WP 2: Report on activities # 1 () – work in progress – do not cite!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team no. 9 (Ljubljana) (work in progress – do not cite)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

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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

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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 . 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 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 ; 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 competed – not quite so expressely as nowdays in Slovenia – for their readerhip. The concept of ownership was especially troublesome with respect to 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.

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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 and means of mass communication in . “In theory, the Yugoslav political system, as conceived by its leading ideologist Edvard Kardelj, ought to allow for political participation in temrs of articulation of diverse social groups within a unified socialist organization, The People’s Front. But following the Soviet model, he rejected any form of political pluralism. After the Tito-Stalin split and with the introduction of the self-management system, Kardelj considered that the interests and opinions of individualsocial groups could be structurally incorporated into political system through decisions made by the organs of self-management. (…) The conceptualization of social communication in the system of self-management considered public opinion a constitutent element of political process. Opinion pluralism included the opinions voiced by grassroots groups, non-Marxist ideological movements, religious associations, ethnic groups, and others. Modest attempts were made to achieve pluralization of opinion” (Vreg 2001: 250-251). In practice, on the other hand, “the professional and cultural élites lost their power and were vegetating on the margins of political and professional decission-making. Educational and cultural institutions and organization, universities, medical institutions, research institutes, trade unions, and even academies of arts and sciences have become state institutions and directly subordinated to the ministries. In public life there was no influence of the institutions of civil society, which had very limited and powerless representation in the advisory councils councils of mass media and other ‘public-service’ institutions. Representatived of political parties have had the decisive role in these organs and transformed them largely into a transmission belt for State and Party bureaucratic élite. In such a bureaucratized, élitist society, citizens remained the object of information flow. The public seemed to be merely ‘social scenery’ in the arena of the struggle of power” (Vreg 2001: 256). Although the above points and evaluations relate strongly to the fourth problematic issue which we mentioned in the introduction, namely to that of the media ownership, they are, in fact, a description of the broader context in which the entire mass communication system operated in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia. Thus they are useful also for understanding other points we will bring to the attention in this document. From the above outlines, one may simply infer the realities of the mass media and also the opportunities for systematic media research in Slovenia.

*** For several reasons, the Slovenian “media studies” published between 1968 and 1970 are an illusive object of analysis. Not much systematic work on the Slovenian mass media was published in the time; that is not much scholarly work is available that would count as results of scientific study by the present-day standards. Thus we put “media studies” in parenthesis in order to suggest that – in this present report – we also considered the so-called “media commentaries” and their main arguments in order to generalize and reflect on the characteristics of the academic / intellectual discourse on the Slovenian mass media in the relevant period. For the most part, scholarly treatment of the mass media was located in the central social scientific periodical of the time, Teorija in praksa (eng. Theory and practice), a broadly focused monthly journal of the Slovenian

