Communism, Capitalism and the Mass Media [antikvár]

X IV^ldV^tThis is a book about the changes that have taken place since 1989 in the media systems of what are sometimes known as the Visegrád countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is primarily concerned with the restructuring of television, although it does have something to say about the newspaper press, and a very little about radio broadcasting. It supplements the literature attempting to review and understand the overall results of these processes of change and it builds upon a range of specialist studies of different countries. It is therefore a contribution to our knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe after communism.To describe the book solely in those terms, however, risks misleading the reader. This work is emphatically not a detailed historical account of the different stages in the transition process as expressed in the mass media. It is, on the contrary, concerned with the general implications of these changes. As I argue in the opening chapter, the fall of communism presented a generalised challenge to what is here called 'the critical project'. It therefore involves consideration of quite wide-ranging issues not only in media theory but also in social philosophy, political theory and economics, at least as much as it involves a detailed study of the media.It takes this form for two important reasons. In the first place, just as it is foolish to imagine that it is possible to consider the mass media in isolation from the society in which they operate, so it is impossible to discuss issues of media theory in isolation from broader considerations about our understanding of the nature of society. As John Downing, in a study closely related to this, has so elegantly shown, even those attempts to construct specific theories of the nature and functioning of the mass media considered in isolation from their broader social context in fact rest upon unstated assumptions about the nature of society and the relationship of the mass media to it (Downing, 1996: x-xvi). He demonstrates that what 'every social scientist knows' about the media and society is in fact a generalisation based upon the predominant relations in the USA, and perhaps Britain. Any attempt to discuss the mass media that is not explicit about the kind of society to which it refers runs the risk of inadvertently presenting its own unique case as intrinsically general. Given that, on almost everybody's account, something quite important has been happening in the last decade in Central and Eastern Europe, it is essential that any study of the media in that region confronts the main questions of social change.If any attempt to isolate the mass media either theoretically or practically