoist magazine was among the local pioneers of the lifestyle genre. It promoted itself with the slogan “A magazine for the new generation,” and mimicked the visual aesthetics, content, and edgy attitude of Western lifestyle publications. The magazine’s suggestive title (the Bulgarian word for a selfish person) served a twofold function—to suggest an anti-collectivist, antiestablishment spirit, and to signal the legitimacy of the idea that human satisfaction is intimately connected to the acquisition of desired objects, whatever the price. Egoist, along with other magazines that followed in its footsteps, created an arena for showcasing cultural trends in a consumer– oriented and advertiser–friendly format. Importantly, this type of publication departed from the mass approach of communist media and focused on narrowly defined “target” audiences. In the case of Egoist, the audience consisted of “the elite of the young generation, people having Internet access, living in the conditions of urban culture, fluent in English, materially well–off, who respect freedom of choice, quality of life, etc.” (Spassov, 2000, 141). This was, essentially, the prototype for the ideal post-Communist consumer subject, who was hedonistic, selfish, and proud of it. Thus, lifestyle media became not only a new forum for redefining the meaning of consumption—from what books to read to what jeans to wear—but also for articulating and shaping the voice, ideas, and life aspirations of the first post-Communist generation. In parallel with these developments, a new advertising industry was born almost overnight to service the needs of private businesses and their media partners. By the mid–1990’s, global advertising behemoths were setting up branches in post-Communist Europe alongside a host of local agencies, eager to profit from the expanding advertising market. According to media and marketing company Zenith Optimedia, overall spending on advertising in major media in Central and Eastern Europe increased five times from $7 billion in 1997 to $35 billion in 2008. This rapid growth produced plenty of successful and not so imaginative experiments, including a lot of poorly produced advertising adaptations, which nonetheless filled the monolithic urban landscapes of post-1989 cities with color and vibrancy. Commercial messages of varying kind–music jingles on the radio, billboard ads displaying products never known in the communist past, TV commercials taunting the imagination with dreamy landscapes and functional commodities–filled the daily routine of post-Communist life. The sudden ubiquity of commercial advertising in post-Communist life was far from accidental; rather, it responded to both economic and cultural needs. On the one hand, advertising presented itself as the most reliable and tested model for a self–sustained media system, independent of state control and ideological manipulation. On the other, it brought the idea of consumer choice to everyone, in essence democratizing the very concept of consumption itself. Access to luxuries that had once been available only to a select few members of the communist nomenklatura was no longer politically controlled and depended solely on one’s purchasing powers. Owning commodities could now be understood as exercis-

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ing one’s personal freedom and not following the dictates of a political ideology. Through the pages of newspapers and magazines, from radio and TV commercials, every citizen could imagine and, in fact, could engage in making consumer choices. Moreover, the sudden encounter of Eastern Europeans with Western– style advertising lacked the “ironic distance” often practiced by consumers in advanced capitalist societies. Perhaps this initial naïveté of post-Communist consumers about advertising could account, at least in part, for the success of the Czech Dream experiment we mentioned earlier. To many Eastern Europeans, the wondrous world of advertising offered a beautiful escape from the harsh economic realities of “shock therapy,” which at first brought about a decline in living standards for the majority of the population. A report by the United Nations Development Program found that the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had suffered an unprecedented increase in poverty, unemployment, and mortality in the first decade of the transition (UNDP, 1998). While poverty levels decreased in the second decade, almost 30 percent of the population in these countries was still living on less than $5 per day in 2008, and that percentage was projected to grow (Horvath et al., 2009). Sut Jhally (n.d.) has eloquently pointed out how, in conditions of economic privation, advertising can conflate ideas about personal happiness, political freedom, and consumption: When your reality is hunger and despair it should not be surprising that the seductive images of desire and abundance emanating from the advertising system should be so influential in thinking about social and economic policy. Indeed not only happiness but political freedom itself is made possible by access to the immense collection of commodities. These are very powerful stories that equate happiness and freedom with consumption and advertising is the main propaganda arm of this view.

All of these observations point to the conclusion that the economic restructuring of the media in the aftermath of communism had significant cultural consequences as well, and we turn our attention to them next.

Discursive Transformations The second dimension of media change in the post-Communist context can be understood as a change in discourse, in the Foucauldian sense of the term. From this perspective, commercially–motivated media discourses represent a totalizing framework that presupposes certain types of subjectivity necessary to orient oneself within it. Looking at Western capitalist cultures, Andrew Wernick (1991) has described this shift as the rise of “promotional culture.” Looking at the ideological functions of advertising and marketing within it, he argues that

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the question of what has happened to the subject as a result of the spread of promotion turns, in part, on what has happened to the signifying practices and materials by which the individual subject has come to be enveloped. (1991, 191)

This is precisely where media play a crucial part, by engaging in commercially–motivated signifying practices and producing commercially–driven symbolic materials that constitute the promotional cultural milieu. Foucault discussed how modern states discipline—that is, control—their subjects through the process of examination, which continually classifies them into various categories through the use of scientific methods, such as modern medicine, census statistics, and other forms of measurement. Communism involved its own specificities of examination, which sorted people into ideologically–motivated categories, such as one’s membership (or not) in the communist party; one’s familial ties with high–level apparatchiks or, conversely, with dissidents; one’s cooperation with secret services, and so on. The post-Communist period saw the introduction of market–oriented tools of examination, which related to the commercialization of the media sphere as well. These included various forms of audience and marketing research, which sorted people into consumption segments. The normalization of such measurement techniques as part of the functioning of media organizations constitutes an important component of the discursive shift towards producing consumer–subjects that can be controlled and managed within the discursive order of capitalism. These developments also relate closely to the emergence of advertising as more than an economic mechanism, but as a dominant mode of public address. Advertising expanded beyond the merely commercial realm to infiltrate all aspects of social existence and it is precisely through shifts in these previously noncommercial areas that we can observe most clearly the rise of consumerism. Let us look more closely at three particular aspects in the social lives of postCommunist subjects—namely, political, national, and gendered identities. During the communist period, the production of subjectivities along each of these dimensions was inseparable from communist ideology and was tightly controlled by the state and its ideological apparatuses. With the relinquishing of state/party control, each of these markers of modern identity has undergone a shift towards increasing commercialization, resulting in the emergence of consumer–subjectivities.

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Consumerism and Politics The end of communist rule in political life meant the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly on the political process. One of the earliest manifestations of the newfound sense of freedom was expressed in the formation of a host of new political parties. Soon enough, these parties realized the importance of forging synergetic relationships with the media in order to establish a notable presence in the public sphere as well as a lasting bond with the electorate. Armed with little to no knowledge of how to deploy commercial media to their advantage, political parties had to climb a steep learning curve in schooling their leaders on how to develop strategic campaign messages. This did not happen without help and funding from Western (primarily American) consultants and organizations. Indeed, as Sussman and Krader (2008) have pointed out, the “branding of democracy” was a consistent policy of the American government in relation to post-Communist countries. Given the novelty of the entire concept of political campaigning via the media, it is not a surprise that both political parties and media professionals turned to the West in their search for workable models. In studying and adopting ideas from the West, politicians realized the power of creating political hot buttons through the use of memorable sound bites and indelible visual images. Thus, politics as the bloodstream of public discourse was to be understood as articulating not only ideas for governance, but also as producing political products—leaders, parties, issues, which could be packaged for public consumption. This trend was fueled by the power of television campaigning that offered the perfect forum for a new style of political advertising, one that stressed imagistic presentation instead of long–winded political speeches. A heavy dose of consumer advertising principles was quickly adopted in political advertising, where instantly recognizable visual logos, music jingles, and photographs of smiling candidates stood as tokens of a new political process which associated political choices with consumer choices. And to meet the demand for expert advice on how to wage successful political campaigns, the media profession adapted to this growing field, producing job titles and professional opportunities that had not existed during communism. These specialized practices and their practitioners were so novel that their titles—image makers, PR consultants, ratings, monitoring—often had no equivalent words in the local languages. More importantly, while the relevance of these concepts for democracy in Central and Eastern Europe is subject to debate, they undeniably heralded the emergence of a view of the political process as a form of commodity exchange between interested parties. This included seeing and addressing citizens as consumers—a trend that is evident in the growing use of various marketing gimmicks to stimulate electoral activity. For instance, in the Bulgarian parliamentary elections in 2005, voters were offered a chance to register to win an iPod, laptop, T–shirt, or other prizes in exchange for answering a few questions