Page 5 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! social and political scientist which was dedicated to the broad concerns of social analysis and critique). The prime examples of this work are Bratko (1968), Šetinc (1968), (1969), Vreg (1968), (1969a), (1969b). A number of scholarly studies on the Slovenian media were also published outside the above mentioned journal, Teorija in praksa between 1968 and 1970. Jože Rajhman (1968) published an article on the “mission” of the religious press after the meeting of the 1968 High council in Vatican in an occasional conference proceedings.1 In the 1969 double issue (7-8) of the central Slovenian journal for linguistic and literature, Jezik in slovstvo (eng. Language and literature), Emil Štampar (1969) published an analysis of the Croatian literature published in the journal Kaj. In a weekly journal for economic information Gospodarski vestnik (eng. The economic informant), France Novak (1969) published an analysis of the language and its use as well as misues of the popular technical terms and phrases. In two parts, the cultural and literary journal Dialogi published an interesting and systematic analysis of Vanek Šiftar concerning Hungarization of the Slovenian press in the region of from the beginning of the 20th century (Šiftar 1970). Other publications – monographs between 1968 and 1970 – on the Slovenian mass media, which we were able to locate by the time of the present report, include texts that deal with the broader topic of mass communication. For the most part, they are historical documents and (quite useful and meticulous) bibliographical collections. Among these, there are a book by Jože Munda (1969) on the bibliography of the Slovenian Marxist press from April 1920 to March 1941; a bibliographical collection of the newspaper articles on the and nautics in the newspapers from Primorska region which was published as a monograph by Vojko Krapež and Srečko Vilhar (1970); a historical analysis and comment on the Slovenian liberation front’ press during the WW2 by Darja Ravnihar (1970); a polemical booklet with a concerned discussion on the children and televison published by Katja Boh and Blaž Mesec (1970); a similar booklet on the contemporary education within the family which included a section on the contemporary mass media (Several authors 1970); a historical analysis on Slovenian book publishing until 1918 in the region of Primorska (Gerlanc 1969); Gerlanc also published a monograph containing a catalogue of all Slovenian books and journals in print or availabe in book stores by the end of 1968 (Gerlanc 1970). An autobiographical account of the Slovenian (and Yugoslav) media can be also found in a book by Gojko Stanič (1970) which was titled Komunisti včeraj, danes, jutri (Communists yesterday, today, and tomorrow); Slovenian media were also investigated indirectly in the published report by several different authors (1968) on the survey concerning the political reforms in the 1960s. A fitting additional information on the quantity of scholarly publication – outside the main social and political science journal Teorija in praksa – concerning the , and specifically on the Slovenian mass media, in the period we studied may be the following. The main Slovenian periodical for the social sciences and humanities, Teorija in praksa published with its every issue quite extensive monthly bibliographies of relevant publications which were published in Slovenia, but also some foremost publications from other Yugoslav republics. These bibliographies listed publications of any kind, from newspaper articles, commentaries, essays, interiews, monographs, conference proceedings and so forth. Mostly, it included publications of intellectuals and university professors. The bibliographies were divided into several established

1 The above list includes articles which we have arbitrarily defined as scientific. As already mentioned, there was a plethora of other texts on media published in the period we selected, the so-called “media commentaries”, but we did not include them in the above list. With respect to the point that this selection was arbitrary and without prior discussion within the Emediate network the above list may be subject to change.

Page 6 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! categories for individual academic disciplines or groups of such disciplines in the following order: philosophy, sociology, culture-science-education, political sciences, political economy, means of mass communication and public opinion, religion and religious organizations, and history-geography. In the entire 1968 volume of Teorija in praksa the bibliographic section on “means of mass communication and public opinion” appeared 4 times.

Bibliography in No. of bibligraphy No. of articles No. of articles on Teorija in praksa entries on “Means of written by Slovenian Slovenian mass (1968; issues 1- mass communication authors media 12) and public opinion” Issue no. 4 5 1 2 Issue no. 8-9 2 1 1 Issue no. 10 1 0 0 Issue no. 12 1 1 1 Table 1: The structure of bibliographical records in Teorija in praksa in the category on the means of mass communication and public opinion

***

The presence of the idea of Europe is rather scarce in these works. As unenthusiastic as we are at this point, we are compeled to argue that this notion did not yet have a recognizable symbolic connotation nor was it used as a reference point for social comparison (in terms of culture, politics, academia, or the mass media for that matter). For the period which we analyzed, Europe does not yet figure as a meaningful category of social analysis and is thus only infrequent in the existing media studies!

