State into Public: The Failed Reform of State TV in East Central Europe

Abstract

The exceptional history of Eastern Europe in the past ten years lead to the concentration in a small period of time of a history that would have normally taken many years. The fate of public television is illustrative in this respect. In only a decade public television in former Communist countries evolved from at first the most powerful propaganda instrument (traces of this can still be found at the Serbian Television) to chairs of liberation (the public may still remember the 'Live Romanian Revolution') and finally to a position of increasingly minor media and political actors. This evolution was not only more concentrated than the similar Western European experience, but also substantially different. Freedom of the press and deregulation of broadcasting in ECE1 emerged in an unstable political and social environment, in societies yet searching for an identity and a normative system to replace the old Communist one. The legacy of the Communist times, consisting both in legislation and legal culture, the transition with its mixture of inflation and fiscal austerity policies, and the desperate power struggles between the old and the emerging political elites also shaped the fate of public television, the once all-powerful media actors. The final result was an aggravation instead of an amelioration in the condition of these institutions. Ten years after, although Parliaments passed legislation that at least formally transformed state into public television, commercial stations became leaders of the market while public stations face growing deficits and a crisis of legitimacy.