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INSIDE Special Issue on Grantors and Grantees In this newsletter, we focus on the medley of American initiatives to promote a freer, more independent mass media. It’s one thing passionately to want to encourage democracy, it’s another to know how to go about it. Determining what to fund and why is no easy undertaking. While it’s not too difficult to make bold speeches about helping the democratic process along, actually figuring out how to spend money to do so is much more complicated. Imbedded in the language about the free press are a great many problems involving means and objectives. Highly charged political contexts present continuous problems of distinguishing between the reigning rhetoric of free press expectations, often self-promotional, and the goals of defining national interest, moving toward a more democratic society, providing security and stability. It is a fortunate world in which all are congruent, but this happy state does not seem to be the case in today’s former Soviet Union. For many in the West, the principal of privatizing the press becomes paramount. The test of whether a press is free becomes, at the least, the existence of immediate and serious competition to the government-owned press, if government ownership is to be retained at all. But in terms of building a culture of democracy, the great public broadcasting entities—like the BBC—may be more effective than a proliferation of advertiser-supported private stations. Undermining central broadcasters may, in the short and medium run, prove detrimental to stability and teaching a culture of democracy. It’s also the frequently stated assumption that the freer the press, the more likely it is that truth will emerge, that democracy will flourish and that the good guys will finish first, or a close second. But, as the comments in this issue from Joseph Brodsky and Frances Foster indicate, there are a lot of preconditions for that to be the case, preconditions that are far closer to being met in Europe and the United States than in each corner of the former Soviet Union. We don’t have much of a public debate about these questions, about the strategies and effectiveness of the USIA, the USAID, or the major involved foundations. Many people who are interested in the work of these entities are applicants for funds and criticism does not behoove them. The agencies themselves are often defensive, besieged by applicants, subject to political pressures, working in uncertain fields and under great pressure. Still, the subject is important, and we shall try, as in this issue, to encourage and enrich discussion. Articles
Directory of Grantors and Grantees |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