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online. This form of consumer–citizenship, in effect, served to depoliticize political participation, while reaffirming the conflation of consumer choice with political choice. Perhaps this was to be expected in societies where life had been so thoroughly politicized during the communist period. In that sense, the infiltration of politics by consumerism can be seen as a reaction to and a rejection of the ideological past. A striking example of the potentially liberating, though deeply problematic, tendency to replace political with commercial expression is found in the former Yugoslavia, where the trauma of the political past was compounded by the violence that erupted after the end of communism. In a fascinating study, Volcic (2010, 159) reports that where once the landscape bristled with statues of political heroes and military leaders, in the aftermath of the fall of socialism and the end of subsequent wars, a new breed of statuary has emerged in the form of bronzed homages to Bruce Lee, Rocky, Tarzan, Winnetou, etc.

In her ethnography, Volcic encounters local people in the towns where these statues appear and learns about their disillusionment with political figures, which has led them to look for hopeful icons and role models in the fantasy world of media entertainment. While it could be argued that these statues do not encourage consumerist behaviors per se, their very existence suggests the centrality of commercialized media discourses in the lives of post-Communist subjects and the complex implications this has for the transformations of politics.

Consumerism and Nationhood Another aspect of identity that needed urgent reinvention after the end of communism was national identity. Under communist regimes, national identity narratives were closely intertwined with the ideological aims of the ruling party. Their construction through the media, education, and culture was tightly controlled by the state. As Kligman (1996, 68) points out, any form of “difference— whether gendered, ethnic, or national—was desirably dressed in the language of a homogenized equality recognizable in a ‘new socialist man.’” When the mask of equality fell off and the state lost its tight grip, national identities had to be revived or reinvented and the mandate of transition required that this happened in a way compatible with the new ideology of market capitalism. The commercialization of nationhood can be observed in many media discourses, although we can only offer a few brief illustrations here. Once again, advertising played a central part in the commercial reinvention of the national. National symbols were co–opted to sell anything from beer, to mobile phones, to the practice of shopping itself. For example, in 2004, the Bulgarian Union of Daily Newspaper Publishers ran in its newspapers a series of ads with the slo-

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gan, “Made by a Bulgarian.” The ads highlighted scientific, artistic, or sports achievements of various Bulgarians over the years, allegedly with the purpose of “raising the morale” of the nation. At the same time, the campaign was obviously intended as a ploy to sell more newspapers by appealing to national pride. Media across the region have conducted a number of similar projects, which invite audiences to vote for their favorite national symbols or historical figures, much like they vote for their favorite Pop Idol contestants. Further, a number of advertising campaigns that promote domestically manufactured goods have popped up in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and other post-Communist countries, suggesting that one could express and affirm national identity through shopping preferences. A Bulgarian magazine ad for this kind of “patriotic consumerism” featured a young woman holding a stack of gift boxes painted in the colors of the national flag. “The nation serves as repertoire for advertising” in postCommunist consumer society, as Mineva (2008, 1) argued. Moreover, such campaigns reinforce the discursive equation of citizen and consumer and translate national identity into a consumerist form. Just as the national was co–opted to sell products, conversely, the logic of product promotion was employed to sell the nation itself. A growing global phenomenon, known as “nation branding,” quickly gained popularity in former communist countries in the second decade of the transition and continues to gather steam. Nation branding refers to a set of ideas, rooted in Western marketing, which propose that in a world of global markets nations compete with each other for resources and attention, just like corporations or products do. By extension, this means that strategic branding campaigns, deployed through the mass media, could be used to change and enhance the images of nations with various economic and political benefits. The most pragmatic applications of nation branding are typically in the areas of tourism or trade promotion, as well as in efforts to attract foreign investment. More ambitious and controversial uses have to do with garnering international recognition and goodwill for political purposes. Nation branding was particularly appealing to national elites in postCommunist countries because it promised a quick and deceptively easy fix to the national identity malaise of transitional societies. Each of these countries was eager to show to the rest of the world that it was no longer a drab, backward outpost of the Soviet Empire. The need to polish up national images and invent new and shinier narratives of national identity and unity was felt especially urgently in the context of post-1989 aspirations for EU accession. Concerns over the way Western Europeans perceived their Eastern neighbors, clamoring at the doors of what could be called the European utopia, were a central topic of public discussion in every post-Communist country. Indeed, they became a dominant theme in local politics and provided an additional incentive for politicians to initiate highly visible media campaigns that promised to rehabilitate their countries’ international images in the eyes of audiences abroad and at home.

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Poland was the first post-Communist country to jump on the nation branding bandwagon. In 2001, Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs hired DDB Corporate Profiles, a branch of global ad agency DDB, to design a logo that would be used to promote tourism and trade. Estonia was another early adopter of the nation branding idea. When, in 2002, it became the first former Soviet country to host the Eurovision Song Contest, Estonia employed global brand consultancy Interbrand to develop a comprehensive rebranding program for the country. Since then, practically every Central and Eastern European country has engaged in some form of government–funded and privately executed branding initiative, resulting in a multitude of colorful logos, commercials on international television channels, such as CNN and EuroNews, advertisements in magazines and newspapers, billboards, websites, and so on. The success of such efforts to improve the images of post-Communist nations is difficult to measure, but their popularity is undeniable. Moreover, they have opened up a new market for branding consultancies eager to advise governments on how to promote their countries. Needless to say, the media channels that disseminate the campaigns have also reaped financial benefits. The significance of post-1989 nation branding is yet to be fully examined. It is important to note, however, that these campaigns are typically paid for with public money from state budgets and so they cannot be dismissed as harmless, frivolous experiments. A particularly controversial example is presented by the case of Kosovo, a nation that declared independence in February 2008. While some still challenge Kosovo’s legal status as a state, its government has been under attack for not doing enough to promote the new nation. In response, in October 2009, the government launched a nation branding campaign, featuring television commercials with the slogan “Kosovo, the young Europeans.” The agency retained for this effort was BBR Saatchi & Saatchi Tel Aviv, and the price tag for the campaign was €5.7 million (NationBranding.info, n.d.). This is a staggering price tag for a country where in 2009 unemployment was estimated at 45 percent and 30 percent of the population was living below the poverty line in 2010 (Central Intelligence Agency, 2011). Aside from concerns about the cost of branding campaigns, however, what is important to our discussion is their significance in rearticulating national identity in consumerist terms. Nation branding helps to reimagine nations as products for sale, which can be offered to affluent Western buyers, be they tourists or corporate investors. Moreover, citizens are encouraged to see and celebrate their national identity in consumer terms as well. To illustrate this last point, consider for example that to commemorate Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007, the Bulgarian government commissioned a television commercial that aired on all national channels. In this case, the whole nation was being defined through a commercial text, solidifying the notion that national identity has been fully appropriated within the realm of promotional culture and that national subjectivity had become an aspect of consumer subjectivity.

