Europe's media

When Russian television and newspapers hid Boris Yeltsin's health problems in the recent elections, it highlighted health problems of their own. Aware that a return to communism might threaten their freedoms, journalists shamelessly plugged Yeltsin and ignored his communist opponent. Unhappily, the deformed election coverage was not an exceptional case of bad journalism in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In many places the press is as distorted and shackled as it was under communism.

In countries where democratic reforms are doing relatively well, the media are, too. In the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Baltic states and to a lesser extent Russia and Ukraine, the biggest problem for locally owned newspapers is generating enough income to stay in business. The practice of journalism is improving, with a few excellent newspapers, such as Warsaw's Gazeta Wyborcza and Prague's Respekt, leading the way. Foreign-owned papers and private television expand the news spectrum, but most show little interest in serious political coverage, and can hurt the local media by sucking up scarce advertising.

In more authoritarian nations, the press is not prospering by any measure. There is little real journalism in countries like Bulgaria and Albania, and none at all in some former Soviet republics, the worst being Turkmenistan. The controlled economies in these countries provide little advertising, so most papers are financed and indirectly controlled by the government or political organizations.

The quality of journalism is likely to improve in most places through economic growth and expanded contact with the West. But government censorship is tough to change, and it is getting worse. After a car bomb exploded in Albania in May, the government arrested the entire staff, even the cleaning woman, of Koha Jone, the country's major independent paper, arguing it was a secret organ of the old Communist Party.

Belarus' president recently sacked the editor of the country's leading daily, the fifth editor he has fired in his two years in office. In February, Slobodan Milosevic shut down Serbia's last major independent television station. Many formerly communist countries now have only state-managed TV news. The broadcasts are eerily reminiscent of the Soviet era, with a half-hour of the national leader signing decrees and greeting foreign guests.

Eastern European governments eager for Western approval use subtler strategies to control the press. These include financial pressures like new taxes, the withholding of advertising and the impounding of delivery trucks. Dangerously broad defamation laws, usually enforced by courts lacking independence, provide jail terms for journalists who damage the image of political leaders. As part of a broad effort to silence critical voices, Croatian authorities have turned a new defamation law against two reporters from the country's most independent paper.

The new generation of authoritarian leaders in these countries is unlikely to warm to the principles of a free press on its own. But some leaders, especially those eager to join European institutions, do respond to pressure. The Council of Europe recently delayed Croatia's application for membership, in part because of President Franjo Tudjman's crackdown on the press. Tudjman also got a lecture on the issue from Vice President Al Gore in Washington last week. The United States and its European allies must remain insistent that an unfettered press be a condition of partnership.

-- The New York Times