Articles

When it comes to representing children, art and law are on a collision course, writes Anne Higonnet, and photographers are in the dock.

The lack of comprehension for historical as well as present day events on the Balkans has to do with the very different character of master narratives in east and west. If only the West would “try to create a context, to adjust its horizon of expectation” to the Balkans’ stories, and not vice versa, writes Goran Stefanovski.

The iconic Serbian broadcaster B92 was founded in 1989 in the expectation of a new era of media independence. But Serbia had reckoned without Slobodan Milosevic. With rare exceptions, the media became a key part of his nationalist propaganda arsenal. Along with other courageous publications and individuals, B92 survived the war into the new, more open media climate. But like society itself, the media bears the scars of war, writes B92 founder Veran Matic.

The European Union’s new directive on Audiovisual Media Services may not be all that it is cracked up to be. On the contrary, under the guise of protecting vulnerable groups from hate speech, it may have the unintended consequence of allowing national governments to indulge in a little censorship. Something his region is only too familiar with, warns Péter Molnár, a specialist on freedom of speech from Hungary.

Media self-regulation has many advantages over the more intrusive forms of state legislation, argues Ioana Avadani. Not only would it help raise professional standards in Romania, it might create greater responsibility towards the public that now trust journalists so implicitly.

A former contributor to the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune writes that the paper was left to die by those who should have taken better care of it: its readers and all who cared for its lone, free, critical voice.

Those in central and eastern Europe who, after 1989, took the commitment to free expression seriously, and who saw the media as the handmaiden of democracy and the conventional watchdog on political and commercial power, today have become targets for new and subtler forms of censorship, writes Eurozine guest-editor Judith Vidal-Hall.

The initial probe into the murder of Nacional editor Ivo Pukancic in October 2008 indicated a disturbing level of entanglement between the criminal underworld, high-level politics and the media in Croatia. Several arrests and an informal state of emergency later, there are still no convictions. Journalist Drago Hedl, himself the recipient of death threats in November 2008, looks behind the scenes.

Even before ’89, Slovene journalists and civil society were fighting for the right to free expression and a media free of government control. This earned critical journalism great credibility and led to a situation in the 1990s, rare among other post-socialist countries, in which the media was protected from market forces by public subsidies. In the last decade, however, this has turned into political interventionism that, together with commercialization, stands between the Slovene media and true autonomy, writes Marjan Horvat.

The fate of the controversial and outspoken Croatian weekly “Feral Tribune” is an object lesson in what happens to a publication that refuses to toe the government line or bow to the tyranny of the market. In his editorial for the final issue of the paper, Viktor Ivancic describes how a lifeline was thrown out only to be inexplicably withdrawn.

In many ways, Poland had a head start on other countries in eastern Europe. But after an ebullient beginning, the post-1989 media there appears to have lost its impetus for reform. Media law has yet to catch up with the facts on the ground and constitutional assurances of free expression are not translated into legal independence. Nevertheless, locally owned Gazeta Wyborcza continues to set the standard for journalism throughout eastern central Europe.

Despite European Union legislation on the subject, Europe’s Roma remain the victim of discrimination and abuse, as much in the media as in society at large. In Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, not to mention Italy, it is the media that more often than not instigate the witch hunts.

Caught between murderous attacks by the mafia and the vacillations of the state, the Bulgarian media discovers its government has less regard for journalists than for members of the criminal underworld. In response, the media has in recent years been developing an effective system of self-regulation, writes Svetoslav Terziev.

The more that the Romanian press professionalizes, the more it is discovering the conflict between editorial content and market demands. Managers must find a formula for delivering quality newspapers to a waiting public, writes Dilema Veche editor Mircea Vasilescu.

The most notable feature of the post-1989 media in the Czech Republic is the triumph of the market. So convincingly have economic imperatives taken over from editorial priorities, that even the quality press has been affected by “tabloidization”. Ideological domination has been replaced by the more sophisticated strategies of the market, regrets Jaromir Volek.

In his time, Miklós Haraszti has been writer, journalist, human rights activist, politician and academic. Under the communists, he co-founded Hungary’s Democratic Opposition Movement and was editor of a samizdat magazine. After participating in the round table negotiations that led to the country’s first free elections, he became a member of parliament. Today, he is the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he speaks to Judith Vidal-Hall about the shifting media landscape in the post-communist countries of Europe.