Abstract
This essay explores the development of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet period, including the influence of social and political factors, outside media assistance, and the drive toward privatization and public service broadcasting, in an effort to understand what the experience teaches about democracy promotion, about the efficacy of various forms of media intervention, and about the utility of various forms of incentives and pressures in setting agendas and effecting political change. Despite differing historical, social, and political traditions and different forms of and reactions to media assistance efforts, factors, both exogenous (“Americanization” and “strategic communication”) and endogenous (“modernization,” secularization and commercialization), ultimately contributed to a homogenization of systems, rendering less relevant the particular distinctions among countries.
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Notes
During this period, I published the Post Soviet Media Law and Policy Newsletter: http://www.vii.org/monroe/.
Paolo Mancini suggests that the Anglo-American model of journalism has become an “ideology” for professionalization and for interpretation of mass media systems (“Political complexity and alternative models of journalism: The Italian case” in Dewesternizing Media Studies , as quoted in Lauk 2008 ). Lauk further notes, during the period of transition, “it was quite natural to look for the models to emulate in the more developed Western democracies” (p. 194).
Epp Lauk points out, “The special features and ways of development of journalism cultures in each country are determined by historical traditions, as well as specific local cultural, social, and political conditions” (p. 198).
The development of media policy during the transitions of the 1990s has been described as a three-phase process of (1) de-linking the media from the state, (2) attention to market developments, involving the liberalization of telecommunications and broadcasting markets, and increased foreign investment, and (3) European integration through harmonization of media legislation (Perusko and Popovic 2008 , 169).
“[P]rivatization has increasingly become a component of conditionality requirements attached to institutional lending…seventy percent of structural adjustment loans and forty percent of sectoral adjustment loans made by the World Bank during the 1980s contained a privatization component” (Baker 1999 , pp. 233–234).
For more on Hungary’s “media wars,” see, for instance, Schwartz (2000).
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Price, M.E. Media Transitions in the Rear-View Mirror: Some Reflections. Int J Polit Cult Soc 22, 485–496 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-009-9078-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-009-9078-4