Elzbieta Matynia [EM]: I want to welcome Professor Price, who is a professor of law from the neighboring institution, the Cardozo School of Law . . . (introduces him). Prof. Monroe Price is not only a legal expert on regulating media, but also did considerable research on media situation in the region. He will be talking with us about media regulation and the problems of media policy.

Monroe Price [MP]: I was trying to think of what would be useful for us to talk about today, and I'll start with some ideas or some concepts . . .

EM: Good, some late arrivals from Slovakia.

MP: Please interrupt me if you want to talk about something else.

One thing I've been interested in is how various countries of the former Soviet Union and the region dealt with the problems of transition, and what kind of ways there are of defining this problem of--I just learned the word--transitology. Do you know this word? EM: Yes, I don't like it, I don't think the word is serious, it's ridiculing it, don't you think? MP: Some graduate student told me he's working in the department of transitology at the Central European University, I thought it was trams, I thought it was mass transportation or something like that.

So one interesting question for me was competing western interests and how they define what they thought their influence should be in this very delicate time--the US interests, the British interests, the French interests--because in the period after 1989 this idea that USAID or American foundations or American media had some kind of answer to the question of what the media should be like, in a kind of missionary way, went to Poland and went to Hungary and went to Russia and conducted lectures and discussions and things like that, and in a sense brought back ideas saying this country is progressing or not progressing depending upon whether it's following a particular model which had been developed within that western country. And there was a kind of competition I would say among say the UK, Germany, certainly Germany and the United States to define how the media should be regulated, or what it means to have a media in a democratic society. I'm still not comfortable with my own answer to this question, which was what was at stake for the US or for the UK, etc., who are still expending money, sending advisors, holding conferences, in some way trying to place their stamp on the development of the media. USAID for example just established a 12 and a half million dollar fund for partnerships between American media organizations and Russian media organizations.

EM: And USAID is? They may not know. MP: United States Agency for International Development, as part of some sort of democratization and society project at the Department of State of the US. I just met with people at something called the European Institute for the Media in Dusseldorf, which is a group of researchers with grants from the Council of Europe and from the German government etc. who try to monitor elections and somehow have some kind of impact on media policy, media regulation policy in the region. And I'd certainly like your views on this kind of questions, which is what are the goals of these kinds of interventions? Is it out of a kind of religious zeal, is it because Americans think they have the right answer to the way media should function in a democratic society so they want to export it? Is it a sort of cultural sphere of influence that is developing, can one see in the region different patterns developing in terms of cultural spheres of influence, how do media alliances and media regulatory patterns relate to that. And then there are commercial aspects to it, and I think these are really important, is the kind of idea of freedom encapsulated in the American media law a kind of tent for the export of American entertainment products and cultural influences and things like that. So is the same thing true, is it less true but similarly true of the British model or a German model. So it seems to me this is one, it's probably not that big a question, but it's an interesting question to me, and probably also its corollaries in other areas of post-Soviet practices.

I can say a little bit about these different models. The American model, as compared to the British model, is one in which this idea of the first amendment is king, in which there is very little government regulation of speech, at least in theory, and in addition to that, in terms of the structure of the media, there is very little idea of the public, in the construction of the media. That is if we think about the difference in the development of television and radio on the continent and here, her ewe have a kind of vestigial public broadcasting service, one that's always in danger, in jeopardy, it was an afterthought that wasn't really established til 1964, after the kind of exuberant development of a totally private broadcasting system. whereas in the British system you had a public monopoly, the BBC, that wasn't broken until the late 50s when you had your first introduction of private television. so you have 2 completely different conceptions of how the electronic media ought to function in a democratic society. And if you then compare that to the German model, and it's important to do so because the German model becomes very important in Hungary, maybe other places as well, the German model established after World War II, partly as a requirement imposed by the allied forces, of certainly public institutions but institutions that were dedicated to internal pluralism, very very delicately structured in some ways so as to have governing councils that were very pluralistic and different from the BBC which had a kind of elite governing body and played a kind of elite role in British society. in the German model we had each of the laender having their own broadcasting law and this elaborate, almost parliamentary approach to the governance of broadcasting entities. so here we come in the post Soviet period, and the question is, first what should happen to the ancient machinery we have in each of these countries a state broadcasting of great proportions, Ostankino, Hungarian television, etc. etc. , and in terms of vocabulary of these questions people distinguish, whether accurately or not, between public broadcasting, which is basically a kind of element of civil society, if that's the correct use of the word, as opposed to state broadcasting, that is to say, that the BBC is conceptualized as being a kind of institution of the state, but not an institution controlled by the state. And on the other hand, there's never a question about whether Ostankino was controlled by the state, or in the presoviet period any of the great state television systems were instruments of the state, as it were.

So one element of this entire post-Soviet period has been, what occurs to these institutions which are state instrumentalities and were in fact one of the great sources for molding opinion and maintaining power and enforcing power. And the question is, should they be dismantled. To take these several models and these several prejudices, under a British model they would move from state institutions to public broadcasting, they would become repositories of a kind of cultural identity, but independent of the state and with kind of a character and culture of their own, they would be public but independent, if that could be the case. Under the American model, they would virtually disappear. From an American perspective, people can't figure out what these institutions are, they're so unlike anything, and there's no belief that they should have a substantial future, except as privatized institutions, they should be privatized the way in which every other major state industry should be privatized, there's no difference between whether the, I don't know, a company that manufactures tractors should be privatized and the company that delivers television signals should be privatized. Under a German model, these public institutions might continue, but you would pay a lot more attention to an elaboration of the governing process, etc.

