Vysotsky

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue Jan 28 11:17:08 PST 2003


Joanna:
> But, as for the censorship, it was there. My mother was a
> writer and it
> seemed as if she had to write to a certain formula to keep her
> perks....which were amazing!!! Basically, she got to be a
> writer full-time,
> to go off and live in castles in order to have the space/time
> for creative
> work -- she also had daily heavily subsidized restaurant
> meals (she didn't
> have to cook a single meal until we left the country) and
> like everyone
> else, she had free childcare, free education, free health care.
>
> I'm not saying that people who write for the "market" don't
> have to write
> to a formula...they do. But you do understate the censorship issue.
>

Let's not confuse limited number of publications in E. Europe with censorship. That fewer things were published than the writing community wanted was mainly a result of resource limitations. Of course it there is the issue of priorities. Somebody had to decide whether to publish the proceedings of the Communistis Party or a novel by a young mostly unknown author and we know what got the priority which forced everyone else to compete for whatever resources were left after these priorities.

But censorship was mainly limited to journalism, especially to the portrayal of public officials. Anything smacking of less than official function (even banquets, let alone private lives or smut) or anything smacking of a negative innuendo of party apparatchiks were strictly off limits. However, journos were permited to criticise lesser bureaucrats and functionaries (factory directorship or lower).

Another issue was news selection - anything negative in developed capitalist economies got the attention of the editor. On the plus side, however, there was a rather broad coverage of Third World affairs (I would say, not that much worse than BBC) but news were usually accompanied by propagandistic comments identifying good and bad guys (cf. "the puppet governemeny of _____"). In general, I think that E. European media was more intelligent and offered better coverage than most of the media in the US, especially TV.

Besides, I do not think that relatively high transaction costs in publishing (including editorial reviews, as long as they are not biased toward a particular ideology or point of view) are a bad thing. They serve as a natural bullshit filter, keeping the public environment from mental pollution.

Wojtek



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