MEDIA LAW AND FREEDOM IN POST-SOVIET COUNTRIES

“I am wary of any government that tries to impose restrictions on the media.
 That is something the media should do for itself”
– Serge Schmemann, International Herald Tribune

 Developing a dynamic media in a new, competitive and commercial society in former Soviet-run countries poses major challenges for newspaper and television owners, journalists and law makers.

 Most journalists in CIS member countries work under varying degrees of stricture imposed by governments and a free press, as known in the West, remains an elusive notion. Yet many thousands of media outlets are estimated to have sprouted since the Soviet Union collapsed. 

 The session was chaired by Alexander Arkhangelskiy, a respected Russian television host. Referring to Soviet times, he said he once had to delete the word “meat’ from a script for a children’s show because meat was in short supply and his editor did not want to offend the authorities.

 “There is an opinion,” he was told by his editor, who pointed up to the heavens.

 Arkhangelskiy said censorship power passed from the defunct Soviet state to oligarchs, who then controlled the Russian media. “Freedom of speech was regulated by the oligarchs,” he said. “There were as many opinions allowed as there were oligarchs.”

 Under Russian President Vladimir Putin, the situation has changed again. “Journalists have the right to have a co-opinion today. But there is a strict and clear limit,” Arkhangelskiy said.

 Serge Schmemann, Editorial Page Editor of the International Herald Tribune, France, and a distinguished former foreign correspondent, said: “One thing I have learned is not to try to impose Western media practices on discussions on the media as it develops here.

 “I believe that a free press is utterly critical for any democratic society. I am wary of any government that tries to impose restrictions on the media. This is something the media should do for itself.”

 When working in the Soviet Union, Schmemann said he “always had awe” for the local media – “There were always those who managed to slip through the cracks in censorship… that kind of courage is highly commendable and an example to all of us.”

 Kazakhstan’s Culture and Information Minister, Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, said his country was ready “to compromise and liberalise laws here”.

 But journalists needed to compromise as well and rely on self-regulation and internal editorial controls. “The media should balance and share power if it wants to be the Fourth Estate,” he added.

 Miklos Haraszti, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, spoke of “the slope of pluralism” as a typical problem in Russia and the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia.

 Media outlets with the most reach, such as television, allow the least freedom of expression. Those least read or watched, such as newspapers and the Internet, which has low penetration in the region, allow the most.

 Haraszti called for the development of public broadcasting in the region to enhance pluralism in lieu of state-controlled television. “Public broadcasters are obliged by law to offer all opinions, not just those of the party and the state,” he noted.

 Oleg Poptsov, President of the Eurasian Academy of Television and Radio in Russia, backed Haraszti’s comments on the ‘slope of pluralism’. In Russia, the situation is: “You may have any opinion you want, but please express it after midnight when most people are sleeping.”

 “We should connect development of the media with the development of democracy in Russia. If you start building a democracy from scratch… there will always be unpredictable turns.”

 Poptsov said most of the media in Russia, except for Pravda, the leading newspaper in the Soviet time and a mouthpiece for the Central Committee of the Communist Party, accepted the idea of freedom of the press after 1991. This, he said, was a big shock for the communist media.

 Sergey Kara-Murza, a Russian political scientist and author of a book “Manipulation of Consciousness”, was critical of censorship, saying: “Where there is censorship there will never be professionalism. It simply cannot develop.”

 He was also against licensing and said fines that were too high for journalists who transgressed various laws related to the media would eventually kill the profession locally.

 Ashot Dzhazoyan, Secretary General of the International Confederation of Journalists Unions in Russia, said of the 591 reporters killed around the world since the early 1990s, 266 were killed in former Soviet countries.

 “The media have their own relationship and attitude towards what they do. Journalists want to protect freedom of speech but somehow they step outside the ‘game’.”

 On the estimated 70,000 or so new media outlets in former Soviet countries, he said subscriptions had fallen substantially in some countries, especially Armenia. He also said some outlets tended to serve their owners and their views – “giving service to the powers that own them”.