*** The notion of risis. The social studies of the Slovenian media between 1968 and 1970 were immersed in an enxtraordinary historical context which was explicitly dfined as a period of crisis. This links well with the intention of the Emediate project. It is, however, necessary to mention that “framing” of the notion of crisis had a specific background in our case, both political and social. Late 1968 were a time of some tension between political elites in the constitutive federal republics of Yugoslavia. It was form this perspective that the editor of Teorija in praksa asked the following question to Stane Kavčič, at the time the chairman of the executive committee of the Slovenian assembly (a responsible political function within a federal republic which was roughly equivalent to that of prime minister). Asked Zdenko Rotar, the editor of Teorija in praksa, “I believe that our present situation in Yugoslavia can be named a sort of crisis. It is not, of course, a crisis in the sense of dead end, a situation from which there is no exit, but as a natural phase of the social development. (…) What is your opinion on that? Is such also your personal diagnosis? Do you see a way out by means of revolutionizing the existing institutions?” (Kavčič 1968: 1174). A diagnosis that the period between 1968 and 1970 was a turbulent one was confirmed also by political dignitaries. In his authoritative editorial to an issue of Teorija in praksa in 1970, the president of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Josip Vidmar commandingly emphasized dramatical implications of the historical context in which the period we analyzed was located. “The historical moment warns us that we live and decide in an unusually dramatic time, in which the Earth which is our home, is continuously moving and wrinkling so that it causes earthquakes and catastrophes, in which people and nations are able to save themselves and to survive only with utmost attention and complete concentration of all its powers and potentials.

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The map of the world is changing so dangerously fast that only those who are prepared will find a way and survive, especially in cases when one is not protected by a grand physical power which we Slovenians ourselves by no means posses” (Vidmar 1970: 532). Other sources of this interpretation were international events. The developments in Czechoslovakia, for instance, were explicitly formulated as “crisis” by one of the Czech authors whose reflection was in translations published in Teorija in praksa (Kosik 1968).

*** Among the international events, constitutive of our present conceptions of Europe the most attention of the Slovenian social scientists and commentators was, of course, paid to the developments in the Czechoslovakia. There were several publications in Teorija in praksa where authors dealt explicitly with Czechoslovakia and in their reflections used some kind of media analysis. In his reflection on the developments in the Czechoslovak republic, Vinko Trček used information from the newspaper Pravda in order to understand the prevalent (political) conceptualization of the problem presented by the reforming ideas of Dubček and of subsequent Soviet intervention (Trček 1968b: 1343). Trček found out that articles in Pravda, led one to conclude that the intervention was not oriented toward the population as a whole but towards the political leadership alone. The main bone of contention was overly apparent right-wing positioning of the new political leadership in their attempts to reform the Czechoslovak republic. “In the opinion of the editoirals (in Pravda) the stories about the ‘improvement’ of socialism are a sham unless the leading role of the ocmmunist party is secured in practice. That was basically the original sin from which all other have been deduced: the intention to radically alter the economic system, to expand the economic democracy, to include Czechoslovakia into the international division of labor and so forth” (Trček 1968b: 1343). Trček also mentions in his paper that the international news media were an excellent source of information on the reactions of the communits party leaders, of the scientists and publicists concerning the Soviet military intervention. He found out that some reactions demanded strengthening the unity of the fight against imperialism and thsus to stop the new reform movements (Trček 1968b: 1335). Unofrtunately, there is no mention on either how in his opinion the Slovenian media reacted to the developments nor how did they serve as providers of accurate and relevant information. Teorija in praksa also published a number of translations from the Czech and Slovak authors, who were mostly already known to the Slovenian audience, either from their previous publications in Teorija in praksa or by their political or intellectual prominence. Such, for instance, were texts from Miroslav Kusý (1968a, 1968b)2, Robert Kalivoda (1968), Karel Kosik (1968) an interview with Ota Šik (1968) and others. On the internal problems of social and political life in the Czechoslovak federation, Teorija in praksa also published a translation of a round table discussion on federation and assimetry in the country (Mitošinka et al. 1968). An authoritative contribution to the debate was also published by an Italian political scientist Umberto Cerroni, who wrote about the need for a new communist party after the events in the summer of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Interestingly, he included an essentially Marxist argument against censorship –

2 It is perhaps interesting, that Kusý, who wrote fo Teorija in praksa an informative paper on the new political ideals in the country prior to the Soviet intervention, also included an instructive section on the role of the political press and generally of the mass media in Czechoslovakia in order to better explain the current situation. He concluded that “political press succeeded in completing a dignified role in preparing for the revolutionary process of today” (Kusý 1968a: 717).

