Party Colonisation of the Media in Central and Eastern Europe

273 Pages·2014·3.879 MB·English

by  Peter Bajomi-Lazar

-
péter bajomi lázár
Party Colonisation of the Media
in Central and Eastern Europe
lazar_jacket.indd 3
Party Colonisation
of the Media
in Central
and Eastern Europe
Péter Bajomi-Lázár
Central European University Press
Budapest–New York
© 2014 by Péter Bajomi-Lázár

Published in 2014 by

Central European University Press

An imprint of the
Central European University Limited Liability Company
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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of the Publisher.

ISBN 978-963-386-041-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bajomi-Lázár, Péter.
Party colonisation of the media in Central and Eastern Europe / Péter
Bajomi-Lázár.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-9633860410 (alk. paper)
1. Journalism—Europe, Eastern. 2. Journalism—Europe, Central.
3. Freedom of the press—Europe, Eastern. 4. Freedom of the press—
Europe, Central. 5. Communication in politics—Europe, Eastern.
6. Communication in politics—Europe, Central. 7. Political parties—
Europe, Eastern. 8. Political parties—Europe, Central. I. Title.

PN5355.E852B35 2014
077--dc23
2014021003

Printed in Hungary by
Prime Rate Kft., Budapest
Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1. Political and Media Systems in Central and Eastern
Europe 1
1.1. Media Freedom in Central and Eastern Europe 6
1.2. Conditions for Media Freedom 10
1.3. Theories of Media Capture 15
1.4. Party Colonisation of the Media 19
1.5. Party Colonisation and Media Freedom 25
1.6. Further Specifications 27
1.7. Normative Implications 28
1.8. Methodological Notes 28
2. Hungary 33
2.1. The Political and Media Landscapes 33
2.2. Media Policy under the Horn Government 40
2.3. Media Policy under the Second Orbán Government 52
2.4. The Horn Government vs. the Second Orbán
Government 62
3. Bulgaria 73
3.1. The Political and Media Landscapes 74
3.2. Media Policy under the Kostov Government 83
3.3. Media Policy under the Simeon Government 88
3.4. The Kostov vs. the Simeon Governments 94
4. Poland 103
4.1. The Political and Media Landscapes 104
4.2. The Media Policy of the Miller–Belka Governments 119
4.3. The Media Policy of the Marcinkiewicz–Kaczyński
Governments 124
4.4. The Miller–Belka vs. the Marcinkiewicz–Kaczyński
Governments 133
vi Contents
5. Romania 147
5.1. The Political and Media Landscapes 148
5.2. Media Policy under the Năstase Government 166
5.3. Media Policy under the Tăriceanu Government 177
5.4. The Năstase vs. the Tăriceanu Governments 184
6. Slovenia 197
6.1. The Political and Media Landscapes 198
6.2. Media Policy under the Second Drnovšek Government 207
6.3. Media Policy under the First Janša Government 211
6.4. The Second Drnovšek vs. the First Janša Government 220
7. Summary and conclusions: Veto Points in the System 229

Appendices 239
Table 1. Freedom House press freedom indexes and
ranking 240
Table 2. List of interviewees 242
Table 3. Composition of governments studied 249
Table 4. Selected party systems indicators 251

References 253

Index of names 267
Acknowledgements

Particular thanks are due to the Media and Democracy in Central
and Eastern Europe project’s principal investigator Jan Zielonka
and co-investigator Terhi Rantanen, as well as to Ioana Avădani,
Alina Dobreva, Beata Klimkiewicz, Ainius Lašas, Matthew Loveless,
Paolo Mancini, Radosław Markowski, Marko Milosavljević, Henrik
Örnebring, Brankica Petković, Manuela Preoteasa, Lilia Raycheva,
Balázs Sipos, Václav Štětka and Michał Wenzel for their comments
and suggestions on the early drafts of this book.
This book is largely based on field research, during which Dimi-
tar Ganev and Anton Zhelev (Bulgaria), Marta Sienkiewicz (Po-
land), Manuela Preoteasa (Romania) and Boris Mance (Slovenia)
were of great help. I am also grateful to all the interviewees who
assisted my colleagues and myself with their answers during our
field trips to the countries studied. Special thanks are due to Jean
Morris for copy-editing the manuscript. All errors are, of course,
mine.
Péter Bajomi-Lázár
1. Political and Media Systems
in Central and Eastern Europe

