History of the media in Central and Eastern Europe

This chapter discusses the recent history of the media in four former communist countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland) in Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on the transfer of media institutions and culture from “old” to “young” democracies. In line with theories of “multiple post-communisms,” it reveals major differences among these countries while also disclosing a number of similarities, including the political instrumentalization of media, party capture of public service broadcasters, partisan journalism, and excessive commercializationViešosios komunikacijos katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta

Media systems in transition: Poland, Russia, China

This article discusses the transformation of the media system in three countries moving away from the classical “communist” model: Poland, Russia and China. Despite very significant differences, all three of these societies displayed similar starting points in terms of economics, politics and media. The dominant political science tradition has discussed post-communism as part of a more general theory of “transitology”, seeing the processes involved in these cases as examples of a world-wide transition from dictatorial regimes towards western-style democracy. An alternative is to see the shift away from communism as an example of “elite continuity”, in which the former bureaucratic ruling class attempts to restructure itself as the owners of private capital. The article tests the two theoretical views in these three cases. It is demonstrated that transitology gives very little insight into the prevailing situations, and that the theory of elite continuity accounts much better for major features of the media systems