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Consumerism and Gender Finally, let us look at the way consumerism has infiltrated ideas about gender and, more specifically, about femininity. The fundamental move to foster a consumerist mentality in the post-Communist subject brought along deliberate images of gender, seen by the majority of both men and women as signs of Westernization and breaking away from the past. One consequence of this shift in visualizing images of the female body, accompanied by gender–stereotypical comments and combined with a market ideology, represented the woman and her sexuality as yet another available commodity. Partially clad women and nude models on the inside pages of daily newspapers are now a regular diet for the post-1989 reader and accepted as routine. More importantly, this trend became a commonly recognized symbol of the post-Communist transition across the region, as Borenstein (2008, 88) has contended, mostly because “the discourse of sex became inextricably linked with the discourse of economics. The result was a commodification of women’s bodies and female sexualities,” unseen on this scale during the communist regime. Women, in part, triggered the shift in gender representations. The consciousness fostered by totalitarian regimes and expressed in the mythical heroine of the past—who combined the identities of worker, mother, and revolutionary—was rejected and replaced with a full display of beauty, sexuality and hyperfemininity, all of which demanded acts of consumption. This trend was readily embraced by the mushrooming media outlets, which flagrantly used representations of rebellious, young women, bursting with sexual energy, to symbolize visually the rejection of the communist past and its stifling mores. For instance, Democratsia, the main opposition newspaper in Bulgaria, used a topless beauty contest to drive a political point. Upon publishing the first–ever photo of a half–naked young woman (the winner of the competition) in a Bulgarian daily, the newspaper commented that a new sense of liberation was being expressed by through the symbolic act of stripping the clothes, as well as the artificial morals of the communist past. It further commented that Eastern Europeans could now also boast to the West about the beauty of their women. The naked female body has been used repeatedly in post-Communist commercial media as a way to increase sales and ratings. For example, TV Nova, the largest commercial channel in the Czech Republic, banked on nudity when it launched Počasičko (Czech for “a little weather”), a nightly weather segment, featuring a naked woman who would present the forecast while dressing appropriately for the day’s meteorological conditions. Bulgarian cable channel MSAT also drew plenty of eyeballs when, in 2001, it launched a ten–minute nightly evening newscast titled The Naked Truth in 600 Seconds. While reading the day’s news, the young, female “anchors” in the studio stripped off their clothing.

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Perhaps the ultimate commodification of the female body in Eastern Europe is exemplified by the scantily clad, silicone–enhanced icons of the burgeoning pop–folk (aka. turbo folk) music industry in the Balkans. As Ghodsee (2007, 34) notes, “Love, heartbreak and consumerism are the staple of the lyrics of many of the songs [in this genre], and beauty and seduction are the suggested avenues for attaining a luxurious lifestyle.” All these examples show that the consumerist reinterpretation of femininity goes far beyond the promotion of fashion, cosmetics, and impossible standards of beauty, although these have also been major aspects of the post-Communist cultural transition. If a cause–and–effect relationship could be established, it would be most significant that the increased commodification of women’s representations in post-Communist media coincided with an increase in sexual trafficking, sexual tourism, and prostitution in Central and Eastern Europe. In any case, it could certainly be argued that the symbolic commodification of women and the cultivation of consumerist sensibilities by the media have helped to establish the idea of the female body as just another product for sale.

Conclusions The various examples we have presented in this chapter reflect important and often troubling shifts in the economic, political, and cultural landscapes of postCommunist societies over the past twenty years. With the commercialization and liberalization of their media spheres, Central and Eastern Europeans have been ushered into the domain of “promotional culture” (Wernick, 1991) in all of its glory and grotesqueness. Among other things, this has led to the construction of consumer subjectivities and a proliferation of consumerist values in postCommunist societies. At the outset of our discussion we proposed that the post-1989 embrace of consumerism would have been impossible without the active participation of the media. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that the media were not solely responsible for it. Consumerism was helped along by changes in the banking and financial sectors of post-Communist economies and the introduction of consumer credit, which had been practically nonexistent under communism. Further, the arrival of international megaretailers in Central and Eastern European markets transformed the nature of shopping. Although the global economic crisis after 2008 slowed these trends down, they can be expected to recover, as there is still plenty of room for growth in post-1989 markets. All of this is to suggest that media change in post-Communist countries was happening within the context of larger social changes responding to both domestic and global pressures. Importantly, the end of the Cold War intensified the processes associated with globalization by erasing the insular division between East and West and opening up the former communist world to the influx of

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global capital. In addition, the eastward expansion of the European Union set up specific parameters for the economic and political development of former communist countries, which in many ways determined the shape and form of postCommunist “transitions.” In that sense, the ideology of “transition” reproduced a trope familiar from communist times—namely, the metaphor of development as a race to catch up with (and, as communist propaganda would have it, ultimately overtake) the advanced capitalist West. “Catching up” meant a lot of things in the post-1989 context, but in terms of the lived experiences of individuals, it had a lot to do with one’s ability to consume more goods and services. Thus, as we argued earlier, consumerism signified a form of rejection of communism and its discredited narratives of identification. Consumerism provided a much–needed new framework for developing personal and collective identities; it liberated hidden desires; and it offered an alternative form of expression to the politicized discourses of the past. As a result, the nature of political participation was altered and post-Communist subjects were increasingly defined as consumers rather than as citizens. One important consequence, as Imre (2009, 17) has poignantly observed, was that “there is no automatic equivalent of the active, politically conscious democratic consumer in the political wasteland left by communism, which Europeanization processes aim further to depoliticize and tame into a quiet, full–stomach market for media entertainment and tourism.” Perhaps the starkest illustration of the victory of consumerism over political participation could be seen in Mikhail Gorbachev’s appearance in advertising campaigns for Pizza Hut in 1997 and for Louis Vuitton in 2007. The man behind perestroika and glasnost, who aimed to reform the Soviet system but unwittingly contributed to its demise, was transformed into a commercial spokesman for powerful Western brands. The copy of the Pizza Hut commercial suggested that capitalism was better than communism because it made possible such wonderful things as Pizza Hut. In the print ad for Louis Vuitton, the former Soviet leader, photographed by none other than Annie Liebovitz, was shown riding in the back of a limo past the remains of the Berlin Wall, with a branded valise next to him on the seat. Both campaigns clearly imply the passing of communism and the triumph of the new, capitalist, and consumerist order. At the same time, the co– optation of Gorbachev’s iconic status for marketing purposes ironically symbolizes his irrelevance as a political figure in the post-Communist context. So, in the end, what are we to think of the post-Communist consumer– subject who has gradually emerged in the period of transition? In 1924, American businessman and philanthropist Edward Filene wrote about the role of advertising as a “school of freedom” for the working classes. He argued that (cited in Ewen, 1976, 29–30): Modern workmen have learned their habits of consumption and their habits of spending (thrift) in the school of fatigue, in a time when high prices and relatively low wages have made it necessary to spend all the energies of the body

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and mind in providing food, clothing and shelter. We have no right to be overcritical of the way they spend a new freedom or a new prosperity until they have had as long a training in the school of freedom (sic).