Page 8 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! which was a contested issue in the Czechoslovak revolt – in a section titled “Marx’s cure for the ailment of censorship” (Cerroni 1968: 1372). But most importantly, in their double issue of 1968 (8-9), the editors of Teorija in praksa published a declaration with which they most strongly objected to the military intervention of the Soviet Union and some Warsaw pact countries. Teorija in praksa published this declaration from the standpoint of its continuous interest in the social condition of other socialist countries and also from the standpoint of wider possible implications of the intervention. The general attitude of the Slovenian social science towards the events was well expressed in the Declaration: “The Czechoslovak January of 1968 was heartly welcomed. Against the dreadful signs of the restoration of stalinism, the Czechoslovak revival meant new upsurge of the humanistic basis of socialism, a new proof of the utter and unavoidable compatibility of socialism and democracy. The general popular support for the action program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia also meant a proof of the unswerving faith in the potentials and in the future of humanistic socialism. In addition to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia will henceforth testify with its political and social transformation of this future – so we had hoped” (TiP editors 1968: 1108). The declaration also stated: “The thought of the creative theoretical social science has to tackle difficult problems: from the role of the party and the state in socialism, to the role of the army to mechanisms of tensions and conflict resolution which also exist in the socialist countries. Theoretical analysis will further have to deal with the relations between socialist countries themselves, and international relations in general. This will enable a more profound insight into the causes that drove to the situation in which for the first time in the history of the labor movement and of socialism one socialist country occupied another one.

Another international event that resonated in the Slovenian “media studies” and “media commentaries” were the new social movements, the new left and students’ revolts. The tide of these movements was reflected through occasional mentions of the developments in Paris (e.g. Kavčič 1968), in the United States (Močnik 1968), but mostly – the international students’ movement was reflected through the activities of the Yugoslav “generation” of 1968. For there were several demonstrations in major Yugoslav cities where Universities were located. Ljubljana was also a site of such unrests and demonstrations. Among its other revolutionary claims, the Slovenian student movement expressed clear demands for the reformulation of the existing mass media. The claims of the students were, we believe, appropriately summarized by Zdravko Mlinar, a sociologist and a professor at the School of political science, University of Ljubljana. In section devoted to the topic of political demands of the Slovenian students’ movement, which was organized by Teorija in praksa, Mlinar presented the following argument: “There is a general proclamation that relaxed expression of opinion and their democratic contest are essential, but in reality the means of mass information are not preforming this task or disenable it. A protest against such conditions was among the loudest ones in the recent public addressess of the students. It seems that the means of mass information assume in their role the premise that (a) the people, the ordinary citizens ,are not capable not mature enough to independently and ‘correctly’ understand unselected messages (information) and that it is thus necessary to prevent them from being exposed to different ‘negative’, ‘foreign’ or suspicious’ ideas or influences; (b) the other side of the same mediating role of the mass media is again in that they secure the expression of only those perspectives, arguments and opinions or interests that are favorable to the program of some action on the higher levels of decision- making” (Mlinar 1968: 1258). Mlinar went on to develop his general agreement with the claims made by the students and also added his own experience to support the argument; namely his experience with a selective media represnetation of the endeavors of the Slovenian sociologists to contribute to the debate on a law defining reduction of the workload in Slovenia. Specifically

Page 9 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! in the case of students, Mlinar believed that the Slovenian media were selective in their reporting on the students’ activities. “When it was about protest actions of the students in different university-cities, the newspaper – the bulletin of the Socialist Union of the laboring people of Slovenia – was completely biased nad unobjective in its reporting on the actual situation. On the events in Sarajevo, for instance, we could only find in Delo a short note, which basically said that the students from Sarajevo decidedly distance themselves from the actions of the students in Belgrade (as established by the University committee of the CP). On the exciting climate and demonstrations of thousands of people on the streets of Sarajevo who were – among other – cheering paroles on solidarity with their Belgrade colleagues, we could find not a word in Delo” (Mlinar 1968: 1258).