So that has been a major aspect of the period between 1989 and the present, what should happen to these state broadcasting institutions, and I would say at least from an American perspective people have been amazed that they have survived and there has been as little modification in the state broadcasting systems as there has, and there seems to be little disposition to engage in privatization. in each of the countries there's a special chapter about the fate of these broadcasting entities, I know some of them a little bit more than others, and I'm sure all of you know particular ones better than mine, and we can talk about that.

The major questions that arise in terms of these things, state entities, is what role should they continue to play in national identity and politics and culture of the society? And to some extent this is a question of whether there is sufficient money, what should be the source of financing for them, how should they be governed, who should control them, who appoints the director general, what's the governing board, who establishes the programming schedule, etc., so there's a whole family of issues that relate just to these transitions of these state broadcasting entities.

The next major question is licensing. Here we get to more of the American model. This is certainly the American view, that the true definition of independent television is private television under private control, then first of all, here many questions arise. One of them is, and I'm still just talking about electronic media here, will spectrum be made available for independent television; that is, in addition to the spectrum made available for state broadcasting, will there be independent or private television as well? And will this be on a national basis or will it be on a regional basis? Will these be small local broadcasters or will they be competitors with the state broadcasting system? What is the method of selecting these licenses? How political is this method for selecting them, will it be friends of the nomenklatura, and then the whole question of whether foreign investors should be allowed to acquire interests in broadcast licenses. And this is a very lively issue; it's part of what's hung up the Hungarian media law, in the Czech Republic as you know nova television has been one, I'd say in the Czech Republic. And in Poland there have now been grants of major licenses, but in Hungary that hasn't been the case. In the former Soviet Union in many places there are informal small independent broadcasters who often acquire time on the frequency of the regional or local broadcaster, and the question is is that sufficient independence or do people need to have their own transmitters and security of their license. One of the main questions is how secure these licenses are and what it means to be independent. One of the things that's interesting in Russia is that, here, the issue of independent television means independent from the government, but it certainly means dependence on business interests, but in the American vocabulary that's not seen as being dependent, that's seen as being independent, and it's certainly independent of government, but its been my experience that often it's not seen as clearly as that in a post-Soviet context, that the choice is seen as do you want the media to be dependent on business or dependent on government, and it may not be that clear that dependent on business is that much better, or what.

Then I think the another question are substantive areas, non-structural ones, that is to say, what kinds of legal issues arise and other kinds of questions, for example censorship and areas of prohibited speech, and here again there are American models and European models, for example hate speech and promotion of war, areas that are questionable under the European Covenant on Human Rights, but are not exactly codified in American practice. So the issue of how one thinks about which speech practices should be free of all regulation seems still to be debatable. defamation is an interesting question now, because in the United States since the sixties the idea is that you can have a harsher level of criticism of public officials and still be immune from defamation actions or libel actions, and in Russia particularly and other places as well, defamation as a kind of principle of law limits what journalists can say about politicians. And some politicians, Zhirinovsky in particular, have used defamation law to harass journalists who have been overly critical.

Advertising law, I notice that a number of you have mentioned this. There are a number of issues that arise, how much advertising there should be. One issue that I'm interested in is the allocation or the, let me see if I can put this well, the question of whether the state broadcasting systems compete unfairly with the independent systems, that is they try to undersell the independents so it's harder to maintain an economic basis as an independent broadcaster. so one of the interesting questions that I don't think has been looked at very much is whether, because of structure or regulation or unfair practices of one sort or another, state broadcasters try to make life difficult for independents by their sales and other practices. what constitutes unfair or unethical advertising--I think these are still questions that are being looked at in most of these kinds of places.

I want to conclude with a few comments and then maybe we'll talk about some of these questions, about research issues. One of them is whether something that I'm interested in and I don't know how much it applies in all of these countries, how much does technology, particularly transborder distribution of signals, make a lot of the internal debates less important than they otherwise might be? That is to say, you have nation states in a, this is a hypothesis, you have nation states functioning as if they were in a kind of bubble, and trying to maintain or think about the control of imagery as if there was not a lot of transborder data flow or not a lot of image flow. And it may well be that what is occurring in terms of the practices of individual viewers and individual citizens in actually watching television, gaining a variety of signals, a variety of viewpoints, etc. is different from the assumptions that underlie the regulatory debates. This may be true in certain regions, in certain border regions, it may not be true for large numbers of people, I don't know, and it has a lot to do with language as well.

The other question is, whatever the structure, that is to say state, independent, public etc., the content moves inexorably towards western imagery, either because its foreign investors, or foreign programming acquired for the market, or domestic product which mines the foreign product, so the whole question of the content and how it's related or not related to the regulatory assumptions is an interesting question for me.

I'm interested in patterns that are developing. For example, are there regional interests, for example Ron Lauder, the Lauder-Palmer interest in CME--he has this company with Andrew palmer which is called CME, Central European Media Enterprises I think it's called, it's interesting to know what his strategy is, I'm not sure, he is certainly the license or the substantial interest in nova, but he has a kind of regional interest . EM: that's in Czech republic. MP: That's in the Czech republic. but I think he has a new license in Romania, and he's applied for a license in Poland, and I think he might be a candidate for a license in Hungary. What does this mean, and is this a good thing? That is to say, is the pattern that will develop large national companies that compete with the state broadcasting entities, will they be network, a sort of central European network that has some coherence to it . . . EM: Intervision, that's what we had before, Intervisja . . .MP: Is there a, does it, and how are any of these questions related to democratic practices and the expansion of civil society, do they have anything to do with it at all? The other, I think I've alluded to this before, the question of governing structures. There are these highly complex and convulsive commissions, the polish broadcasting commission, national broadcasting commission. in Poland, the licensing commission in Moscow, under the new, about to be, if ever, Hungarian media law there are ornate, there may be six or seven broadcasting councils or authorities that are established, and made up in very complex ways. Are these workable, are they instruments of civil society, are they just transitory phenomena themselves?

