NOT-SO-SILENT JOURNALISTS
Hebblethwaite, Peter
NOTSO SILENT JOURNALISTS PETER HEBBLETHWAITE A few surprises in Eastern Europe Western journalists preen themselves on their intrepidity and outspokenness. Even if there is a good deal of cant in...
...Naturally enough, it is the foreign correspondents of East European news agencies who are most exposed to Western influencies...
...1967 Vitezslav Gardavsky published a series of articles in which he attempted, as a convinced Marxist, to come to terms with Christianity: it might be mistaken, but the questions it raises are real questions and cannot be dismissed by repression or dialectical finesse...
...The neo-slavophile movement deserves separate treatment, but it is worth noting here that this movement to return to Russian origins is not tender towards America...
...But the "Church of Silence" is not wholly voiceless...
...Sometimes Catholic editors of Eastern European papers complain that they have more trouble from the bishops than from the censors...
...It was the first revolution achieved on and through television...
...Censorship further limits the area of maneuver...
...Along with their colleagues in radio and TV, they had an important role in manipulating and controlling "public opinion...
...Leszek Kola-kowski was arguing a similar case in the Polish journal Tworczorc...
...Journalists can "influence the government," though to call them a pressure group would be to go too far...
...On the one hand one had "mindless, vapid propaganda...
...and most of Estonia can receive Finnish TV...
...Tribuna Ludu in Warsaw gained a reputa-tation for being the defender of the little man...
...In the post-Helsinki period, when the realities of its grandiose declarations have to be tested and embodied, journalists have a key and irreplaceable role...
...It is not a very enviable task...
...They make no contribution to the discussion...
...For that reason they are hand-picked and untypical...
...After all, the strikes might be said to illustrate the thesis that capitalism was going through a rough patch, even if not entering its final agony...
...Technological developments are making it increasingly difficult to seal off Eastern Europe, and the Modernists know it: already 80 percent of the German Democratic Republic can receive television from West Germany...
...It is the sort of praise that smothers and pinions its object...
...In Eastern Europe the role of the journalist is at first glance wholly different...
...Self-censorship does the job, and the East German press is among the most predictable and depressing in the world...
...Its editorial meetings have to take account of the censor's known sensitivities...
...It exists by law only in Russia, Poland and Romania, though it is of course also applied elsewhere...
...After many years of experience, they come to know what he will take and what not...
...They prefer to be called "modern...
...peter hebblethwaite, a regular contributor from Britain, is the author of The Runaway Church (Seabury...
...But paradoxically the existence of censorship is a sign of feared and possible non-conformity...
...It was the only paper in Eastern Europe which refused to praise Stalin after his death in 1953...
...The Stalinists jam Radio Free Europe, the Modernists listen to the BBC...
...Though Gardavsky inevitably lost his job in the Military Academy in Brno, where he was professor of philosophy, and though Kolakowski is now in exile, there is an astonishing resilience among the literary intelligentsia which repression can curb but not extinguish...
...Ironically, Gomulka's speech was not published until long afterwards...
...After the Polish "little Spring" of 1956 Gomulka told journalists that they had a vital role to play in "influencing the Party leadership": they knew better what was really happening among the people, and had to convey this information upwards...
...The most dramatic instance was in Czechoslovakia during the Dubcek Spring, when TV interviews were used to cross-question party leaders...
...While the neo-Stalinists fear the outside world and try to screen out Western sources, the Modernists want to enter into discussion with them...
...and on the other, "pornography and detective stories...
...It was suppressed for its honesty, but rose from the ashes in the Polish "Spring" of 1956, by which time Stalinism was officially in disgrace...
...They can defend the citizens, though with due circumspection, against the crassness of the courts or the bureaucrats...
...Worse, or better, according to the point of view, is to come...
...The interaction between journalists and writers is strong they are often the same people, and the Easf European tradition of a responsible intelligentsia remains tenaciously alive...
...This was part of the wide-ranging attack on "russophilism" and rusoznavstvo (the desire for excessive knowledge about things Russian...
...of their censors...
...They know more, have better contacts with the West, and have learned how to work despite the blundering clumsiness...
...Tygodnik Powszechny has two further claims to distinction...
...The "confessional" press, where it exists, is an important area of relative freedom, and its influence is out of proportion to its artificially restricted circulation...
...The statements of Gomulka and Brezhnev provide the parameters for the current discussion which is going on over the smoked salmon and vodka among Eastern European journalists: are they merely "precious instruments of the Party" or do they have to educate the Party...
