On the Czech Russian-made TU123 arriving at Prague airport, I picked up an abandoned copy of the daily Rude Pravo, the best-known of the old Czech papers. One of the cabin attendants caught my eye, pointed at my copy - and held his nose.
Rude Pravo (roughly "Red Right"), is anathema to many Czechs today because it is still unrepentantly the official organ of the Czech Communist Party Central Committee. Yet, it still sells about half a million copies a day, as many as any other Czech daily.Last November, pressured by massive demonstrations, the Czech parliament agreed to amend the constitution to eliminate the requirement that the Communist Party play the "leading role."
Nonetheless the party is still a force, the second largest among six in the parliament, with 23 seats of the 150 in the House of the People. The Civic Forum coalition of the "philosopher president," Vaclav Havel, who once pledged to bury the communists, has 47 seats.
The continued tolerance of the communists contrasts with what has happened in neighboring countries that also have gone through an astounding revolution in recent months.
- ELSEWHERE THE COMMUNIST Party is at best discredited and its newspapers are in disarray. Some are trying to make it in the market economy free of political ties, others awaiting dissolution, some having been sold to Western media conglomerates, and some now speaking for the socialist parties that spun off from the communists.
Rude Pravo competes with a dozen other dailies in Prague, nine in Bratislava, the nation's second city and capital of Slovakia, and a smattering in other cities. Each prints only eight tabloid pages. Most Prague dailies sell about half a million copies a day between 6 and 9 a.m.; Rude Pravo takes a little longer to sell out. I was unable to find any dailies for sale in nearly a week of looking for them in Prague until catching an early-morning flight out, when I stood in line at the airport kiosk.
That means of course that papers are appealing, refreshingly lively and combative. Unfortunately, virtually every paper is aligned with a political party. This is much in the Czech tradition but also alarming to many newspeople I talked to who believe the nation must be served ultimately by not only an interesting but also an independent press.
- OTHER PRAGUE DAILIES speak for such groups as Civic Forum, the Socialist Party, the Christian People's Party, the labor movement, the farmers, and the successor organization to the communist Socialist Union of Youth. In Bratislava, papers include the Slovak government organ, Obroda ("Revival"), and the Communist Party's equivalent of Rude Pravo, still called, astonishingly to me, Pravda ("Truth").
Some papers are trying to shake off party control, however. While I was in Prague the Socialist paper Svobodne Slovo ("Free Word") appeared with the front page blank. This signaled a staff strike protesting the party leader's dismissal of the chief editor and the director of the party's publishing house. The reason for the dismissals were "insufficient pursuit of the party line." In other words, the party, which won not a single legislative seat in June, wanted a more militant organ.
The sacked editor, Lubormir Petric, responded, "The majority of our people will not put up with the return of old practices of before the November revolution." (After the Prague Spring of 1968 direct censorship ended but communists controlled the press by many more subtle remaining devices until November.)
Much of the rest of the press chimed in with support for the paper. The Syndicate of Journalists protested the firings. Somewhat equivalent to our Society of Professional Journalists, the syndicate is working to protect press independence, though it says true freedom will come only with political maturity. "Some political circles tend to instruct the press on what it should do. This is a situation we cannot allow to continue," says the syndicate's vice chairman, Vladimir Bystrov.
Unfortunately, after the June elections Havel profoundly disappointed a group of American editors at a meeting in Prague by stressing not freedom of the press but "responsibility" and the need to keep state secrets. His press secretary said the government was considering jailing reporters who broke state secrets.
- ONE NOTEWORTHY INDEPENDENT daily is Lidove Noviny ("People's News"), which between the wars had been a great paper read by the intelligentsia. It was reborn in 1986 as an underground paper and appeared as a legal paper only in December, at first as a monthly. Its editor was in jail when the November demonstrations began.
So far it has resisted overtures by Western media groups seeking a stake in it.
Some significant investigative reporting is being done. This is a particular forte of a weekly newsmagazine, Mlady Svet ("Young World"), for readers in their late teens and early 20s.
It has been particularly aggressive in exposing such once-forbidden subjects as pollution and drug addiction. When I was in Prague it had just run a six-page piece on a scandal involving the minister of internal affairs, who was accused of releasing files of the old secret police to discredit his rivals in the Christian Democratic Party.
But Mlady Svet's writers fret over a three-week wait between deadline and press run, since the magazine is dependent on contracting out its printing to overburdened printing houses, which have creaky machinery.