Some parallels between Filene’s description of early twentieth century society in America and the post-Communist condition at the century’s end are hard to resist. Just as American workmen had to learn new consumption habits from advertising, post-1989 workmen and women were turned into pupils of consumerism and, once again, the media and advertising were called upon to play a pedagogical role. From the distance of twenty years after the end of communism, we may not yet understand the full implications of this reeducation, but it appears that we have plenty of reasons to be critical.

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Jhally, S. (n.d.).Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse. Retrieved December 10, 2009, from http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed. Kligman, G. (1996). Women and the negotiation of identity in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Global, Area, and International Archive. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3fx8g5rh. Mineva, M. (2008). Made in Bulgaria: The national as advertising repertoire, Eurozine.Retrieved November 25, 2009, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008– 11–13–mineva–en.html. Reid, S. (2002). Cold War in the kitchen: Gender and the de–Stalinization of consumer taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. Slavic Review, 61(2), 211–252. Spassov, O. (2000). Преходът и Медиите: Политики на Репрезентация (България 1989–2000) [The Transition and the Media: Politics of Representation (Bulgaria 1989– 2000)]. Sofia, Bulgaria: St. Kliment Ohridsky University Press. Stearns, P. (2006). Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire. New York/London: Routledge. Sussman, G. & Krader, S. (2008). Template revolutions: Marketing U.S. regime change in Eastern Europe. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 5(3), 91–112. NationBranding.info (n.d.). Saatchi & Saatchi will “nation brand” Kosovo. Retrieved December 8, 2009, from http://nation–branding.info/2009/01/24/nation–branding– kosovo. True, J. (1999). Expanding markets and marketing gender: The integration of the postsocialist Czech Republic. Review of International Political Economy, 6(3), 360– 389. UNDP (1998). Poverty in Transition? New York: Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS. Volcic, Z. (2010). The struggle to express, create and represent in the Balkans. In Y. R. Isar & H. Anheier (Eds.), Cultures and Globalization: Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation, (pp. 158–165). London: Routledge. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage.

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The Intersection of Two Revolutions: The Role of New Media in the Development of Post–Socialist Europe in the First Twenty Years John Parrish–Sprowl In the period from 1989 to the present two great global revolutions, one political and the other technological have changed the global environment in huge, transformative ways. The first revolution was the collapse of the Communist governments from the Soviet Union to those across Eastern and Central Europe. Among other changes emanating from this revolution were seismic shifts in patterns of global trade, national political systems, and international political structures. The second revolution, technological in nature, created great changes in communication and information management tools, or new media, facilitating historic shifts in the nature of connectedness between people from all corners of the earth. In the countries of post–Communist Europe we can observe the reflexive relationship between these two revolutions and how they have created political and cultural changes profoundly breaking many ties with the past, while concomitantly setting the stage for a different, more globally integrated future. This chapter explores these changes through a brief discussion of each revolution with a specific focus on the development and penetration of new media, a term often used to describe digitally based media. This will be followed by some thoughts about the implications for the near and long–term future in this region 85

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with respect to cultural, political, and economic development.

The Great Geopolitical Revolution In a century filled with global war as well as large number of other conflicts, both hot and cold, perhaps no greater geopolitical shift occurred than that resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only was the USSR broken up into multiple countries, the nations of Central Europe were free from Soviet domination and the yoke of communism for the first time since the end of the World War II. Throughout the Western world these changes were celebrated as they were in most of the countries directly affected. Although many outside observers, as well as many among the populations of the post–Communist countries, grossly underestimated the difficulty in effecting the transformation to both political and economic structures and policies, no one doubted that much needed to be accomplished to bring these countries up to Western standards of governmental and commercial performance. Amongst the myriad of decisions and changes that governments had to make to regulatory policies were those related to the development of a more modern, shared private/public media system. As Dragomir (2003, p. 1) notes, quoting Welsa: “When the Polish anticommunist Lech Walesa said in 1993 that, ‘the level and state of the mass media determine the development of democracy’ few put much value on his remark. A decade later, however, Walesa’s comment has proven prescient.” However, Walesa, along with most others, did not anticipate the rapid development and spread of new media that would add additional strength to his observation. During the Communist era private media and its attending industries, such as advertising, were essentially nonexistent. In addition, only a very few citizens even had a telephone in their residence, much less a computer. Access to the Internet, or even knowledge of the Internet, among the public was also nearly nonexistent. A very small number of people at some universities along with a few political elites could access e–mail on a highly limited basis. While the political circumstances changed with what some called the Velvet Revolution— such that people could purchase computers, phones, and other equipment supporting new media—the reality in almost every post–Communist country was that almost no one could afford to buy. Even if a person did develop the economic wherewithal to obtain a computer, the infrastructure was not set up in much of any place to allow a hookup to the Internet. With one important exception, the infrastructure and economic changes necessary to facilitate access to new media have been and continue to be slow to evolve. The rate of change, in almost every post–Communist country, has been and continues to be highly correlated with the degree to which democratic reforms have taken hold, along with the pace at which market reforms have taken place. While the World Bank (2002) categorized post–Communist countries based on a four–category schemata, Jakubowicz (2005) notes that is easier to

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simply identify two groups: Type A (e.g., Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia) and Type B countries (e.g., Armenia, Albania, Georgia, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Belarus). To the present day, many who live in Type B countries, the ones that have been slow to reform or simply have not, still have highly limited access to new media either for infrastructure, personal economic reasons, or both. At the more progressive end of the spectrum, in Type A countries such as Poland, Internet cafés grew rapidly in numbers in the first part of the twenty-first century and are now in gradual decline as more people have Internet access in their home, obviating the need to go to the café. The important exception in access is that of mobile telephony. Some small geographic areas not withstanding, in almost every locale in post–Communist Europe one can observe high rates of mobile phone ownership and use. Because the infrastructure for this technology was faster, easier, and ultimately less expensive to develop than landline–based capacity, mobile phone usage quickly spread across the region. This phenomenon is often referred to as “leapfrogging” because new technology has been put in place without a progression through the development of older technology. Although the capacity to own and use this technology has primarily been used for personal conversation and text messaging, it sets the stage for the technological revolution to continue to blossom. Without the political and economic changes that resulted from the collapse of communism, both old and new media would be much further behind the West in development due to both the political urge to resist democratizing access and because the West is moving forward so rapidly. Many observers have noted that the state of media in post–Communist Europe is much stronger than it was in 1989. They, of course, are primarily referring to traditional media. Yet, even as governments began to democratize, the political elites still had a strong desire to control electronic, and to a lesser extent print, media outlets. While print media expanded rapidly initially, only to scale back as the economic realities of supporting such publications set in, electronic media were much slower to evolve. Most of the private electronic media were financed and controlled by sources from outside of the post–Communist nations. In creating new, post–Communist media regulation for both electronic and print media, however, for the most part countries did not write laws that would take into account the effects of digital convergence. In fact, the same could be said for the regulatory structures in many Western countries as well. While such regulations made sense in the short term, over time they will not keep pace with the development of digital advances and the resulting new media that will dominate the global landscape. For example, all countries will need to deal with the issues of intellectual property rights, changing media industry structure reflective of the new technologies, and issues of content regulation such as the access to pornography.