...The literary press has also played an honorable role alongside the confessional press...
...Any account of the "factors for change in Eastern Europe" must include them...
...They were a two-way transmission belt...
...The Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny, published by the Znak group in Cracow, has a print order of forty thousand, a mere drop in the ocean of Poland's thirty million Catholics...
...They could be trusted to be reliable and dull...
...From 1966 to...
...Brezhnev solemnly warned that "patriotism was good but that extremes of patriotism represented the danger of a departure from class-consciousness...
...The Yugoslav journal Svesci roused the wrath of the bishops when it reprinted an article on sexual anthropology from a foreign journal in 1972...
...Three weeks later a columnist in Tygodnik Powszechny coolly replied that freedom of expression was indivisible: it existed for all the people, or it did not exist at all...
...But the man from PAP was not reporting the strikes, because to do so might put ideas into the head of Polish miners...
...Sometimes a comment that would not be permitted in an editorial can be more subtly conveyed in a cartoon or slipped into a book review...
...But elsewhere it is possible to find more open-minded journalists who are not content to be faithful parrots...
...And ironically Gomulka fell in December 1970 because he had become out of touch with popular aspirations...
...Even in Russia Novyi Mir showed an independence which led to the sacking of its Editor, Aleksandr Tvardovskii...
...To call them "liberal" would be misleading as well as damaging to them...
...After the actions of the Gdansk shipyard workers in December 1970, nothing must be reported which might encourage industrial disruption or the display of working-class muscle...
...A similar spirit of independence has been shown by Glas Koncila in Zagreb which dared in 1972 to publish Solzhenitsyn's letter to the Russian Patriarch and then, compounding its felony, accounts of the arrest of priests in Lithuania...
...In 1964, for example, there was a spate of editorial comment on the correct concept of "socialist legality," intended to head off the dissidents' potential exploitation of this promising theme...
...Its other claim to fame and uniqueness is that it has engaged in polemics with the establishment...
...I once asked a correspondent from PAP, the unfortunately named Polish news agency, whether he was reporting the British miners' strike which in early 1974 "brought the country to its knees" and lost Edward Heath the premiership...
...They filter Western news on pragmatic more than ideological grounds...
...But other less dramatic instances are no less significant...
...Its effectiveness can be judged by the grim repression which followed: 2,000 journalists, half the profession, lost their jobs...
...Yet it would be misleading to conclude that Eastern European journalists form an army of intellectual zombies, obediently developing and illustrating the party line, the stakhanovites of the typewriter...
...They are in control in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania (where all public manifestations of religion have been wiped out) and, casting the net more widely, in North Korea and Vietnam...
...A writer in Veche, suppressed in 1974, thought- that there was little to choose between West and East...
...There have been times when they have had real influence, and have not hesitated to use it...
...The Party can then have a clearer idea of what people are really thinking and take appropriate action...
...Standardized editorials can then be produced to ward off dangerous trends...
...In 1968 Gomulka declared that there could be "no freedom of expression for the enemies of freedom...
...Khrushchev defined journalists as "the first officers of public opinion" and Brezhnev lauded them as "precious instruments of the Party...
...The Editor of Polityka in Warsaw actually prefers to be censored: it shows that he is not a tame nonentity...
...Journalists were simply seen as another link in the conveyor-belt of the Party...
...In Czechoslovakia the literary review Literdrm Noviny helped to prepare the change in the intellectual climate which made Dubcek briefly possible...
...In all these countries there is no "social role" for journalists, except one of inducing conformity...
...Though occasional offensive numbers are suppressed, Glas Koncila survives...
...Petitions and open letters still find signatories...
...But letters to the press also provide a safety-valve and yet another means of social control: the vast majority of letters are never published but, suitably summarized, they are forwarded to the Central Committee in the form of confidential reports...
...In Poland, on the other hand, censorship is an indication that conformity cannot be guaranteed in advance...
...Even if there is a good deal of cant in this self-image and if countless time-servers hang on the coattails of greater men, there is nevertheless a tradition of courageous nonconformity and a willingness to ask tough questions...
...There are still plenty of impenitent crypto-Stalinists around who repeat the official theses...
...Perhaps of more significance was the sacking of the Editor of Molodaia Gvardia, journal of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, no less, in 1970...
...In the German Democratic Republic it is not required because the journalists are so integrated into the power elite that dangerous thoughts never cross their minds...
Vol. 103 • September 1976 • No. 19