With that, I thought I'd open the floor to questions or discussion.

Heshan: You talk mostly of television and visual media. do the same problems arise in the print media and in radio, or are they slightly different?

MP: As far as I can tell, they're quite different. I'm not sure if I can say much about radio, radio is closer to the television issue, but the press, as far as I can tell, was almost wholly privatized and rendered independent, for want of a better word, almost immediately, and none of these structural issues seemed to apply so much in the press. with exceptions. in Russia. Although essentially what I've just said is right, I think by and large, there's still newspapers that have as their founders organs of the state. for example, there's a newspaper that is of the government. (which one? you mean the organ of the state? --- Rziska Gazeta) right. it's an official newspaper. [Lidia: but it's a private newspaper. because I was surprised that they're publishing this newspaper, the laws, and now acts of the parliament, the duma} [the founder is a state body, anyway newspaper operates as an independent legal entity. but the owner is the state, as I understand it]. MP: and many other newspapers. but there are many that are not, there are private founders as well. And there were really interesting problems of transition. Izvestia was one of the great problems of transition, of who owned the paper in the post-Soviet period, because the founder was the supreme Soviet, and then the question was who owned the paper, and as far as I can tell the journalists and other people got around the table and said we own it, and there was a big dispute as to who owned the assets and who owned the paper and things like that. In 93, several newspapers were in the crisis between the government and the parliament were closed down in Russia, and some of them were closed down by their founders, there were a couple that has this kind of structure where a government organ was the technical founder of the paper, and one of the questions was between the government and parliament, I can't remember which newspaper that was.

Another issue that is interesting in Russia and I don't know about it elsewhere is the subsidy policy, where there is an elaborate effort to provide subsidies to allow certain papers to continue to function [Q: governmental subsidies?] governmental subsidies, and there have been some questions about the means of distribution and whether there's favoritism and whether you can have independence if you're still dependent on subsidies. but newspapers present a wholly different question from electronic media, and one of the really interesting questions is, is this because of two different traditions, is it because governments consider electronic media so powerful that the risk of their being privatized is so much greater than newspapers? I don't know the answer to that.

Andrew Arato: Well, it's the pretechnological argument, the argument about technology changes it? But before that argument, in a country say Hungary is a very small one, you have two maybe three surface? Television channels, you have many newspapers, so that changes the issue quite a lot. It doesn't change it totally, because privatization is in government hands, through privatization some outcomes can be influenced, or at least there can be a hope that it influences some outcomes, I mean this happened in the last part of the communist regime in Hungary, where the provincial newspapers played into the hands of Axel Springer. Now Axel Springer is not known for his either procommunist views or his views that would somehow coincide with what the socialist party now wants to represent. but still it was a deal, and I think that part of the deal was that the editorial boards and the journalists stay in place and continue to control those particular provincial papers. I think that was a political result to some extent. The new government tried to do the same thing with Magyar Nemszet, which was at the time the second largest daily, now it's in third position possibly, in the context of an open sale when the best offer was on the table from dagens ??, a liberal Swedish paper, they played the newspaper into the hands of ??, the editor of Figaro, because they assumed that Figaro was conservative, and they wanted a conservative partner. Actually in Hungary there is no audience for very conservative journalism, and so ? got out of the deal later on. but still, there was the attempt. And I assume that must be there also in the case of the electronic media too, that is you look for partners, sometimes not the most economically reliable partners, who will somehow politically fit in . . .

MP: Well I think there are two questions, one is, is this a pattern that applies to newspapers across the region?

EM?: I think the one thing that can be traced very easily throughout the region that emerged in Hungary, as Andrew described it, is that actually their print media are much more susceptible to foreign financing, not only individual media representatives or other newspapers or larger print organizations in the west, but I kind of a media moguls which invested in various print media throughout the region, much earlier than it was even discussed on the level of the electronic media. sometimes they went out, as you mentioned, they decided to give it up, or they closed operation. There were some expensive and unsuccessful dailies in different countries that had to close down, in Poland it was Observator, which was heavily invested by Swedes, and for non-political reasons, financial and other, when it turned out there was some problem with the financial viability of the investor, the paper was closed.

Andrew Arato: but the economics are different. newspaper prices in the whole region have been incredibly subsidized, the price is very very low. suddenly to sell them at economic prices seems impossible. In no country does that happen even now. so if you're not going to have a lot of sales . . .and plus it should be added in Hungary at least, there's not much tradition of advertising in newspaper, so financing is very precarious. TV is a completely different matter. if someone gets hold of a TV station, it's a quasi monopoly even if there are two or three in a country, and so there money can be made immediately, it's quite different form the case of newspapers, and I have a feeling only newspapers above a certain circulation can make it, they don't make it but I think they don't lose so much.

