Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter
Issue 20 Benjamin
N. Cardozo School of Law July 27, 1995
Signs of the Times
1. Bulgarian Constitutional Challenge to Media Law.
According to the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, July
18, 1995, Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court has agreed to rule on a petition
filed by Prosecutor-General Ivan Tatarchev challenging the constitutionality
of the national television and radio statute of 1991 with regard to censorship
and the principle of the separation of powers.
Tatarchev reasoned that the statute is inconsistent
with a provision in the Constitution under which “the press and the other
mass media are free and not subject to censorship.” The prosecutor-general
cited provisions of the statute of the national electronic media, authorizing
parliament at large and the Parliamentary Committee on Radio, Television
and BTA in particular to determine the structure and the rules of operation
of the two broadcast media and to vet their governing bodies.
Tatarchev also said that the provisional statute did
not comply with the principle of separation of powers. The statute of national
television provides air time for the prime minister and the National Assembly
chairman, but not for representatives of the judiciary, according to Mr
Tatarchev’s reasoning.
The Constitutional Court has listed President Zhelyu
Zhelev, the parliament, the government, the Supreme Judicial Council and
the directors-general of national television and radio as parties in the
case.
Just a few days earlier, the justices of the Bulgarian
Constitutional Court issued a statement rejecting attempts by politicians
and media to influence the court’s decisions and encroach on its powers.
The BBC issued the following text of a report by Bulgarian radio:
The Constitutional Court issued a statement, signed
by the 12 constitutional judges, which rejects the accusations levelled
against it and the attempts to influence its decisions made by representatives
of some political forces and the mass media.
The statement further declares that the Constitutional Court
firmly rejects any attempts to encroach on its independence, status, and
powers, emphasizing that such attempts are directed against constitutional
and democratic law and order in a law-governed state.
2. TV6.
An article by Yuri Bogomolov in the July 14, Moscow
News, took an interesting look at TV6 in Moscow and its head, Eduard Sagalaev.
“One should say that, for all the predictability of TV content, Sagalayev
has developed a fairly streamlined concept of telecasting. The channel
was conceived not merely as non-partisan, but also as depoliticized to
the extreme. The CNN programs only accentuated the spectators’ feeling
of political detachment— after all, we could look at our own country’s
immediate reality from afar and from on high.
It will also be recalled, furthermore, that the
channel was born in a fairly specific social situation when there was a
sharp decline in mass political activism, when the post-Soviet man in the
street was tired of political cataclysms and while the powers that be were
gripped with a feeling of the futility of fighting for the moral-ethical
purity of their ranks. The importance of private life became relevant for
the first time since the beginning of perestroika. And with the creation
of Channel Six Sagalaev, who hithertofore personified the destiny of a
thoroughly politicized TV journalist (the creator and inspirer of the “Vzglyag”
and “12th Floor” programs), has come to symbolize respect and attention
for these new post-Soviet values.
Sagalaev, who began as a telecaster, works successfully
today also as a teleproducer. Has the TV company been able to overcome
its inferiority complex entirely? Not quite. The point is that a channel
which has no information-analytical service of its own is not quite of
value in itself. By way of partial compensation it has created the programs
“Catastrophes of the Week” and “Forecasts of the Week.” But all the same
the problem has still not been solved. The vow once given by Sagalayev—not
a word about politics—is not really feasible. The forced restraint from
political topics and peripetiae cannot in the long run but explode into
something indecent, which actually happened not long ago when Stanislav
Govorukhin spouted his venom throughout the evening without respite on
Channel Six.
The channel, having no political analysts nor any view
of its own of the processes and realities of social life, risks becoming
a permanent hostage to some or other political beneficiaries.
3. Radio Archives.
Anatoly Tupikin, director-general of Russia’s state
radio broadcasting, recently discussed the state’s archive of early recordings,
music tapes, and historic broadcasts. These archives, among the largest
in the world, contain legendary classical music performances, many never
heard in the West.
According to the Financial Times Limited, in January
1991, the authorities gave a US entrepreneur, an Odessa-born Russian-American
named Tristan Del, exclusive access to the archive to produce and sell
compact discs. Mr. Tupikin says that the contract obliged Del to produce
and market at least 52 CDs, but only two have been presented. The Times
analysis says that “officials in the radio industry are divided between
those who want to cancel, and those who want to renegotiate. Mr Tupikin
said a decision must be made shortly. In addition to improvements in the
royalty rate, Mr. Tupikin said that Mr. Lazutkin, who signed the original
Del contract, must give up jurisdiction over the archive to the radio broadcasters
themselves.”
