Similarly, any suggestions that the CSCE countries are unequal in their ability to sustain press freedom were vehemently rejected by journalists in Group 2. Coming as they did from all the main CSCE regions, the journalists reflected a strong professional consensus, based on experience, that proposals to "protect" the media by special regulations invariably reflect governments' own purposes and objectives, including hopes of limiting journalists' ability to operate freely. Specifically, journalists from both sides of the Atlantic rejected suggestions by some governmental representatives that media in European countries have become widely unpopular because of journalistic excess and therefore need some form of regulation for their own protection. European journalists quite specifically rejected these suggestions by governmental spokespeople from their countries. The journalists maintained, to the contrary of such suggestions, that media have continuing proof of strong, even growing public support - in contrast to mounting problems for governments' own general lack of authority in the face of public scepticism. Specifically, several participants traced the government-press tensions partly to the pattern of scandals exposed in recent years by the press in European countries. Such major revelations have become easier with the weakening of national security constraints since the Cold War's end, and European journalists said that politicians might be trying in some cases to scapegoat the press in an effort to distract attention from their own difficulties. In a more sophisticated guise, new proposals legitimising government interference with the media often amount to new versions of the old efforts to discredit the value of a free press that were defeated during the Cold War. To situate the current debate, we might recall where we stood on press freedom a decade ago: "The freedom of the news media is a fundamental pillar of a free society. Press freedom may be defined as independence from ownership, control or influence by the government; or, even if a medium such as a broadcast facility is government owned, the independence of the communicators to provide balanced programs reflecting more than an official viewpoint. press freedom permits the independent media to be wrong or biased. Professional ethics, a sense of social responsibility and diversity of views and reports provide the correctives." (Sussman, 1985) The most controversial point in that definition - that freedom includes the right to error and even to bias - sparked no dissent from journalists in our group. Just as democracy prefers freeing the guilty to executing the innocent, it believes that the striving by independent journalists for ideals such as objectivity and for scoops in the sense of revelations are what matters. The idea that anyone has omniscience - journalists, ombudsmen, governments - has failed: let us not revive it surreptitiously in the name of fixing a media that is not broken. That definition of press freedom was written by Leonard Sussman in 1985 at the height of the ideological wrestling in the UNESCO fora. Today, press freedom is the creed of all the CSCE nations, but there are efforts to challenge it. As noted by a participant from an emerging democracy, it is foolish to imagine that any of us is exempt from the Bolshevik temptation - the idea that greater efficiency can be obtained by leaving control to an enlightened few with inside knowledge or superior wisdom. In the developing democracies, officials offer the old third world rationalisation that their fragile condition makes it impossible for them to have a free press. Even in Western Europe, the combination of exponential improving technologies and weakening governmental authority seems to be generating a bogeyman of "media-ized society" - meaning that media somehow usurp the place of politicians in influencing public behaviour. That, the journalists replied in our group, is a leadership failure, not arrogance of media power. Yet, officials and journalists alike acknowledged, the 1960s and the 1970s may have marked the highwater point for press freedom, including journalists' right of access to information. The twin explosions of the 1960s - upheavals, often student-led, right across the CSCE countries and the sudden realisation that all these societies had become permeable to powerful, world-wide media - have driven North CSCE ODIHR BULLETIN Vol. 2, No. 1 31