MEDIA LAWS IN EASTERN EUROPE: THE MEDDLER'S ITCH 20 Ronald Koven Editor's Note: The following article is an updated version of the original which appeared in Uncaptive Minds, Vol. 6, No. 2 (23) Summer 1993 and appears in the Bulletin by permission of the author and journal. Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, parliaments have been groping to define the place of the press in a democracy. Not a single one has come up with a satisfactory solution from the standpoint of press freedom and democracy. In many of the new would-be democracies, there have been so many generally unsatisfactory drafts of press laws that even those most directly involved in the process have lost count. Where the continuing struggles over press laws have left legal vacuums or lack of clarity, the way has been opened for backsliding and governmental arbitrariness, as in the removals by government leaders of the heads of television in Hungary and Russia and of the editors of independent-minded newspapers in Croatia and Slovakia. Back in 1983, at an international meeting hosted by the Soviets in Tashkent, a red banner stretched across a wide boulevard greeted foreign participants with the slogan: "The Press is a Powerful Tool in the Leninist Struggle." No government in the former Soviet sphere would openly dare today to make such a bald proclamation of its intention to use the press for its own ends. But the perplexity of the region's lawmakers towards media laws and the questionable approaches they are prepared to adopt demonstrate just how much the basic communist approach to the press has affected the thinking even of aspiring democrats. For example, when the Polish parliament proclaims that Polish broadcasting "should respect the Christian value system," it shows that the communists succeeded in persuading their most ardent adversaries that they should consider the press a "tool" to be used for some purpose. Going beyond this widely commented call to adhere to Christian values, the Polish broadcast law of December 1992 says: "Broadcasts may not advocate activities contrary to the law or to the interests of the Polish state, or (express) attitudes and opinions contrary to morality and the general interest." By the summer of 1993, Poland was one of only four former Soviet bloc countries to have managed to pass new broadcast laws, along with the former Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Latvia and Romania. Elsewhere, countries have been limping along with the old communist legislation. Even in the Czech Republic, the former communist country where one finds the best understanding of press freedom, the government abandoned its attempts to pass a press law after journalists objected to a draft containing restrictions on the press so complex that its framers never got around to outlining its freedoms. Most other countries' parliaments are in similar disarray regarding press laws, stuck in various draft stages. Russia is a major exception. The rebellious former parliament kept threatening to amend in even more restrictive ways the already flawed press law of President Boris Yeltsin. In Hungary, the requirement that any press legislation be passed by a two-thirds majority means there may never be a law. This has not prevented the government from vetoing foreign press investors whom the new power structures fear might be politically hostile. Nor did it prevent Hungary's late Prime Minister Jozsef Antall from stating his apparently sincere frustration that a press in a new democracy did not automatically support his democratically elected government. In this, he was not much different from a number of his colleagues in the West, who are all for press freedom when they are in opposition 20 Ronald Koven is the European Representative of the World Press Freedom Committee and an American newspaper correspondent in Paris. CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 11