MP: well the other question, this gets to the question of influences and sort of the way in which the media relates to certain political and financial interests. In Russia, I guess, the most?? group, which has developed NTV, or independent television, which is the strongest news-bearing counterpart to the state broadcasting service, and actually is very competitive and is now maybe the more respected news organization in terms of television, is founded by a group of banks, the most group of banks, and they also control Sovodniya. And the question is, what's the interest in doing this? Is this ??'s commitment to a democratic society, is it because in the furtherance of a particular perspective on what the culture should become. And I had a really interesting discussion once with Igor Maleshenko, who is the programming head of NTV, and it was a kind of an odd discussion about programming. someone was trying to sell him Mexican soap operas for showing on NTV, and soap operas were very popular, etc., and he said to me, I prefer American cop shows, I want Miami Vice on NTV, and I'll tell you why, he said, my dream, the problem with Russians, this is what he said to me, dreaming of a utopian life of wealth, and this is underscored by the soap operas, the soap operas are about a kind of culture of wealth and ease. but I want those hard-driving competitive crime shows from the United States because that's the kind of personality I want to help develop in Russian culture. It seemed to me to epitomize the kind of idea that he had, which was charming in one respect, which was that he as captain of this great electronic opportunity could mold attitudes towards work, consumption, civic responsibility etc, and he would do it through a certain technique. But I think the first question was his recognition that in fact what he did with this private network actually would affect behavior, actually would affect political attitudes, whether that's the case or not. And I don't mean just in news; the entertainment programming selected would have a major impact on how people thought and conducted themselves.

EM: About the problem of print media, I know we didn't talk about it. I have a question, and I know it's a topic frequently raised by the foreigners visiting those countries. The issue of objective journalism, the issue of presenting the reality without events or what is happening within engaging in it in a political way, personally, by journalists who are to be reporters and not political commentators. This problem is brought up throughout elections especially, but actually the whole time since 1989. And I want to ask the question how this problem, in print media which of course had to appear in the electronic media, how people try to think about regulating that. A tricky policy issue, but how we are doing that here, or is this just a problem of kind of political culture, professionalism.

MP: It's partly a question of ethics and professionalism, but it's also a question of regulation. I just read a little note by Miklos Haraszti commenting on the evolution of the Hungarian media law in which he compared what he called northern European television to southern European television on this question of objectivity. That you had a kind of BBC approach, which is that there is such a thing as objectivity, it's not necessarily a matter of regulation but it should be at the core of the professional operation; as opposed to a wildly partisan media in which various [anities] have their own instrument of mass communication, and they can be as flagrant and as attitude bound as they wish. The way you get objectivity in a society is to have sharply conflicting views, and no individual paper has to aspire to objectivity, or has its own objectivity, like the old style objectivity, which is the scientific exploration of the Marxist-Leninist perspective was considered objective in some ways. So he says the Italian system of broadcasting, or what he calls the southern system, is least objective; the political parties parcels out the broadcasting channels and one group controls one channel and one group controls the other channel [ until Berlusconi, who introduces objectivity!!]. And it's his argument that the Hungarian media law has moved from a northern to a southern--that the current compromise, which gives Duna satellite television to one group, and in his view suggests that it's moving towards a more Italian approach. so that's one question of dealing with objectivity at least in the electronic media in two very different ways.

EM: You mean letting it be spontaneous, and trying to saturate the environment of journalists with some responsible and ethical . . . And then letting it go.

MP: Not exactly letting it go, but dividing it. That is to say, that there is a conscious division of the pool of available means of communication among parties . . .

EM: There are two models. but then there is a reality in some of the countries that might be between north and south, which is there is a kind of a messy trying to get in front of the people whoever's agenda it is, not necessarily divided or balanced.

MP: The issue arises in the United States in an interesting way. There is no regulation for objectivity here, except for public broadcasting. Public broadcasting has a statutory responsibility for being objective. The word objective is used, and it's a total curiosity. Well you know about this.

EM: I'll give you an example. My husband is a documentary filmmaker, and at some point he made a documentary about the Solidarity period in Poland. That was at the time when Poland was under the state of war, and that was at the time when, and the movie was broadcast through the public stations throughout the country. The problem was that he didn't have in the movie, that all the people who were speaking were either intellectuals or workers or artists or poets or underground printers who were partially in prison, but he didn't have Jaruselski or anybody who represented the other to balance the view. The problem was at the time people were in prison, what was there to balance. so in fact, very frequently prior to the screening on television, there had to be, you had those hosts, this is another way of making it balanced, because otherwise it's unacceptable.

MP: Well it's an interesting question in public broadcasting here, because there, and it used to be true under the fairness doctrine in the commercial systems, do we look at any individual program and require that it be internally balanced, as it were, or do you look at the entire schedule, so you can say you're going to have some programs that are pro-solidarity and you have to balance it with some programs that are pro-Jaruzelski

EM: the military regime also has to have its say!

MP: In the United States, we had for many years something called the fairness doctrine, which required that when a, except in news, on the commercial system, when you had controversial issues of public importance you were required to provide the multiple views on that controversial issue of public importance. And that led, among other things, to this idea that there are two sides, which is very firmly fixed in the American notion of fairness, that there have to be two sides, and usually there are only two sides. it makes it much more convenient for the programmer who is dealing with fairness questions to define two sides of the question. so that was true of commercial broadcasting. That doctrine has been abolished basically for commercial broadcasters, but for public broadcasting the requirement of objectivity becomes more and more rigorous in some curious way.