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The Technological Revolution Political and economic systems transformations in and of themselves provide a rate of change that can be difficult for any nation, organization, or individual to manage, much less when those changes occur at a juncture in history when a global technological revolution is under way. The development of computers in general, and the Internet more specifically, has initiated the process of completely transforming the media in almost every nation around the world. Up until the post–Communist period, nations in East and Central Europe were being largely passed by. However, once the political and economic revolutions took place, the technological changes in media began to spread across the region, initially in Type A countries, and more recently in many of the Type B countries. As noted earlier, the most obvious manifestation of this has been in mobile telephony. However, just as in the West, both traditional and new media will change and continue to change in all of post–Communist Europe. Analyzing the media of any region of the world, or even any nation, is confounded by the constant change in media systems due to the advent of digital technologies. The rate of change and the transformative nature of digitization practically assure that each article or book that assesses the state of development is out of date by the time it is published. Because technology provides the platform for any media system, be it print, broadcast, or digital, we cannot discuss a media system without attending to the means of delivery. Globally, all media systems are transforming into digital–based media systems, albeit at radically differing rates. A digital–based system creates a completely new media system, not only because it creates new media streams, but also because it alters the nature and relationship, both of and between, older media. Digital media not only add new streams of media, such as the Internet, they also update the technological basis for more traditional media, both electronic and print. Essentially all media are rapidly moving into a digital stream such that they can enter the home (or wherever) all in the same way. Thus they become equivalent choices, technologically speaking. So radio, television, film, and traditional print as mediums and as industries become a subset of the same thing, digital information and entertainment providers. In addition, we add new media streams; notable examples include web pages, blogs, gaming, and social networking sites. As a consequence, traditional print circulation tends to decline with increased Internet access by the populace. This is most obvious in the United States where traditional print media has become largely unprofitable. Many newspapers in the United States would fold were it not for online revenues. In addition, traditional broadcast network audience share is in gradual decline as well, sharing the viewers with digital channels, including such fare as cable television networks and online video games. While traditional broadcast and print are in decline in the United States, digital locations such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc., are expanding at a prodigious rate. This is happening in Europe

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and the rest of the world as well. Cable outlets such as CNN International and MTV are everywhere. One can enter an Internet café in almost any country and see people playing online games. Although the move to digital media systems varies in each nation, it will continue to replace traditional media around the world because ultimately it is less expensive and more expansive. Each of the post–Communist nations is moving towards total digitization at different rates, depending on economic development and political factors. Type A countries began slowly, but the paces moves a bit faster with each passing year. Type B countries vary from those who have seen little penetration, such as Belarus, to those nations who, with external assistance, are beginning to move forward more rapidly than in previous years. Macedonia, for example, is working on developing a totally wireless capable nation through assistance provided by the United States. The pace of penetration affects the rate of cultural accommodation of globally homogenized artifacts that creep into the indigenous culture. For example, fashion, food, music, sport, entertainment content, transportation, shopping, and lifestyle patterns (such as weekend) begin to alter culture in large part due to a large volume of media content from multiple sources.

Post–Communist Europe at the Intersection Twenty years of governmental changes and market activity (1989–2009) have brought much change to the post–Communist world. Shaping these changes, as well as being shaped by these changes, is the technological revolution digitizing the world. The historical tendency for the political elites to make an effort to control media is being undermined by mass digitization. Indexical of this problem is the widespread violation of copyrights and media piracy throughout the post–Communist world. People routinely copy whole books, films, and music for both personal use and to sell at discount to others without regard to who owns the intellectual property. The ease with which this can be done, combined with the high portability of the product makes this very difficult to control. Much of the world wants to regulate this for commercial reasons and yet control of digital media is only marginally successful. There is no reason to believe that the political elites in post–Communist countries will be any more capable of controlling digital media than their Western counterparts. This is especially so since governments in many post– Communist countries have had little internal incentive to enforce regulations even when developed at the behest of external forces, because the property did not originate in their nation so no revenues are lost and the theft of such property aids in local economic development. Thus digital media provide a catalyst for completing the transformation from the old order of central media control, to one that is less amenable to close management. While the impact of new media covers a broad spectrum across the region, without question, change in cultural patterns, political processes, and economic development has been and will con-

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tinue to be, the result.

Cultural Patterns One important consequence of new media is the exponential growth of a global popular culture. Music, celebrities, games, social networks, and language have converged in digital media to create a culture that is worldwide in reach and accessed constantly by a growing number of people. For example, U.S. hip–hop music and Japanese Manga are both wildly popular outside of their original country and both are primarily available to other nations in digital form. The development of this global culture does not lead to the disappearance of local cultures, but rather leads people to split their time between the two. This, in turn, creates a reflexive relationship between local and global cultures that influences and reshapes both. This is manifested both in the amount of time one devotes to each, constituting the enactment of culture, and the direct influence of the content on cultural patterns. The influence of media content is always difficult to separate from other environmental stimuli, let alone discerning the particular impact of new media on ways of being. Certainly the ascension to the EU of a number of countries has facilitated connection with the local cultures and the larger continental and global currents. Nevertheless, it clearly presents a force in shaping cultural patterns of action, especially among the younger generation. Perhaps the largest impact on traditional ways of being is the shift of time and attention to new media away from historical means of engagement. People spend a great deal of time text messaging, listening to MP3 players, gaming on the Internet, surfing the Internet, watching programming on DVD players, as well as viewing digital channels on the television. New media captures an increasing volume of time and attention from people in post–Communist Europe, just as it has elsewhere. How people choose to spend their time is important in shaping culture. While people had television, radio, and print in prior times, as well as during the first stages of the post–Communist era, in the second post–Communist decade a growing number are spending more time with new media. This growing diversion of time and attention to new media by its very nature reduces focus on more traditional activities. This allows old patterns of life to give way to new, reshaping the culture as people shift their way of life to accommodate new media. For example, one can observe people spending hours in an Internet café engaged in online gaming in many post–Communist countries. This is not time spent in any traditional cultural practice, but rather one that reflects a homogenized global culture. Increasingly, people from around the world, especially the young, are spending their time engaged in a digital world that is shaped quite differently than the one we have lived in up to this point. No one envisioned this as a consequence of the collapse of communism, but nonetheless, it is part of the post– Communist cultural development of nearly every country.

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The consequences of attending to the content of new media by the citizens of post–Communist Europe potentially move way beyond the time spent engaged in computer–mediated communication. Unlike earlier electronic communication technologies, new media holds the choice to determine, at least to some degree, the size of the audience one wishes to engage. It can be as few as one, such as in a text or e–mail message, or as great as anyone who has access to the Internet. Real–time exposure to changes in fashion, music, food, and other aspects of consumption outside of Eastern and Central Europe have greatly influenced the post–Communist cultures in many countries. U.S. movies, and the attending cultural artifacts such as McDonald’s giveaways, happen in places like Poland at the same time that they do in the North America. The more economically developed countries, with their greater Internet penetration, evidence the greatest manifestations of global culture in their social milieu. However, even in those that lag behind, such as Macedonia, the increasing connection between youth and global culture is clear. Not only do people access movies, music, television shows, and news, they also engage in discussions with people that they otherwise would never meet or converse with if face–to–face contact were required. This intercultural communication, while virtual, offers a new dimension to culture. New media goes beyond simply raising the curtain to the world outside of the former Communist zone; it facilitates an interconnectedness that was not fully anticipated in 1989. In addition, connecting people has gone commercial with a number of sites devoted to dating and spouse hunting that fosters a number of international exchanges. Thus, new media plays a pivotal role in generating a global culture without borders, influences, and traditional patterns within cultures, and facilitates intercultural engagement. Such changes can be viewed as either positive or negative, but little doubt can be raised that those cultures indigenous to the post– Communist countries have been and will continue to be influenced through further development of new media infrastructure and broadening access.

