Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter

Issue 18 Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law May 23, 1995

Signs of the Times
    1. In an interview in the Moscow News, on May 5, Valentin Lazutkin, the head of the Federal Service for Radio and Television discussed the problems of the new public television system. Pointing out that the new debts will be shouldered by private shareholders, he asked whether they are prepared to bear them. Are they ready to be such a paradoxical commercial structure to invest vast financial resources in a non-liquid company?

    “Whether the new public television structure can function depends on the will power of those who joined the channel. I am afraid that some people will abandon this work under various plausible pretexts. What else is dangerous? Until Ostankino was a state company and joined our common idiotic ring-dance of non-payments, the communication workers could not bring themselves to switching off the channel. There were threats but they were frightened to carry them out. But now that half the company is owned by banks, the attitude will be different. Yes, I was not a supporter of ORT. On the other hand, I did not fight against it, I was in opposition to it. But as soon as the government passed a decision I, being a law-abiding official, shall do everything to put this project into practice.”

    2. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, 13-14 May, there are more developments in the running saga concerning the status of the Polish Broadcasting Council. Under the Broadcasting Act, the National Broadcasting Council may not be recalled if any one of the three institutions—the Sejm, the Senate or the president—approves its annual report. The Senate was the first to vote on the report and the outcome of the vote was unclear.

    The Senate deliberately moved the date of the vote from to consult the matter with the Sejm. The ruling coalition leaders feared that the matter could get out of hand. The atmosphere in the Senate was such that the fate of the Council looked uncertain.

    According to the journal, it was not clear how the president would act if both houses of parliament rejected the Council’s report. He might reject the report to get rid of the council in its present shape; or he might accept it, if only to emphasize his discord with the parliament. The latter would be more likely since he recently appointed Marek Jurek to head the Council.

    One SLD politician explained to Gazeta Wyborcza that the coalition leaders were not sure what was more profitable for them: to recall the Council and secure six seats in the new one or leave it as it is to avoid accusations of greed.The matter was finally resolved when the Senate accepted the report by 41 votes to 18. The paper reported that ,although the Senate vote guaranteed the Council’s survival, the debate on the report in the Sejm was quite heated. The ruling coalition was indignant over several programs shown by state television on May Day.

    3. At the United Nations, on May 4. Mikhail Demurin, First Deputy of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Information, said that a principal role of the press is “to keep generations to come from the menace of war.” He pointed to the pluralism and independence of the Russian press in its coverage of the war in Chechnya. Because of a “well-balanced attitude” of the federal authorities, the Chechen crisis, he suggested, had not become an inter-ethnic or inter-religious clash.

    4. On April 29, the Armenian Supreme Council Presidium’s ten members in opposition to the ruling party held a press conference in which they argued that the draft constitution “disregards democratic principles and grants the Armenian president unlimited power,” according to the Snark news agency. They complained that the government is increasing the pressure on mass media, particularly Golos Armenii, Armenia’s Voice and the “Freedom” American radio station. Snark reported the group as arguing that the ruling party sought a monopoly on information and the mass media.

    5. According to Itar-Tass correspondent Vladimir Khodii, the administration and trade union of the Irkutsk radio and television retransmission center said all radio and television programs, except for news releases, might be suspended on the territory of the east Siberian Irkutsk region. The report was prompted by the fact that Moscow-based broadcasting companies Ostankino, 0RT and Rossiya all the local retransmission company 777 million roubles.
“Our stock of materials is depleted to the minimum, there are no resources for servicing remote retransmission installations, and the wages have not been paid to the employees for the three past months,” the administration and the trade union said in a joint statement released on Friday, May 12.

National Identity and Media Regulation: An Irish Example
    In late April, a Green Paper on Broadcasting in Ireland, authored by Michael D. Higgins, raised a number of concerns that are relevant in a post-Soviet world. There the question was one of assuring that there is, even in a free market society, some carrier of public service broadcasting, and one, in a market crowded with other voices, a strong voice that carried the national identity. Here, we present a discussion of the Green Paper, by Michael Foley, taken from the Irish Times.

    At the heart of Michael D. Higgins’s Green Paper on Broadcasting is an essay or statement of principle about where broadcasting in Ireland is going and how public service broadcasting can and should be defended. The Paper talks of reconciling the demand to make information a “commodity” with the need to retain its value as a public good of stimulating debate and of how to ensure that Irish TV and radio is of the highest quality and the preferred choice of Irish viewers.

    Most of what has been written in criticism of the Green Paper has concerned its specifics, the suggested structural and institutional changes for broadcasting in Ireland, the level of license fee, or what is wrong with RTE. What commentators have ignored are the arguments about community, about the market place and broadcasting and about national and local culture in a global information world. Some commentators have referred to those parts of the Green Paper as “hot air” and “waffle”, preferring to concentrate instead on suggested broadcasting authorities, or transmission plans.

    The Green Paper presents an image of a world of fast flowing, non-stop information: “The need to put the Irish broadcasting sector back on a sound legislative footing comes at a time of intense change in Europe, change that is happening at an accelerating pace in a vexed continent, flooded with virtually instantaneous information, circulated by ever more sophisticated technologies.”

    It talks of citizens becoming instruments in the “reproduction of a triumphant global consumer culture, dependent on imported goods and imported images”, of pressures towards globalization undermining the “anchoring of identity in the local environment and the imagined community of the nation.”