Andrew Arato: in a case when you are presenting people who take a stand, then it is fairly easy to figure out that it ought to be some kind of balance, maybe not two but more, so that's not senseless to insist on. but there is an additional problem of the news, which is presented by the reporters or the staff. And the question that you raised earlier is whether objectivity there is to be had through some kind of complete lack of relationship to any political institution, party, advocacy on the part of the reporters, or rather you deal with the problem by having different programs and each reporter will have a different point of view. Obviously the philosophical problem is what would this objective point of view be . . .MP: does it exist? AA: This thing which would be different than pluralism? And that's the issue that you raise . . . MP: Yeah, is there such a thing as objectivity? And there again, I think in the history of broadcasting, the BBC is often erroneously or correctly placed as being a kind of palace of objectivity, disengaged, and even ITN I would say tries to follow . . . AA: That philosophically relates to issues like judicial independence, neutrality of the state. It's worth discussing, because both in a premodern and postmodern atmosphere that we are, I never know which, people would say it's all nonsensical to talk about that--I mean, the typical postmodern point of view, well, it's just another interest, it's the journalists, they might have a corporate interest of their own even if they're not tied to a party, so forget the whole issue. I think that's too easy and actually leads to bad results, and I think that's Miklos' point in that article you refer to, even though there ?? difficulties with objectivity, to get rid of it in advance, to set it up in the Italian way, is not perhaps very fortunate, and it's too quick intellectually to opt for that.

MP: Well, and it goes back to the question, what is the future of these state broadcasting entities? And I think one of the really interesting questions is what's the future and the role of these broadcasting entities in the newly independent states? Let's leave Russia out for a second, but Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova -- in these states, is there an important current role for some instrument of cohesion; another way I like to think of it is, you can't be a country unless you have a national airline and a national broadcasting system, that's the definition of a country. And the question is, what should, how should Ukraine think about its broadcasting policy, and if you go back to these models, do you think of the British model, the German model, or the American model, and is it necessary for language purposes, is it necessary for political identity questions, is it necessary for building a public sphere, for thinking about the management of elections? I mean the whole question of the mechanics of the democratic processes is so intertwined with the structure of the media, and that's something that plays itself out now in Russia and in all of thesecountries, what kind of access to the media, what should be the rules that establish how candidates and parties gain access to the media. And in some ways the access rules mirror the way in which party or candidate development occurs, and in some ways maybe it affects it. I don't know enough about that. But again, a really important subject. In Russia, I participated in a bunch of discussions about this kind of questions that seemed to have some strange elements, and one is should there be equal time for all candidates or all parties which tends to be what sounds like the right thing to do, but is it right? It turned out to be a total disaster, it trivialized time, it created imbalances between strong parties and weak parties that shouldn't have been created, I don't think, it's hard for me to know, but it's hard to know how to parcel out time on ORT, or Ostankino at the time, to candidates. And there's, interestingly after the last parliamentary elections the head of Ostankino was fired, and he was fired in part because of a documentary that was shown about Zhirinovsky on the eve of the election. And I couldn't tell why he was fired. It was either because this documentary was supposed to be anti-Zhirinovsky but it turned out to help Zhirinovsky, and if it had hurt him he would have been retained in office, but if it helped him he wasn't, which probably was the case. And what was his role, washis role to use Ostankino in this political campaign obviously to help incumbents or to help establish the party of the status quo or of power or whatever, but this is a big issue we haven't touched on here, and maybe you have some familiarity with it, which is the relationship of candidates to the media.

Mariela Vargova [Bulgaria]: I have one question about the mass media laws in our countries in Eastern Europe, because I am from Bulgaria and a few months ago in our parliament there was a big political struggle between the political parties on the mass media law. And I remember that much earlier, before this law, this law is not passed til now, but there were a few months with this struggle and this discussion about this law of mass media. but I remember that immediately after the parliamentary elections last December, the socialist party within 24 hours changed the directors of the national mass media, of the national TV, the national radio, the national telegraph agency, without any motivation, without any explanation, just by the decision of the majority of the socialist party. It was very strange, and public opinion was scandalous, how could it happen, but without explanation. And now the socialist party tries to impose its law on the mass media, to control it. And this law will make it for future ten years, within force. So it's very dangerous. And my question, because I am not sure what it is in other Eastern European countries, are there lawson mass media and what do these laws look like and what is the criterion to this law in the national legislature?

MP: Well let me respond briefly and then invite other people to respond. First of all, there seem to be similar problems of passing major mass media laws in almost each country in the region, and the question is why? Is there something about it that makes these laws difficult to enact? and one question is whether the governments have sufficient control that any sort of formulation of it or bringing this to a final completion weakens the role of government, I don't know. Second, the issues on which these laws founder or the debates founder seem to be similar in a number of contexts. One is the governing councils--who appoints people to the governing councils, how long they are in office, who can remove them, what their powers are. They founder on the question that Andrew pointed out which is how does the limited scarce spectrum space get allocated.

[second side of tape]

. . . and I think the point that you raise, the same issue was in Hungary which is, the head of Hungarian television was removed, in Russia there have been periodic removals of the heads of the committee on the press, and the head of Ostankino.

Mariela Vargova: But the director of the national TV in Bulgaria is a socialist party member and I think it's a scandal.

EM: What she's trying to say is the appointments became so politicized

M.P.: It's true in Poland as well.

Mariela Vargova: Absolutely. One hundred percent politicized. so you cannot be director of the national mass media if you're not in close contact with the majority party in the parliament or with the party in government or please be a party member.