Political Processes During the first five years or so of post–Communism new media played almost no role in the transformation of government and political processes. The web was still in the stage of being anticipated but at that point was not functioning; in addition, many digital products that are ubiquitous today were not on the market yet or had only just entered, and almost no one in Central and Eastern Europe had the wherewithal to purchase the equipment anyway. Over the next decade and a half much has changed. A number of newspapers have developed online versions, satellite and web television, and Internet cafes are numerous and many people read and write blogs, send and receive e–mails, and participate in social networking sites.1 In addition, many political parties have developed websites and send messages over the Internet.2 All of this has developed in addition to the

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government websites that were created to serve a number of civic functions. While all of Europe is behind the United States in terms of the role that new media play in the political process, little reason exists to believe that many aspects of the political process will not become digitally based. Economic barriers to digital politics are in a constant state of erosion as equipment and access become less expensive along with growing personal incomes across the post– Communist countries. Once tapped in, the costs of reaching both large numbers of people and targeted audiences is inexpensive. This is why the growth of new media involvement in the political process of all of the countries has begun and why that growth will accelerate in the coming years. More importantly, once digital media penetrates a region it is difficult for political elites to absolutely gain control of the media as they have often done or tried to do in the past. This is why new media play an increasingly powerful role in shaping political process. For example, across much of the region political parties now have websites. Perhaps a more graphic example is the protest in Moldova concerning government policies and the impending parliamentary elections in April of 2009. The crowd generated for this protest was almost entirely created via Facebook and Twitter.

Economic Development The new media has impacted the economies of the post–Communist nations in three distinct ways: online commerce, online versions and variations of traditional media, and the development of new media products. Although slow to develop, reflecting the gradual penetration of online access, business conducted via the Internet is growing. For example, both plane and train tickets from various countries can be purchased and hotel reservations can be made. Other products are available as well, either through international providers or from those developing domestically within post–Communist countries. Just as in Japan, Korea, and the United States, we can expect large growth of online commerce in the coming years, especially in the Type A countries. As banking systems become more technologically sophisticated and greater numbers of people have online access in their homes, people will find the convenience of online shopping compelling. Traditional newspapers, along with radio and television have found their way to the web. In addition, many governments maintain news and information sites. Certainly web versions of newspapers, radio, and television stations have not yet replaced the traditional print and broadcast mediums as of yet, nor is such a change likely anytime soon. However, unless something occurs to undo the changes made, especially in Type A countries, the trend to greater new media presence combined with reduced old media influences will proceed as it has elsewhere. This will lead to shifts in employment patterns, because the work to support new media demands different skills than that of old media. This includes

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all aspects of the business from aggregating capital, to production, to distribution. Many of these jobs demand higher skill levels (e.g. computer programmer, developer of creative entertainment content, social network marketer) that consequently may lead to larger average incomes in many countries. The work of creating and maintaining new media already plays a small role in shaping the economic development of a growing number of post–Communist countries. Computer science has been a rapidly growing area of study in many countries. While the industry is still small in most countries, the numbers employed are increasing at a rapid rate. People are making a living programming, designing web pages, and managing web content. When a new university in Macedonia opened its doors in 2002 (South East European University), computer science was immediately one of the most popular majors on campus. Companies such as Microsoft, which has set up R & D facilities in Poland, are finding the abundant highly talented engineers in the region to be an attractive labor pool for their new media jobs.

Implications During the first twenty years of post–Communism, some countries, such as Belarus, have not moved in the direction of democracy and market reforms. Others, such as those nations that have gained membership in the EU, evidence considerable progress towards the direction of joining the West economically and politically. This is not to say that substantial remnants of the Communist legacy do not remain. Yet, change has clearly been made. The new media has played a small but growing role in reshaping cultural, political, and economic development over time and is poised to continue to do so. The pace at which the post– Communist countries have developed their new media are a marker of their respective efforts to narrow the gap between themselves and their wealthier, Western counterparts. But the question remains: What are the implications for the trajectory of the development of new media in the European post– Communist countries? First, it can be said that simply by allowing the new media in and grappling with the issues surrounding its development is, in and of itself, a significant aspect of transformation. The seeds of the Internet were already planted some two decades prior to the fall of communism. The development and subsequent spread of desktop computing across the West was already well under way by 1989. A picture of the possible future world with everyone having a networked computer was emerging once it was clear that everything would change in the coming decades, especially in the media industry. By importing the technology, the post–Communist countries were allowing in the basis for a potential radical restructuring of the media into something extremely difficult to control. The consequences for culture, politics, and economic development have only begun to emerge, but it is clear that turning back to a predigital media system, one that

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is more amenable to central control, is virtually impossible. One important consequence is the reshaping of the media industry itself. Companies such as Yahoo and Google now compete with traditional media for the time and attention of people everywhere. While traditional media have moved into a genre known as reality programming, YouTube has been created on the web and it allows for actual reality shows. For example, within the past few years Big Brother has been a very popular show in Poland. It is only a small leap there, as it has been in the United States, for people to begin to create their own video and to post it on the web. One reason this is highly likely is because virtually no economic barrier exists to participating in providing and viewing such fare. Since the topics for such posts are delimited (excepting certain offensive material), this has implications that go way beyond entertainment. Governments can attempt to censor certain sites. However, as we find in China, many individuals as well as media companies are highly capable in their ability to circumvent such restrictions. So, while some control can be exerted, absolute control, or even substantial restrictions, is difficult to both monitor and enforce. It only takes a few people to download the content from a restricted site and then to e–mail it throughout the system. This process is quite common in countries that do attempt to restrict access. In addition, any enforcement often occurs way after the massive transfers have been executed and are therefore only partially effective in restricting content. This is one of the reasons music downloads are so difficult to control. The same would be true for political or any other content. Thus, while the trajectories of the penetration and development of new media are different in each country, the process that ultimately decentralizes media and makes control by the elites much more difficult has begun in every post–Communist country. In this way new media, by its very nature, pushes the transformation of society. Exactly how new media will shape the culture, politics, and economic environment in the post–Communist countries is unclear, in large part because the widespread penetration of new media is a recent occurrence everywhere. Effectively, the generally availability of the web itself is younger than the post– Communist transformation. Consequently, it is difficult to look to the West to develop policies that have some predictable outcomes when the West itself is still in the process of new media transformation. From 2000 on, each election cycle in the United States has seen new impacts on the political process from web–based activity that is new to the system. For example, while blogs have played an increasingly import role in the United States they are not quite as influential, at least not yet, in the UK or the rest of Western Europe. The potential for new media to impact journalistic standards in post– Communist countries is great. The question to be answered is in which direction. In most of the former Communist countries professional standards for journalists are not particularly high. Adding to this blight has been the growth of tabloid journalism. It is possible that the availability of higher–quality journalism via the web and satellite television might provide a comparison that leads to a demand for higher–quality local standards. On the other hand, the growth of ama-

