Media in Central Europe—Happy Times Are Over

What if journalism were football or ice hockey? Then small nations would stand a chance from time to time. There would be a Jaromír Jágr, the global hockey star born in Central Bohemia. There would be a Robert Lewandowski, the fabulous striker for Polish national team and Bayern Munich, the Treasure of Bavaria. On occasion a New York Times would pop up, as nearly two decades ago when Czechs led by Dominik “The Dominator” Hašek, the invincible goalie, won the tournament of the century in the Nagano Olympics.

Journalism is no sport. A generation after the end of communism in Central Europe it is in a sorry state. Not that it flourishes anywhere, but hopes were high in 1989. At all critical turns of history, writers in the region were in the forefront. They bore flags of national liberation, labored in clandestine movement during Nazi and Soviet occupations, and attempted to loosen the communist totalitarian grip from within. Some emigrated and became national stars at foreign radio stations like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.

The fame and influence of a few of them crossed borders. The late Karel Kryl, the protest song bard, poet, and journalist at RFE in Munich, the town of Lewandowski’s fame, gained many Czech, Slovak, and Polish fans. In the basement cafeteria in the RFE headquarters next to the English Garden in the Bavarian metropolis, he once told me he had not known he had been famous behind the Iron Curtain. Isolated with a mic, he was sending a missive after missive into the darkness, not knowing how they were received. That was ice age of journalism.

It was fun to watch the Poles at the football Euro in France, it was not fun to watch the Czechs, and it was kind of o.k. to watch the Slovaks and Hungarians. It is decidedly no fun at all to observe the media landscape of Visegrad. The strongmen in government and oligarchs are massaging what used to taste like freedom into something much less tasty. How did we get here?

After 1989 we in Central Europe’s journalism had lots of enthusiasm, zero experience of functioning in liberal democracy and market economy, and no money. Many Americas got re-discovered in the process of the media industry formation. Important newspapers were formed generally in two ways: some started from the scratch or used samizdat as the starting point. Other newspapers, most in fact, had functioned in communism as an ideological tool, and then transformed in various ways into free enterprises. Communist state television and radio stations morphed into public service media, but new politicians kept the habit of their predecessors, trying tricks to keep them under political influence. President Tomáš Masaryk, the founding father of Czechoslovakia, presciently said it would take two generations to build a fully democratic country, with citizens as democrats.

In the 1990s numerous regional media sold themselves to German, Swiss, French, American, and other publishers. Foreign owners brought in new technology and to some extent also professional know-how. They could not bring back the interrupted professional tradition. Journalism veered between fierce political partisanship and infotainment, with some liberal islands of quality in between, like the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza, still by far the best of the regional media organizations.

Some critics charged that foreign ownership was corrupting, that the Germans attempted to privatize “our motherland” through media manipulation, but as far as I could tell from my own experiences, it was all baloney. Sure, politicians tried to appeal to foreign managers with their grievances. Some publishers had an occasional power lunch with presidents and parliament speakers to assuage them, but there was no political influence.

Unlike the economic influence, of course; not infrequently, large advertisers interfered in newspaper content. Public relations agencies got into the habit of buying articles that promoted products, services, or even politicians. But largely media were free, though unruly and not very good.

That started to change in the last few years, as journalism business model collapsed globally. Classified advertising vanished. Most of specialized advertising can be better targeted on social networks and specialized web pages. Readers got used to reading news for free on the Internet. Circulation of newspapers plummets. All papers suffer, but big ones in large language-areas will cope. Yet there are only 5 million Slovak readers, 10 million Czech, and slightly more Hungarian, if you count the sizeable diaspora. I am informed that now it is impossible for most Czech newspapers to send anyone on a foreign trip to cover events. There is no money and there are so few writers and editors in the room that if one travels, it would be difficult for the others to handle the work. Only public media have a small number of foreign correspondents.

As the money vanished out of the business, so did foreign owners. One by one they sold the publishing houses to local entrepreneurs. There is not one foreign company in the Czech Republic anymore. But who would buy a moneylosing business? That’s easy: people who care not about profits, but about economic and political influence, of course. The most egregious example is the Czech oligarch Andrej Babiš, former-communist- slash-current-USD billionaire, who owns more than 40 percent of the media market. He also happens to be the country’s finance minister and deputy prime minister. Speak of the mother of all conflicts of interest…

Kaczyński’s and Orbán‘s strong-arming the nominally public television and radio into lapdogs of the governing class are being jealously watched in Prague. President Miloš Zeman’s attacks on Czech Television, possibly best quality and most independent public media organization in Central Europe, intensify, with Babiš not being too far behind. Some Zeman’s hatchet men suggested that the public media ought to be under a direct state control, like in Poland.

What ensued was an exodus of quality journalists from the tamed newspapers. The staff of SME, liberal Slovak daily, left after Penta, a Slovak- Czech investor group acquired it. The journalists started a new, independent paper called Denník N, which in a short time gained a significant following online, but is still financially struggling. Renegade Czech journalists launched several small print and online independent media, with some already scoring significant scoops about Babiš’s corruption or Prima TV Channel (a private television) gross manipulation of the refugee crisis coverage. Recently several high-profile Czech reporters left their stabile for a new media undertaking by Seznam, a leading search engine and web entertainment producer, that announced the intention to branch out to independent journalism. So all’s not hopeless. But the media in the Visegrad realm have seen happier times.