MP: But then getting back to this question about freer press, and I don't know about Bulgaria about the newspapers, and this continued interplay between government and high officials in television. What accounts for it? Is it about money as well as about control of the news? In Russian television, as many of you may know, let me just say a word about public television, Ostankino, this is a really interesting example of this process, Yeltsin has announced a privatization program for the first channel, and here the really interesting question was, whose responsibility is it in a society to make these fundamental decisions? Should it be the duma, or should it be the president, should it be the government? So one of the really interesting questions in Russia was whether this was in the president's power. The duma has contested this privatization, and I think at present has brought a court case against the president concerning the privatization mechanism, and that's another reason for the impasse on passage of law, because in the absence of the passage of a law which has some other orderly process it may be that the government maintains greater power or itself establishes a media policy, that is to say it is in charge on an ad hoc basis or on a general basis. And that seems to be an interesting aspect of the Russian situation, that is, who establishes the media policy and the legislation, as it were, and in the Russian case the president's decree both announced the privatization, the form of it, who the investors would be, selected the investors and the percentages that each investor would hold, and that led to a famous ban on advertising on public television, on ORT, on the grounds that there had been a scandalous dissipation of advertising revenues away from the station to other economic interests in society. So the guy who announced this policy got killed, was murdered the next week, add it was thought that it was because in part of his own economic interests in his own advertising policy. So it's a more efficient means than merely withdrawing a person from the job.

EM: When you were talking about the situation in new independent states outside of Russia, and you brought up the case of Ukraine, there is a situation in this country where you have a multiple television stations, a majority of them, are actually Russian television stations. not only is this true, but the quality of the broadcasting and the programming is superior. They are better financed, they have better specialized, whereas Ukrainian, I was watching it in the course of a few weeks in Kiev, it appears as though it's a kind of a provincial, amateurish-run television channels. And this is related to the question that you presented at the beginning, what is happening to the debate, including the debate on media, in the country which is actually watching the much better packaged electronic message coming from the other country, in fact the political debate, the debate which concerns public issues, which they are getting is a Russian debate, and in fact puts the society outside of the opportunity that television should provide, and I think this is the case in some other countries, in the central Asian republics, in the southern republics of the former Soviet Union. Of course the problem of language is different in Lithuania, I think you seal yourself . . .could you comment on that, Darius?

Darius Aidukas [Lithuania]: I guess in Lithuania it's a different situation, there is not so big influence of Russian television at all, we just have a few hours of Russian television, but we have now, during this lecture I'm trying to calculate how much channels you can watch in Vilnius, I calculated that it is five Lithuanian TV channels you can watch in Vilnius. Not cable. [Question: They are private or national?] One is national, the rest are private. But of course not the channels, a few hours in evening time, another channel is more or less a competitor to the state television.

EM: So there is a state one major competitor and several small channels that broadcast in different hours.

Darius: Maybe two competitors are more or less equal to the state channel. So I think that I've got the impression that it's different in Russian and other Soviet republics. We have no state newspapers anymore, newspapers are private.

MP: I was going to say a couple of things. One is, ORT or Ostankino basically changed from having a role of being the official Soviet television station to being a sort of international television station which is designed in part to reach the Russians abroad, or what's the term for it, near abroad. So there is a kind of special mission, and the question is is this a role the state wants to continue to support and certainly does, it's an appealing idea that a principle function of the state broadcasting entity is to reach out to the near abroad. In Hungary, DNA satellite has this idea of reaching the Hungarians in Romania. There was just a little flap in Romania, the national cable council issues a sort of ambiguous ruling which seemed to have the effect of banning cable systems in Transylvania from carrying DNA satellite television. Then they denied it, the president denied it, that's why I say ambiguous, I don't know what the deal is but it's a continuing kind of small issue, I don't known whether it's a big issue or a small issue, but it's an issue.

Andrew Arato: It's good that you raise it from the other side, because Elzbieta raised it from the side that sounded like that of Russian imperialism, or at least cultural imperialism, and now you raise it from the side of a minority getting some kind of service.

MP: The same thing is true of the Slovak language question. What's Slovakia's relationship to Hungarian language press or Hungarian language television.

Elzbieta: And what Slovakia's relationship to Czech television!

Dionyz Hochel: I would say that Czech private TV Noah is the most popular TV in Slovakia. The people are looking always, because they have cable in their ?, and state commission to order licenses, they gave them to their friends in the first round, but they were not able to start? broadcastings; now it is visible, that without joint venture with Noah is not possible to start private TV channel in Slovakia.

MP: I think this is why, I just wrote a note to Milan Swid at Charles University, he's been following CME, and the interesting question, there are two questions I would raise that come from your comment. One is, it's interesting the idea that whatever we call competition or the market is such that it makes it harder to pass out licenses to your friends, it may not work; in a competitive environment, favoritism may just be a transitional phenomenon. It gives some money to these guys who can then sell out to foreign interests of some sort, but . . . Well I think this whole idea of CMEs general strategy, what's it's Slovak strategy, and who are the competitors to CME, for example. [EM: Central European Media Enterprises] Yeah, this is the Lauder-Palmer thing. Time Wagner has a strategy, there are a number of cable strategies, but CME seems to have a specially central European strategy. There were a number of Russian companies involved in ? first, Turner Broadcasting had a joint venture in Moscow for a terrestrial license for something called TV6. It was very interesting, this was early on, and one of the questions is how do they get a license. That gets back to this questions of what's the overall legal system for granting licenses, is it corrupt, is it biased, and it's interesting in both the cases of private television in Moscow. but turner broadcasting has been bought out, that is to say they are no longer part of the picture and Russian money went in. This is my publication, post-Soviet media and policy newsletter, but I have one issue on the Ukrainian efforts to diminish the influence of Russian television in Ukraine. Ukraine switched the broadcasts of ORT to a less available frequency channel. This was in September. And I don't know what changes have been made, but Ukrainian state television and radio, ORT was moved to the second national channel, already partially used by local production entities. in a lot of these instances, and this is true within Russia itself by the way, it's another interesting question, which is the way in which the financial structure of transmission. for example, when Russian television is transmittedin Ukraine it often uses the distribution facilities of the ministry of communications or of another Ukrainian state broadcasting authority, and they're not paid. I mean they ought to be paid, and they're billed, but no money is forthcoming from the Russians to pay for this. So the Ukrainians basically say, we're not doing this because of language fears or cultural fears--you haven't paid your rent, and you're being turned off. [EM: Iis it easy to turn off, physically?] Apparently so. [Comment: you have relay stations for each country] They're not jammed. You just put something else on it, you assign it to local broadcasters.