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teur reporting and analysis may not only offer a counterweight to development, it could undermine the economic basis for professional journalism itself. At this time it is difficult to know how standards will evolve. In any case, new media will have some impact on the quality of journalism everywhere, including in post–Communist countries. Even more recent than the development of the web itself is the widespread use of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Tagged, along with a number of others. Just as in the West, a growing number of people in post–Communist countries are participating in the process of making friends and connecting with a wide array of people in virtual space. The content of these sites is personal in that each person can post what he or she chooses, but also public in that anyone can access a profile. Such sites compete with old media for viewer attention in two ways; by offering the same content on demand (e.g., television shows and films) and by providing alternative sources of entertainment and information (e.g., gaming, chat rooms). In the United States, political candidates maintain profiles on sites such as Facebook, which offer yet another mechanism to connect with voters. It may be only a matter of time before social networking sites play a significant role in post–Communist politics. In the Type A countries as well as some of the Type B countries the growth of participation in these sites is escalating at a rapid rate.3 The potential impact of this phenomenon has begun to emerge in the past couple of years. People have opened themselves up to the possibility of meeting new friends from all over the world. They can learn about other countries and cultures more directly from participants without the filter of journalists or educators. They can ask difficult questions and get a variety of answers. New fashion and fads can more quickly move through global networks thanks to the increased level of personal interconnectedness facilitated by these sites. However, such sites also expose people to unwanted scrutiny by, among others, sexual predators, stalkers, potential employers, and, of course, law enforcement. In the United States cases of people facing sanctions for illegal behavior that has been posted on social networking sites have already occurred. In post–Communist countries, where law enforcement has not always been carried out with a concern for citizen rights, social networking sites create a different potential problem for people than in the West. While the growth of participation on such sites in post–Communist countries shows little sign of abating, the impact for society remains unclear. Perhaps the greatest potential for increasing the future impact of new media is the introduction of smartphones into post–Communist countries. Making the web mobile has already altered new media usage patters in South Korea, the United States and other countries, a process that continues to unfold. Smart phones are both an extension of an established pattern of new media usage and at the same time transformative due to their mobility, so the spread of these devices is likely only a matter of time and economic circumstances. As the networks become upgraded (which is already happening in several countries such as Poland and Slovakia) and people trade in their old mobiles for smartphones,

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the populace will be connected to the web like they never have been before. This allows people to carry access to news, entertainment such as shows and games, e–mail, blogs, advertisement, and other information in their pockets for immediate access at any time. This technological development will result in further altering the fabric of society as well as contribute to additional restructuring of the media industry. When mobile phones were introduced, in part as a way of leapfrogging old technology, it was not generally anticipated that this would ultimately lead to widespread web access portability. Such changes suggest the next twenty years could see technological transformation as great as in the past twenty. The impact of new media at any given point is determined by the speed and depth of adoption in each country. Consequently, the trajectory of development of new media in each country is a strong indicant of level of economic development in that nation. The more penetrated the nation, the greater its ability to participate in the global economy. International commerce is highly competitive. New media are necessary to make systems more efficient, to reach customers, and to develop new sources of revenue by developing media content. Post– Communist countries who are slow to create the regulatory, technological, and educational infrastructure necessary to maintain an intensive new media society run the risk of being unable to grow their economic output. For several reasons this issue is important, not the least of which is the strong relationship between economic circumstances and political process. The most obvious, but certainly not the only, manifestation of this is the need for economic performance sufficient to participate in the EU and possibly the euro zone as well. Thus, whether the political elite, or even the general population, wants a society bound to new media or not, they are likely to be drawn into dependence anyway. This may or may not make society better, but it will make it different.

Conclusion Once the initial euphoria wore off, the people and governments of the post– Communist countries were faced with the daunting task of transforming their political and economic systems, indeed, their entire way of life. Talking about the possibilities that change might bring and how the change process might unfold is not the same as living through it. Each country, both those that were already on the map and the newly independent states, chose wildly varying pathways to conceive their future. From the perspective of democratic reform and economic development, the first twenty post–Communist years have produced some solid successes along with some abysmal failures. There has been open warfare, ethnic cleansing, tumultuous politics, worker protests, and peaceful process. In each aspect of these activities the nature of the media system in the countries involved played an important role. As time unfolded and new media

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made its way into the mix, its role has grown as well. A defining moment in the development of the power of new media in the transformation process was the role that web–based interchanges played in the war in Kosovo. Never before in this region of the world were people able to convey so much information about the nature of the situation to so many others so quickly. This “media system” had a direct impact on the entire process. E– mails, blogs, jpeg posts, and other messages were able to do what old media could not do as effectively. This example, although a bit extreme in some ways, demonstrates the profound change that new media can and will bring to the post–Communist world. Communism still plays a residual role in most of the countries, affecting both political and economic development. This, in turn, affects both the rate of new media penetration and the level of censorship of content. At one end of the spectrum, Belarus, which has a tightly controlled political system, has very low penetration and high levels of censorship. At the other end, Poland, with a much more developed democracy and market system, has a much higher level of penetration and virtually no censorship. Democratic and economic development need still more gains to close the gap with the West. There can be little doubt that new media will play a role in the continuation of this process. So what will the next twenty years bring? No one can know, but it seems unlikely that we will return to a world where communism reigns powerful over so many people and so many countries. We are likely to witness a continued strengthening in democratic process and economic performance, especially in those countries that have become members of the EU. The rest of the countries will range from growing development to stagnation. In each case new media penetration will probably index the functionality of both democracy and the economy. Poland, for example, has upgraded mobile networks to handle smartphones, a number of Internet cafés, a rapidly growing number of people with Internet access in the home, social networking sites in the Polish language, and large international offerings on satellite television. In addition, they have strong computer science education with programming teams frequently doing well and even winning international competitions, and a growing presence of software developers, including Microsoft. Consequently, Poland will, barring a disaster, continue to close the gap between itself and the rest of the EU (this is evidenced, in part, by the fact that Poland alone, of all of the EU countries, did not suffer recession in 2008–2011). Russia, however, is doing well economically based on petrodollars, not solid infrastructure development. The government, for example, still uses only a minimal number of computers. They will do well economically only as long as they can sell oil at high prices, unless they join countries like Poland in developing more widespread access to new media. The same can be said for the state of democracy in Russia; at this point it does not appear that it will move quickly to foster the penetration of new media, so we should probably expect internal political and economic difficulties down the road as a result. Belarus is an example of a country that is moving even more slowly to spread the new media, reflective of their political and economic conditions. It is difficult, given this slow

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new media trajectory, to be optimistic about their prospects for economic and democratic development over the next twenty years. Thus, although the post–Communist revolution is far from being a finished process, it will not completely regress to pre-1989 political and economic circumstances. While some countries, such as Belarus and Moldova, have backed off of democratic and market reforms, and countries like Ukraine teeter back and forth, most of the countries have resolutely moved away from their Communist past. The technological revolution is far from complete as well and it is not likely to regress either. As the two unfold together we can see substantial change at the intersection of the two in the post–Communist countries. Although the rest of the world experiences the collapse of communism in relation to these countries, it is directly experiencing the technological revolution along with them. This creates some kinship of experience between nations, but life at the intersection is still qualitatively different in many respects. Those outside of the post–Communist sphere would benefit from respecting those differences without condescension. Those from within need to appreciate those differences and would benefit from using those differences as a springboard for motivation to continue to create greater freedom and higher living standards. No matter what happens, however, new media will play a key role in the process of creating the future.

Notes 1. See for example http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/poland.htm, http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/czech_re.htm; and http://www.surfmusic.de/webtv/albania.html, http://www.russianInternet.com/video/. 2. http://www.apacouncil.org/polish_political_parties.php. 3. See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/europe/08moldova.html?_r=5.

References Dimitrova, Daniela V., and Beilock, Richard (2005). “Where freedom matters: Internet adoption among the former socialist countries,” in Gazette 67 (2): 173–187. Dragomir, M. (2003). Fighting legacy: Media reform in post–Communist Europe. Washington, DC: Atlantic Council of the United States. Lengel, L. (2000) (Ed.). Culture and technology in the new Europe. Stamford, CT: AblexPublishing Corporation. Volcic, Zala, and Erjavec, Karmen (2008). “Technological developments in Central– Eastern Europe: A case study of a computer literacy project,” in Slovenia Information Communication & Society 11 (3): 326–347.