    Broadcasting can be the motor of modernization, cultural innovation, social transformation, “even democratization. It can cultivate a healthy public sphere in which national self confidence flourishes and is orientated towards the future as a set of challenges to be met in a progressive way. It can critically interrogate a nation’s history, culture and identity and offer a vantage point for the renewal of that heritage”.

    But it can also be a threat, “pitting profit motive against collective rights”. It can disfigure us politically, homogenize us linguistically and depress our inclination for cultural expression. The purpose of the Green Paper, the Minister says, is to discuss ways in which, through legislation, the promise can be maximized and the threat minimized.

    The Green Paper brings together what appear to be disparate elements: film, television and communications, with Irish and European broadcasting policy and attempts to harmonize policy and markets.

    It addresses the link between deregulation and the decline in public affairs programming and priority given to advertisers over the interests of viewers.

    It stresses an alternative direction for broadcasting, which would infuse” the emerging information regime” with a sense of public interest.

    Digital technology with satellite, cable and broadband optical fibre systems are making a world of 500 channels inevitable rather than possible. This also means that the rationale of regulation the scarcity of frequencies, has disappeared.

    Without a sense of responsibility being reformulated the constraints currently imposed by shortage of frequency spectrum will be replaced by concentration of ownership of the new delivery technology.

    What the debate should be seeking, the Green Paper states, are policies that promote citizenship rather than passive consumerism. It raises the specter of tabloid television news, of the trivialization of public discourse and the battle for audience share being fought with entertainment values, rather than with hard news content. It refers to channels offering pornography and the impossibility of banning such services.

    The immediate issue is now to restate the values of public service broadcasting in a new and rapidly changing environment. If it is allowed to wither the Green Paper says, then news and in depth current affairs will be marginalized, special interest programs for minorities without any attraction to advertisers will disappear, experimental, educational programming and the development of new talent will suffer.

John Waters made these comments on the Green Paper.

    The strength of the Green Paper is that these questions are presented not as the thin ends of ideological prescriptions but as practical steps in addressing pressing cultural conundrums of the age.The context is the challenge of placing Irish broadcasting on a sound footing at a time of intense change. The process of globalization, convergence of media ownership and the move to integrated economies have speeded up the cultural process to an extent that it is no longer possible to deal with change in an ad-hoc, piecemeal manner.

    Societies, nations, communities must begin to ask themselves fundamental questions about the implications of the interaction of technological development with a free market for their capacities for self-awareness and self-expression. The role of market-driven mass media, in other words, can no longer be seen merely as a convenient set of extensions to existing cultural capacities.

    Instead, we are dealing with an organic process operating at dizzying, and escalating, levels of speed and frenzy. “What it means to have an identity in today’s world,” the Green Paper observes, “is profoundly influenced by cultural forces. Just as individual identities can be strong, weak, disordered, confused or in crisis, so too can whole societies suffer identity crises if they lose hold on a sense of continuity with their past and become lost or confused through cultural amnesia.”

    The question of taking appropriate steps to protect one’s own culture from the brunt of such forces is not simply one for small paranoid islands, but for every society and community which holds its own culture in any sort of regard. And if its native place is unduly enthralled by the invasion of other, stronger forms, and complacent about creating the correct conditions for its own voice, the result will be a one-way cultural traffic which will mean the death of that society as a cultural entity. The answer is for each society to see first of all to its own cultural protection.

    Only the very stupid or mischievous would try to turn such an important debate into a question of insularity or openness, timidity or modernity, hog nationalism or enlightened internationalism.

Poltoranin Discusses Law on Support of the Mass Media
    Ruslan Ignatyev, a reporter for Rossiiskaya gazeta, interviewed Mikhail Poltoranin,chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Information Policy and Communications, and author of the “Law on State Support of the News Media” in April. Excerpts follow:
[Poltoranin]     Because of the furor over Russian Public Television, journalists didn’t notice that the whole Duma had accepted the proposed law. . . . True, the law had been adopted earlier by the Duma and sent to the Council of the Federation. But the upper chamber rejected it.
[Q]     Why?
[A]     There were objections to the chapter in the document on a National Fund for the Development of the News Media. It was alleged that someone was trying to monopolize influence on the press through the fund. I am certain that this fund is necessary, and society will demand it a few months from now, because the news media’s infrastructure is collapsing. . . . Our committee compromised and decided to delete that chapter, and a provision on state orders was also taken out. . . .
[Q]     What does the law give to journalists?
[A]     First of all, special dispensations — tax breaks, customs breaks and hard-currency privileges. All taxes on the news media are being lifted, and office space will be provided free of charge (space that is currently occupied by newspapers and magazines). Large discounts on various types of services, including communications, are provided for. . . .
[Q]     Mikhail Nikiforovich, who needs this law most right now, state-ran or private publications?
[A]     It is needed primarily by the independent media, although this time all media outlets will get breaks and privileges. If the law goes into force, a tremendous foundation will be laid for creating new television and radio companies and all manner of publications.
    Unfortunately, the local press falls outside our purview, since the law doesn’t extend to it. In the near future we must take every measure to see to it that state support is provided to those media outlets too. . . .
[Q]     What do you think will happen to the law now?
[A]     We have now forwarded it to the Council of the Federation. I don’t think the parliamentarians have any arguments for blocking it now. We compromised and took out all the controversial spots. They should adopt the law.
[Q]     And then?
[A]     Then it will go to the President for signing. But if the Council of the Federation blocks it after all, or the President doesn’t sign it in the form we have put it in . . . then it will be clear that there were entirely different reasons why these structures didn’t adopt the law.