Darius Aidukas: Similar situation that was in Lithuania. We had before Ostankino broadcasting to Lithuania, but Ostankino refused to pay for the rebroadcasting in Lithuanian territory, and this channel was simply sold to one private company.

MP: this is true in Kazakhstan, in Siberia--the status of ORT within, and whether it has to pay and whether it can afford to pay, or how that's determined seems to be a universal question, and I read time and again of cities or places where there is a cut off or a threat to cut off Russian television. And Yeltsin signed a degree, I'm not sure if he signed it or promised to sign it by the first of the year, that makes it illegal to turn off ORT in Russia. The question is, so it's a big issue. And another thing which is happening in Ukraine, and to some extent in bailers as well, is that accreditation of Russian reporters is being withheld as a way of trying to penalize or harass Russian people who particularly report on Ukrainian issues in a way that is viewed disfavorably by the Ukrainian regime. but Ukraine said the following: we want to think about a package that will allow ORT to come back into Ukraine. One element of the package is we want reciprocity. we want to have an effective way of having Ukrainian television reach Ukrainian population pockets within Russia.

Andrew Arato: this shows what is involved in this. The issue is from the technical point of view the same, from the point of view of the nationalists it's always the same too, but from the point of view of democracy it's not the same. Ukraine, Russian is a more important language in Ukraine than Ukrainian. in terms of who speaks it, there you speak about pockets of Ukrainians maybe still in Russian, that's a very different thing. For these people all of a sudden not to have Russian television is a big deal in the Ukraine.

EM: especially since there are a lot of Russians living there. AA: that's what I'm saying. but even Ukrainians.

MP: it's a very big deal. The question is can the Ukrainian gov't effectively do this. Is it a policy which will stand up.

Andrew Arato: because privatization will also lead to having Russian TV. because two thirds of the Ukrainians, one third is Russian speaking, one third Ukrainian, and one third poles, but more Russians than Ukrainians, so that means two-thirds are a market for Russian TV, and you can only stop that market up by authoritarian means, so from the point of view of democracy it's a big problem.

MP: well one of the things, if I read this piece, read the news correctly, was that this led to some regional solutions, Crimea and other areas with heavier, in which the local political entity itself paid for some of the bills for ORT TV; they couldn't sustain, they couldn't remain in power without Russian television actually being broadcast. And so you had local decisions that were possible to reinstate Russian television. This Ukrainian ORT things is unbelievably interesting.

Andrew Arato: it is because . . . A threatened language, like even Slovakian nationalists might say, between the Czechs and the Hungarians somehow there's a problem, or in Ukraine they would say because of the Russians there's a problem, we have to rebuild this position. whatever the people actually want, what should be done is the rebuilding of this tradition. but that prejudges then all the other questions, because neither commercialization nor internationalization is going to help them in that. Then they must offer a governmental structure.

MP: but then the question is, in a modern society is that a viable option? it sounds like a necessary option, but not necessarily a viable option. This reminds me of my second point about nova, which is that the success of nova changes the programming strategy of Czech television, of state television. And that's true for the BBC, BBC is influenced by ITV; PBS in the United States is influenced by NBC. So . . .

Andrew Arato: because of PBS I think other news programs have to do better, they can't be quite as bad as they would be otherwise.

MP: that could be, I'll have to think about that . . .

AA: you don't believe that?

EM: did you hear the news? there was a news item that ABC is creating a new news channel, competitive somewhat to CNN.

MP: all those influences, cross-media, are interesting, but the one that I wanted to focus on is what happens to ORT, the public television station in Moscow, or the Czech station etc, how is it affected in terms of its programming, in terms of its entertainment, because it's competitively hit. Another issue has to do with fees, because are people going to pay for, like on BBC system of having license fees, and will they continue to do so if the public station has only a very small piece of the total pie. This by the way is another problem in Kazakhstan, the Kazakh national system, I think it lost a third of its market when the independent television came in, I don't remember the figures exactly. you both have the competition from Russian broadcasting, Russian language broadcasting, and from the new private entities . . .

EM: because the majority is not Kazakh, so . . .

[?] it used to be this way, now it's about 40% Russians and about 60% Kazakhs.

EM: no it's not. I just came from there and there are new data, no, they are Ukrainians on top of Russians, there are Koreans on top of Russians, and the official data from the month of September, there are 40% of Russians, but only 38% Kazakhs.

[?} these were the figures 4 or 5 years ago . . .

EM: I guess we have conflicting data . . .

MP: I think the main point here is not just the population difference but the quality difference. you want to watch the most dynamic television you can see.