Chapter 7

Digital (R)evolutions? Internet, New Media and Informed Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe Inka Salovaara-Moring Introduction The political revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe coincided with a global transformation in information technology and rapid expansion of the Internet. The new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe started their media revolutions with technological innovations that not only changed their communication structures, but also inevitably affected the transformation of economic relations and political practices, as well as the communities involved. Many states chose actively to speed up their transition to a technologically advanced society through governmental initiatives (facilitating or encouraging investment in network infrastructure) serving the introduction of the Internet and thus the development of various areas of societal life. Soon, however, market developments using the new infrastructure took their own course, and various applications of new media made their presence felt across societies. The evolution brought on by the Internet may not have appeared so dramatic at the structural level of more stable Western media systems, where the new technology initially merely introduced a new layer on top of traditional and 99

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still quite strong media sectors. However, in countries with dramatically shifting structures in the fields of media and media policy, such as the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE), the situation was rather different. The historical conditions of post-socialist countries differed from their Western counterparts in vital areas. During the twentieth century many large companies in the capitalist part of the world made their fortunes by investing in the media. The reason, ultimately, was simple: the Western media were protected to a notable degree within liberal market economies. Some media markets, like newspapers, were natural monopolies, often as a result of simple geography. Others, like radio and television, were (de)regulated monopolies. In all cases, the margins for incumbents remained relatively healthy. In CEE countries before the 1990s the media were even more cosseted as part of a command-andcontrol system and did not function according to the market logics of supply and demand. However, in the new and open market situation, the deregulated market economy dictated the conditions and the speed of change: media policies had to be immediately adjusted to the demands of a global market. Public service broadcasting needed to be created, but otherwise lack of resources forced media systems to adopt new types of technological and organisational solutions. That impacted especially the media habits of young people, the first digital natives, and as a result the Internet became a more important source of information than in the West. This chapter approaches social transitions and media systems by exploring the new media and political economics of online audiences in Central and Eastern Europe. By looking at the relationship between technological convergence and the economic conditions of the print media, the chapter raises the issue of the viability of ‘quality’ news journalism in the midst of Internet-driven change. It is sometimes claimed that the post-Communist transition is over and that liberal democracy and capitalism have won. Still, some of the problems of posttransformation societies remain. This includes the need to improve the quality of democratic governance, create better conditions for an informed citizenry, and, through that, to support and encourage trust in democratic systems.

Who Pays for Quality Journalism? The Internet and Citizens Online In promoting democratic values and supporting informed citizenship the media are vital for democratic systems to function. The media should act as a watchdog over abuses of power, thereby promoting accountability and transparency. They act as a civic forum for political debate, thereby facilitating informed electoral choice and encouraging participation; and as an agenda-setter for policy makers, thereby strengthening government responsiveness and transparency, and encouraging democratic governance (Norris 2007). Michael Schudson and Leonard

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Downie (2009, 9) define the pivotal role of quality journalism in Democratic societies in their report Reconstructing the American Journalism as: ‘Watchdog or accountability reporting aims to foil the arrogance of power and self-dealing rather than to advance ideology or policies. It holds government officials accountable to the legal and moral standards of public service and keeps business and professional leaders accountable to society’s expectations of integrity and fairness.’ In young democracies, the news media have additional and specific tasks, making quality news journalism even more important. These include the introduction of democracy, the rule of law and constitutionalism, democratic agenda setting, the development of civil society, safeguarding new democratic institutions, the assessment of wrongdoing by old and new elites, the introduction of candidates/parties before the first free elections, democratic evaluation of the national past and contributing to national integration (see, for example, Sükösd 2000). Although there is agreement that critical and accountable news journalism is salient in vital democratic public spheres, there is no agreement about who should produce ‘accountability’ journalism in the new market environment where the old business models are being squeezed by commercial online media. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the business model for print media that had been fairly stable in the Western world and hence was adopted by CEE media systems, proved to be outdated (Pew Project 2009; Schudson and Downie 2009; Fenton 2009). Newspapers have traditionally received their income from two sources: their readers (who either paid by subscription or at the newsstand) and advertisers. Today, both main sources of income are drying up. The decline of newspaper readership continues and the only sector of advertising that is growing is online advertising. It is, however, unable to compensate for the loss of revenue from the classified section or due to people’s migrating to free news portals. Additionally, the economic crisis of 2008-2009 hit CEE countries particularly hard, exacerbating the acute crisis facing news journalism and raising doubt as to whether the news industry could survive intact both competition from the Internet and declining readership. In 2008–2010, theses two tendencies accelerated the decline of the print media in CEE countries. If we look at the total average circulation of paid-for dailies, a fall in readership has been the overall trend in the CEE countries, except for Romania and Lithuania. Hungary, Latvia and Slovenia saw a two-digit drop in circulation. Circulation in Slovakia reached its high point in 2007 and 2008 and was expected to start to decline between 2009 and 2010. Lithuania is the only exception to the negative trend in circulation figures. However, a survey of media experts on Lithuania conducted by TNS Gallup in January and February 2009 revealed a trend of falsifying real circulation figures by printing press runs in excess of real demand. The owners and CEOs of the largest media outlets and houses also assessed that the overall Lithuanian advertising market would decrease by 27 percent, while the newspapers’ advertising market would decrease by 30 percent (World Press Trends 2009, 594).

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Table 1. Change in Total Average Circulation of Paid-For Dailies % (World Press Trends 2009) 2008/04 (%)

2008/07 (%)

Czech Republic

-6.74

-7.36

Estonia

1.56

-6.45

Hungary

-10.88

-1.58

Latvia

-35.9

-2.54

Lithuania

28.2

15.7

Poland

-8.09

-6.79

Romania

7.37

6.8

Slovakia

5.21

0

Slovenia

-23.89

-16.46

Partly this is the result of the rise of online media. In the early days of the online media in the 1990s, most newspapers discarded the idea of charging for online news. They preferred instead to make their content free to increase readership and attract advertisers who were pouring increasing amounts of money into the Internet. When newspapers started making their content available on the Internet free of charge, the first source of income dried up, as readers stopped paying for hard copies of newspapers, as they could get content free on the web. In the West, newspapers hoped to make up for the sales decline with increased advertising revenue, as the market for online adverts exploded. However, Internet advertising is still much cheaper than print advertising space. In addition, there are very few places were the pay walls for content have been tried and even fewer where they have been successful. In general, the pay wall has been functional in online portals that provide specialist information, such as business and market data—such as Financial Times. The Internet’s advertising share, however, has increased steadily within the region, taking its share from off-line media. The share of online advertising in total advertising by percentage increased between 2007 and 2008 in Estonia and Hungary (from 8 percent to 11 percent), Poland (from 8 percent to 10 percent), Latvia and Czech Republic (from 5 percent to 9 percent), Lithuania and Bulgaria (from 3 percent to 6 percent) and in Slovenia and Romania (from 2 percent to 3 percent). Although the online version newspapers’ market share has also increased, it has not been able to make up for the losses incurred by the paper side.

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When one looks at the speed of Internet penetration in the CEE region, the depth and pace of digital convergence of communication structures is striking. This is reflected in figure 1. Internet penetration growth has been extremely fast in Romania, Lithuania and Latvia (+