Slovenian Media Studies: 1968-1970” Report on Activities # 1

WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! EMEDIATE: Media and Ethics of the European Public Sphere From the Treaty of Rome to the ‘War on Terror’ EU Sixth Framework Program Specific Targeted Research Project Priority 7: Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-Based Society Work package 2 “Slovenian media studies: 1968-1970” Report on activities # 1 team no. 9 (Ljubljana) (work in progress – do not cite) February 2005 Page 1 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! CONTENTS OF THE DOCUMENT: Work package 2 - »Slovenian media studies: 1968-1970« Report on activities # 1, team 9 (Ljubljana) 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 3 2. Slovenian “media studies” between 1968 to 1970..................................................... 5 3. Gaps and disparities ......................................................................................................14 4. Conclusion......................................................................................................................14 References:..........................................................................................................................15 Page 2 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! Slovenian media studies: 1968-1970 Report on activities # 1 team no. 9 (Ljubljana) 1. Introduction The present document results from attempts of the Emediate team 9 to prepare for the work that lies ahead of the network after the Florence meeting in February 2005. It was our idea to simultaneously prepare for this challenge by probing the empirical material and also to test, while probing, provisions of the WP 2 PRELIMINARY GUIDELINES which had been, we thought, carefully prepared and distributed by Lancaster. Consequently, this report includes some conceptual and methodological reflections on the work that lieas ahead but also some contextual information that might illuminate the specific background of studying media (and media studies) in Slovenia. It was our deliberate decision to focus our initial preparation and our test of the guidelines on what we believe to be – from our own perspective – the most demanding period of the entire project, namely the period between 1968 to 1970; this is a part of the crisis period number 3 of the Emediate project. As we will explain more in detail below, we expected that this selection will have enabled us to provide a meaningful interpretation about feasibility of the work we plan to conduct within WP2, about country-specific obstacles, but also about advantages and disadvantages of the approach suggested, and about the most likely outcomes of our research endeavors. In order to better conform to the WP2 schedule as outlined by Lancaster, we thought that such preparatory commitment was a productive one. We hope that the present document may demonstrate convincingly why we thought this turned out to be the case. In part 2 of this document, we present more synthetic reflections on the results of our activities. We included also some of our broader concerns about that which we thought were necessary (technical and also substantive) inferences from the “footwork” thus far completed. At the end of this document, we appended experimental versions of annotated bibliography for the selected part of the 3rd crisis period which we hope meet the expectations of the Lancaster team. In terms of empirical analysis of the available material for the selected period, we believe the main problem concerning Slovenian media studies to be the following. Late 1960s were characteristic for the fact that only few systematic “media studies” were actually published. Only rarely we were able to locate works that would – by our present-day standards and academic doctrines – count as scientific articles, monographs or edited volumes. There exists, however, a wide plethora of texts which we would propose to define as “media commentaries”. Only rarely, these latter type of publications used systematic methodologies, only rarely they employed consistent terminology from the field of media studies, or social sciences/humanities in general, and almost as a rule, they seem to have been more interested in the possibilites for polemical confrontation in the realm of daily politics or of the public life in general, rather than in the lasting contribution to the theoretical or empirical knowledge about the phenomena under investigation. In a nutshell, the main problem of our analysis was how to define the central “sieving” category – the “media studies”. Directly linked to this problem is an important contextual determinant which we think is important to emphasize. As an autonomous academic discipline, the systematic study of mass media and of mass communication has been established only recently in Slovenia (since 1994). Previously, the main (intellectual and disciplinary) sources of research on mass media and of mass Page 3 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! communication included journalism, sociology and political science. Slovenian journalism, as the most exposed “branch of learning” with respect to the mass media, was perceived mainly as a profession and not as science; to a large extent, it is still perceived in this way (Poler-Kovačič 2004). Secondly, systematic sociology of the media seldomly touched the contents of the media. Instead, it dealt with the organization of media institutions and their embeddedness in the broader context of social relations (Vreg 2001). Slovenian political scientists from the period between 1968 and 1970, addressed media mostly in their relation to public opinion (as an emergent social phenomenon or as a political construct). One can perhaps argue, that before the 1990s, the academic niche in Slovenia for systematic research on media and on mass communication was rather vague and not so clearly structured. “Media studies”, as the Emediate project seems to understand them, spread exponentially in the Slovenian literature some time in 1990s. (As a footnote, central stimulation for their expansion and popularity was – so it seems – the concern of social scientists with the role of the mass media in the interethnic armed conflicts and wars in the Balkans; in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Serbia.) The third major problem, which we encountered during our research was the problem concerning the notion of critical. This notion directly refers to the attempts of the Emediate project to reveal the values and ethical dynamics behind the formation of an European public sphere. We found out that more often than not, research on the media was critical only at the level of explicit self-definition. We found this problematic. Thus on the one hand, the social scientists from the Slovenian academia declared their work (on mass media and on social issues in general) as critical, but also in line with the continuing socialist renovation of the social condition. On the other hand, analysts of the media neglected several key aspects of their objects of analysis; aspects that upsurged again later, perhaps decades later, during the revolutionary transformations of the socialist societies when the media played an important social and political role. It seems from our preliminary analyses that if there was critical social sciences, the mass media themselves were exempt from the critical focus. An important underlaying assumption of the “media studies”, and also of the “media commentaries”, which we examines was that the mass media were perceived as allowing democratic debate, tolerant exchanges of opinions and sufficient information for a lively public to exist. Assumed in the studies we examined was the point that the mass media were the unproblematic vehicles of the socialist-democratic life. A fourth problematic characteristic of the period we analyzed is the concept of media ownership. By default all media addressed by the Slovenian media studies and media commentaries, were owned by the state. There was no media market as such, although individual newspapers competed – not quite so expressely as nowdays in Slovenia – for their readerhip. The concept of ownership was especially troublesome with respect to television and radio. At the time, there existed two country-wide (or republic wide) television channels of the public TV Slovenia, and three channels of the public Radio Slovenia. Occasionally, television programs from other Yugoslav republics (mostly from Serbia and Croatia) were aired on the screens of Slovenian viewers, and there was access to some international radio broadcasts. In sum, due to the specific media ownership, Slovenian audience had access only to a narrow offer of media contents. Page 4 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! 2. Slovenian “media studies” between 1968 to 1970 We propose to start our discussion of the Slovenian “media studies” between 1968 and 1970 with a short note on the political and social context of the Slovenian mass communication system in this period. Slovenian media were imbedded in the mass communication infrastructure of the Yugoslav federation. Professor France Vreg, the most outstanding Slovenian expert on mass communication from this era – and perhaps also the most distinguished Yugoslav scholar on this topic –, wrote the following concerning the official doctrine on the mass media

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