Articles

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 Ideological domination has been replaced by the more sophisticated strategies of the market, regrets Jaromir Volek.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.

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.

A documentary about the Prague Spring created the impression that the revival of the nation in the 1960s was driven wholly by the reform communists, writes Adam Gebert. Why was no platform given to those “who were never the least bit involved with the communist ideology”?

In their efforts of marketing and conversion, both globalization and the religious are forms of total war disguised as peace. The total or global nature of this disguised war leads to what Leonard Lawlor calls “the problem of the worst”.

Russian philosopher Michail Ryklin’s new book “Communism as Religion” explores how the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks, far from rendering religion obsolete, created a new faith. Here he talks to “New Humanist” editor Caspar Melville about the religiosity inherent in western European intellectuals’ admiration for the Soviet Union, including Russell, Koestler, Benjamin, and Brecht.

Panopticism is waning; panspectrocism is the nascent social diagram that organizes our lives. Heineken and Wal-Mart use pattern recognition and computer-assisted predictions of future behaviours to secure their markets. Google, the panspectric corporation par excellence, tells us that the company wants to know what you’ll want to do tomorrow. This brings renewed poignancy to Gabriel Tarde’s contagion-centric thought, write Kullenberg and Palmås.

The reports on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction decided that the US invasion of Iraq could start. Today, we know that these weapons were fiction, an image produced to justify the war. Discussing Hannah Arendt and the Viet Nam war, Cathy Caruth shows that this type of political imagery has a long tradition in the US.

Faced with public funding cuts, the editors of “Esprit” write an open letter defending the role of generalist cultural journals. When the academic world can communicate only with specialists, and the daily press can provide only superficial analysis, cultural journals are needed to balance depth against accessibility. “Esprit” can find the right questions to ask, write its editors, and can help create shared culture in a world fragmented by globalization. Self-consciously “international”, it can bring French ideas into contact with those from elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

As contemporary witnesses disappear, collective memory in Russia is altering, writes the director of Memorial. The hardships of war and the Stalinist terror are being forgotten and Stalin is being remembered as the victor over the essence of evil.

In his essay “Mistaken identity”, Kenan Malik argues that multiculturalism perpetuates a racist definition of culture. Radostin Kaloianov dismisses this critique as being based on false conclusions, turning instead to what he considers to be the genuine limitation of institutionalized multiculturalism: its concentration on only a narrow spectrum of differences.