Intellect

Finding the Right Place on the Map: Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective edited by Karol Jakubowicz and Miklós Sükösd has been reviewed in the Slavic Review (vol. 69, no. 2) by John Downing of the Global Media Research Center, Southern Illinois University.

'This is a remarkably informative collection of essays reviewing the changes since 1989 in media performance, ownership, and relation to the state. The editors are two of the most seasoned and judicious researchers on the region’s media, and they have brought together a very impressive team of their peers in the fi eld. The essays include both detailed country case studies focused on the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Romania and some comparative and conceptual overviews of the region as a whole.

The editors posit a “quite modest” (9) objective, namely to pick out key aspects of an irreconcilably diverse regional process in order to achieve a more penetrating analysis of its full complexity. Perhaps inevitably, they are compelled to underscore the widespread lack or weakness of a democratic cultural tradition in the region, and the unprecedentedly “compressed waves of media change” (15) since 1989. A particular point of interest is the very sudden impact of globalization on media, most widely evidenced by the European Union’s shaping role as country after country strove for admission, but most powerfully by the Offi ce of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The editors argue that it may well take several more decades before media in the region begin generally to assert
themselves as constructive independent actors.

The predominant emphasis is on broadcasting, especially television, though some
chapters explore the press and Internet usage too. Most of the core essays address the news function of media and its relation to democratic governance, though a couple engage with audience issues (Péter Csigó) and with entertainment (Ferenc Hammer). One of the overview essays (Colin Sparks) offers a comparative analysis of the Polish, Russian, and Chinese media trajectories over the two decades.

Empirical topics covered vary from the externally supervised media system in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Internet uses in the energetic 2006 antigovernment protests in Hungary, and from journalism culture in the Baltic states to media ownership concentration trends in the region. Cinema, the music business, public relations, and advertising are not in focus in this volume.

Even those disappointed by the absence of particular countries will find the comparative data and the various problematizations of the issues a valuable starting point for working on other national cases. A recurrent theme is how television has either become the chosen tool of the party in government or has been swallowed by profi t-hungry firms. Newspapers have largely become “tabloidized.” In other words, not only have the reformers’ hopes for transition to a “public service” broadcasting model been dashed, but the comforting syllogism “free market + plural owners = plurality of opinions” is in tatters. (The “public service” model signifi es broadcasting according to the model of the British, Canadian, Australian, Nordic nations’, and Japanese.)

Indeed Karol Jakubowicz argues, citing long-time Slovene media researcher Slavko Splichal, that the pattern that has emerged is one of “Mediterraneanization,” that is, similar to southern European models, where television is still rather slowly extricating itself from the embrace of political parties once in government.

Jakubowicz’s essay on the checkered history of attempts to achieve a public service broadcasting model in the region is worth particular attention, given his long experience in Polish broadcasting research since before 1989, and his intermittent involvement in running the Polish system in the intervening years. For U.S. scholars unfamiliar with the public service model, which steers a course between the Scylla of the state and the Charybdis of commercialism, his analysis of its troubled trajectories in the region will likely bring a host of fresh insights to their thinking about media and governance.

Epp Lauk’s study of journalism culture, focusing especially on Estonia, clearly reveals the absurdity of the premise on which the tidal wave of western missionaries for democratic media were financed by western nongovernmental organizations and governments after 1989, sent in to run short courses to convert the region’s media institutions into happy little mirrors of western news practices—or of their hypothesized practices, at least.

Colin Sparks’s contribution vigorously asserts the “elite continuity” thesis in the media sphere against the “democratic transition” thesis, though it could be argued he overly melds the arguments of Guillermo O’Donnell and his colleagues, who were seeking to grasp how Latin American publics could avoid relapse into dictatorship, with the triumphalist prognoses of the western commentocracy following the events of 1989.'

– John Downing