4. KYIV Licensing Squabble.
Our correspondent in Kyiv reports that the Kyiv City
Council has asked Ukraine’s National Council on Television and Radio to
transfer Channel 30 to a newly formed KYIV TV municipal broadcasting company.
The channel is now occupied, however, by the popular TET-TV, one of the
first independents to take to the air and try to become commercially successful.
According to the mayor, Leonid Kosakivski, the regulations give
a public station a priority in frequency acquisition. The problem arises
because Ukraine is starting to relicense existing broadcasting stations,
but stations that were on the air were supposed to continue until the process
reached a decision confirming or denying their license.
The TET-TV case, which will be an important example
of licensing snarls in the next few years, has caused media criticism of
the municipal action. On July 9, TET-TV broadcast a roundtable discussion
of the issue.
5. Kazakhstan.
The indefatigable Eric Johnson of Internews has returned
from a three week journey to Kazakhstan. He has written that all independent
stations “report a certain amount of political intimidation, but the level
varies greatly. The Shymkent station feels fairly free to cover whatever
they want and to mildly criticize the city and to blast administrations.
In Ust-Kamenogorsk, one station has had so many run-ins with the local
government that its owner has a 24 hour armed bodyguard and has had shots
fired into her apartment.
“All stations reported that before the referendum in
March (on whether to extend President Nazarbayev’s term by another 5 years,
to the year 2000), they were called up by the local government and told
that they would be closed down if they said anything negative about the
President during the pre-voting period.... Now Kazakhstan is about to `discuss’
a new constitution and the chances are good the stations will be similarly
coerced into being supportive.”
6. Moldova.
According to the Basapress News Agency, Valeriu Saharneanu,
head of the Moldovan Union of Journalists, complained that the media in
Moldova are being used as “a tool of the authorities.” He saw Moldova as
an exception to a general rule [which he perceived as] that in other formerly
socialist countries, new media bodies had been established with their former
editorial boards as co-founders and making use of the assets of the former
communist party. In Moldova, he claimed, media employees were still being
selected according to ideological orientation and the media was forced
to support the authorities instead of providing impartial information.
The Moldovan radio and television, he suggested, had been reorganized into
a state company which “distorts reality.”
7. Skvortsov on ORT Advertising.
Crain Communications’ “Electronic Media” conducted an
interview with Sergei Skvortsov, vice-chair of RTR, in which he made some
interesting observations on advertising and television in Russia. According
to the July 10 published interview, Skvortsov explained the moratorium
on Channel 1 as follows: “The people who were taking over Channel 1 had
the aim of destroying the ad market, then moving in and controlling it....
You ruin the price politics of the ad agencies, all their strategies and
all their relationships with the clients. You ruin some of the ad agencies,
and some of them close too. You wipe them out of the market and then start
advertising on Ostankino again with total control of a nationwide channel,
with all of the competitors scattered and in chaos. That’s my assumption
of what was supposed to happen. It didn’t really happen.”
8. Pirates Captured.
A court Ekaterinburg ordered three merchants of counterfeit
video tapes to pay Yaketerinburg-Art (a movie distribution company) 300
million rubles (around $60,000). The trial was apparently the first in
which a piracy claim went to judgment. Proud of their victory, Yevgeny
Miropolsky, director of the company, announced that he planned to file
around a thousand similar law suits around Russia. The “pirates” announced
they would appeal the judgment.
9. Department of Conspiracy Theories
The July 20 edition of Moskovskii komsomolets contained
an unsigned attack on Internews and, at least by indirection, on the extraordinary
efforts it has expended in helping the Independent Broadcasting System
(IBS), a cooperative venture by a large number of television stations throughout
the NIS to consider common problems and acquire programming inexpensively.
The article darkly suggested an American takeover of indpendent television,
and that the IBS is controlled by quasigovernmental structures from the
United States. The article apparently said that “similar actions several
years ago would have been called CIA exercises and appropriately dealt
with.”
In the same mood, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia
(HZDS) sought an apology from George Soros for a speech in Switzerland
in which he implied that the Meciar government showed signs of fascism.
Soros, through the Open Society Foundation, issued a statement refusing
to apologize and stating theat Meciar was damaging Slovakia by using methods
that could disqulify it from integration with Western Europe. He specifically
cited Slovak management of radio and television, probably in light of the
fact that Meciar, last fall, sacked the heads of radio and television and
introduced sweeping personnel changes there.