In April 2011, the local government of Budapest renamed the city’s
Republic Square after the late Pope John-Paul II. Hungary’s new
constitution, adopted by parliament in the same month and valid as
of January 2012, changed the country’s official denomination, until
that point ‘Hungarian Republic’, to ‘Hungary’. In March 2012, the
statue of Mihály Károlyi, first President of the Hungarian Republic
from 1918 to 1919, was removed from Kossuth Square in Budapest,
where it had been standing since 1975 near the House of Parlia-
ment. Lastly, an amendment to the Criminal Code passed in June
2012 imposed a one-year prison sentence on those using “offen-
sive” expressions to describe Hungary’s historical ‘Holy Crown’.
These symbolic moves were followed by many others after the
victory of the Fidesz/Christian Democrats party alliance in the 2010
legislative and municipal elections. With the support of 53% of
those who voted, the alliance won, under Hungary’s mixed election
system, 68% of seats in parliament. Fidesz party leader and prime
minister Viktor Orbán immediately declared the victory a “revolu-
tion at the voting booths” and launched radical changes. Among
other things, the new coalition solemnly adopted a Declaration of
National Co-operation, which was posted in all public authority
premises and which defines such joint national goals as “work,
home, family, health and order”. Parliament’s new majority passed
a new constitution, called the Base Law, with references to God,
Christianity and the Holy Crown, as well as to “faith, hope and
love”. It also adopted a new Church Act which significantly re-
2 Party Colonisation of the Media
stricted the number of registered churches, gave preferential treat-
ment to the ‘historical’ religious communities, and transferred the
right to approve these from the courts to parliament. The senior
managers and editors of public service broadcasters and the national
news agency were sacked, Fidesz loyalists were appointed, and
Christian and pro-Fidesz radio stations were granted eighteen local
frequencies across the country. The newly appointed director of
Budapest’s long-established Új Színház (New Theatre) was known
for his close connections with the political far-right. Ownership of
over eighty schools and kindergartens was transferred to the
Churches. The new government was determined to embed its Chris-
tian democratic, nationalist and conservative values and to margin-
alise alternative political views, even though the level of religious
attendance across the country was only about 13%. In a period of
three years, the Fidesz/Christian Democrats party alliance funda-
mentally reshaped Hungary’s media landscape and transformed the
country’s public sphere.1
The annual press freedom reports published by Freedom House
in 2011, 2012 and 2013 downgraded Hungary. The organisation,
which categorises countries as ‘free’ (0–30 points), ‘partly free’
(31–60 points) or ‘not free’ (61–100 points), gave Hungary 30
points for 2010 and 36 points for both 2011 and 2012, making it
one of the lowest-scoring of the Central and Eastern European
countries. This was in contrast to 2009, the year before the elec-
tions, when its score of 23 points was about average for the region.
Hungary had not received such a poor result since the mid-1990s.2
In Hungary’s case, changes in the political system were immedi-
ately followed by changes in the media system. The impact of pol-
itical systems on media systems may not always be as direct as it
was in Hungary, yet political and media systems across the globe
appear to be inherently linked. Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson

1 See also Freedom House’s Nations in Transit 2012 Hungary report at http://www.
freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2012/hungary (accessed 28 July 2012) and
Democracy and Human Rights at Stake in Hungary. The Viktor Orbán Govern-
ment’s Drive for Centralisation of Power. Report by the Norwegian Helsinki
Committee, http://nhc.no/admin/filestore/Publikasjoner/Rapporter/2013/Rapport_
1_13_web.pdf (accessed 25 February 2013).
2 See Table 1 in the Appendices.
1. Political and Media Systems 3
and Wilbur Schramm (1963 [1956], 1–2) observe in their landmark
book that “the press always takes on the form and coloration of the
social and political structures within which it operates,” and Daniel
C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004, 5) argue in a similar vein that
media systems “are linked structurally and historically to the devel-
opment of the political system.” Following this school of research,
the Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe project is
looking into the impact of political systems on media systems in the
former communist countries that joined the European Union in
2004 and 2007, and it is asking what kind of democracy is needed
in order for the media to perform their agreed-upon normative func-
tions. The project, funded by the European Research Council and
based at Oxford University’s Department of Politics and Interna-
tional Relations, is also asking whether the regulatory frameworks
established after the political transformations of 1989–91 have fos-
tered or undermined media freedom, and how party politics in the
region has affected the news media’s performance with regard to
qualities of democracy.3
In an attempt to answer these questions, this book will link two
traditions of research. On the one hand, media scholars looking into
the relationship between political and media systems in the former
communist countries have often focused on media freedom and
news media performance and worked on the assumption that many
of the political elites were seeking control over the media in order
to suppress critical voices and to gain favourable coverage so that
they could influence public opinion and voting behaviour, but have
barely explored political actors’ other possible motivations (e.g.,
Trionfi 2001, Paletz & Jakubowicz 2003, Kashumov 2007, Bajomi-
Lázár 2008, Czepek et al. 2008, Klimkiewicz 2010, Downey &
Mihelj 2012). On the other hand, political scientists studying the
region’s countries have often investigated parties’ relationship to
the state, including their capture or colonisation of state institutions
in order to instrumentalise these as a means of party patronage, but
have largely ignored the relationship between parties and the media
(e.g., Grzymała-Busse 2003, O’Dwyer 2004, Grzymała-Busse
2007, Kopecký 2006, Kopecký & Scherlis 2008). This book at-

3 See http://mde.politics.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 23 July 2013).
4 Party Colonisation of the Media
tempts to bridge a gap between these two research disciplines by
introducing the concept of party colonisation of the media and by
suggesting that political elites have multiple reasons to capture the
media, including, in addition to the management of information, the
exploitation of various resources from the media that can be used
for party building and organisation.
More particularly, this study looks into how parties and party sys-
tems have affected the media’s institutional frameworks and the
resulting media landscapes in some of the region’s countries.4 Ba-
sed on interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with senior
party politicians, media policy makers, state administrators, media
professionals and academics in ten former communist countries, it
suggests that many of the political elites in Central and Eastern
Europe have seen media policy as a means of redistributing re-
sources. Media policy regimes have mainly been the outcome of
inter-party, and often intra-party, struggles and deals, and as such
they have been shaped by parties’ strength, position, ideological
stance, and internal structure. Lobby interests, civil, professional
and religious organisations, as well as the relevant bodies of the
European Union and United States pressure groups have, of course,
also played a part in the formation of regulatory regimes (cf. Har-
court 2003, 2012), often in alliance with domestic political parties.
Parties, through their representatives in regulatory bodies and on
the boards of public service media, have also played a key role in
the implementation of media regulation, as the boards of these have
often been “a direct extension of the political power structure” (Ja-
kubowicz 2012, 16), which has enabled party representatives to
exert informal pressures on these institutions. It will be argued that
many parties have shaped and used regulation and regulatory au-
thorities in a way that allowed them to extract resources from the

4 A political party will be defined as “an instrument, or an agency, for representing
the people by expressing their demands...Parties do not only express; they also
channel [the public will]” (Sartori 1976, 27–28; italics in original). What exactly
constitutes a party, however, may be debated, since some parties are thoroughly
divided and factionalised, while others are closely allied with other parties to the
extent that they run jointly in elections (Sartori 1976, Lijphart 1999). For the sake
of simplicity, a party will be defined here as an institutionalised political organ-
isation with a parliamentary fraction of its own.