Heshan: just getting back to the question of financing and licensing. In Britain there are these trucks that patrol the streets, and if you haven't paid your license you're arrested. Does any country, I mean PBS depends on public subscriptions, BBC depends on fear of being caught, although nobody's ever caught, are there taxation systems in any countries that actually have, I mean television is a public good in the same way as streetlights are, is there . . .

MP: well obviously in all these countries, in the old regime the state paid 100% of all costs, and it's still the case that there are large budgetary expenditures on state television.

EM: but also people paid monthly dues. everybody who had a television had to pay, not very high, up until 89, I don't know how it is now, you were almost like a cable subscriber, you were obliged to pay, just as you paid for film you paid for TV and radio together.

MP: is that true in Russia too?

? just at the time I left, it was 600 rubles a month.

MP: for regular television, or for cable?

? for they call it for radio antenna . . .

EM: I think that's true throughout the region . . .

MP: but I don't know if that's a substantial amount in the budget now, I don't know if they've raised it enough . . .

? It doesn't go as I understand to the companies, it goes to retranslation [transmission] to cover the cost of retranslation . . .

MP: It may go to the ministry of communication. That's another thing about the Russian structure, you have the ministry of communication, and then you have the federal radio and television, the Yakovlev organization. So the ministry of communications does not control the programs and it doesn't have any control over the broadcasting organizations, but it may be the one that receives the money, I don't know. It's a mystery.

I guess the answer is that the main support for the broadcasting entity seems to come from the tax base, and it's a problem. I mean in times in which there's not money available, the question is, is this a high priority, and if it's a high priority, why is it a high priority? it may be ahigh priority for good reasons or for bad reasons, it may be a high priority for maintaining state control or for maintaining state control of access to the political structure . . .

Heshan: or as a bulwark against western . . .

MP: and then the question is, is it an effective bulwark, and a bulwark against what? On the bulwark question, it may turn out that the shell is a bulwark, but that the content, because of the competitiveness we discussed, is very little different, it's western imagery on a state broadcasting system. And one of the really interesting questions for me is, from an American policy perspective, whether there is support for these state broadcasting entities in a kind of more liberal sense, or it's focussed solely on the private, independent sphere.

Heshan: the case of Sri Lanka, just to throw in another country, is straddling the BBC model and the American model. The BBC world service is received through the networks, and on top of that ITN, w hich is an indigenous Sri Lankan commercial station network, is broadcast, and [??],which is this statewide sort of thing. And you generally have[?], which is much more ethnically centered, if you like, it's broadcast in the three languages in Sri Lanka, English, Senegalese? and Tamil. ITN is generally dynasty reruns and things like that. So you do kind of get the creation of two different kinds of entertainment, much more serious, much more ethnically centered, then the world service takes care of the rest of the world, and ITN takes care of the lowest common denominator. And it seems to be that there isn't this mutual infiltration, but rather the setting up of different spheres, where people just understand, well I'll watch ITN this and this, and at the same time something else is going to appear.

MP: well, the question is isthere a conscious government policy . . . Heshan: absolutely . . . MP: or does it happen naturally, does the market produce that result, probably not. I just read an interview with oleg potsov,who is the head of Russian television, which sort of touches on this. in Russia there's the fourth channel, the fourth channel is divided between Igor Maleshenko and NTV, which has a partial use. It's used in large part for what's called the universities channel. And Maleshenko, I refereed to him before as a model independent station operator in Moscow, and he, in a kind of curious award by the president, obtained the use of part of this fourth channel, and wants more ofit. And Popsov, who controls the rest of it, he's the head of Russian television, has said, we need something which is kind of the culture bearer, we need a channel that is educational and responsible and things like that. As Maleshenko said, Popsov obviously hasn't watched it recently and doesn't realize the mediocre quality of it, I don't know if you share that view. At any rate, sometimes there's a rational division of the market, and sometimes the frequency is reserved for cultural purposes to hold it back from the market, not because they're going to vaunt the public good aspect of it, but to limit the impact or the power of the private entity. And I think that's the kind of debate that's going on now with respect tot he fourth channel in Moscow.

EM: when it comes across the problems of the kind of intertwining ethnic issues and the cultural spheres of influence, because when you say they reserve a part for cultural programs, not to let the private channels take it over, that also means possibly not to take another cultural sphere to enter onto the stage.

MP: well I'vewritten this article, which I recommend; actually I have a new book called television, the public sphere and national identity, which I meant to bring, oxford's published it, and in it there is a chapter which is reprinted in the yale law journal . . . At any rate, the point of this article is that regulation throughout the world is a way of dividing markets for loyalty. it has other kinds of articulations, but the kind of subtext, or sometimes not very much of a subtext, is to parcel out along the southern idea the market as it would be for the market for goods, where oligopolist try to get together and use law to maintain market divisions and to screen out competitors, this is also true with what I call the market for loyalties with respect to the media. And certainly the Ukrainian Russian situation is an example of that, and there ultimately will be a kind of regulatory agreement which will reflect a kind of power arrangement between one kind of cultural and political influence and another. And then the question is, and it wouldn't be news here but it would be news elsewhere, what we call American television or commercial television itself is in this market for loyalties, and the conception of freeing television is a way of articulating a broader opening for this particular approach to the market for loyalties. This conceptualization of something as being non state or private or independent, as being wholly a political, is incredibly political in terms of shaping loyalties, shaping attitudes and redividing the market, and I think that's one of the really interesting things that's being played out.

EM: thank you very much.