*** A further problematic aspect, which was encountered during our preparatory research, and which was mentioned already in the introduction, was how to interpret a recurrent self- portrayal of the examined “media studies” and of “media commentaries” as being critical. Depending on what th critical attitude of the media studies and commentaries means, it is possible to inquire about the inherent values expressed by these works. By definition, the social science – and also humanities – of the socialist countries was critical social science. This stipulation arguably holds also for the period we chose to present in this repost, namely the period between 1968 to 1970, especially as this was in part also a period of quite deep social and political change in the prevalent ideologies of the socialist countries. This change was not the least obvious in the reshaped political ideologies of the so-called “independent” countries. The Slovenian (and Yugoslav) social sciences of the time were supposed to contribute to the continuing socialist renovation of the social condition. By and large aligned along the lines of the predominant political ideology of communist Marxism, the social scientist were the bearers of the critical (socialist) interest and promotors of productive social change. While reading texts on the Slovenian mass media from the period between 1968 to 1970, one has the impression that critical stance advised by the prevalent ideology has entered and become integrated in every public address and publication. It is not so difficult to bring comprehensively this particular aspect closer to our attention as the central journal of the Slovenian social and political scientist, Teorija in praksa, organized in 1968 a panel of frontment from the Slovenian public life who were asked – among others – for their reflections on the present state of social critique. Among many distinguished authors in this forum, a lecturer at the School of political science, University of Ljubljana, Dragana Kraigher wrote (crtically) that “there is almost too much mention of the social critique. It seems to me that it is quite normal and befitting that it has spread so widely. This is, of course, completely in line with the general democratization of our social and political life. But I do not find it so befitting when a reaction to the social critique is biased. In case by case, it needs to be determined from whih positions the social critique this or another social critique is emerging, and also what is its intention. It is all too often that reactions to the critique result from a personal resentment and grudge, which is then unable to see the well-intentioned core if it may exist in the critique – even in a critique ad personam” (Kraigher 1968: 57). One reason for the spread of critical public engagement was the adoption of a renewed Yugoslav constitution of 1963 and also the subsequent laws on public information and on the press enabled. Formally and in principle this new legal framework enabled more free expression of opinion and made the media responsible for full information on the relevant issues. Two central articles in the Yugoslav Constitution of 1963 influenced the media landscape – (1) that “the means of information”, including radio, television, to publish “opinions and information of the organs, organizations and of the citizens which are in the interest of informing

Page 10 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! the public”; and (2) that there should be a principle of free international exchange of information between countries (Bjelica 1968). It is therefore not unusual or incomprehensible that results of an opinion survey among the Slovenian communists which was conducted in 1968 by the Center for public opinion at the School of political science in Ljubljana showed a high degree of critical attitude towards the existing social condition. Among the elements of the socialist life in Slovenia which were the most critically assessed according to these survey results were: the organisational structure of the communist party, the level of internal democracy in the party, the share of young members of the party in organisation and leadership and the degree of homogeneity on the level of ideas and of actions among the communists (Trček 1968a: 4); see also other analyses of the survey material and their interpretation of the “critical attitude” among the members of the Slovenian Communist Party (Vodopivec 1968; Toš 1968; Klinar 1968). On the other hand, it often seems that researchers of the Slovenian (and of the Yugoslav) media assumed a Weberian stance of value neutrality towards the mass media. We found te prevalent reluctance to express critical views concerning the media a problem in terms of the validity of media studies. When in the 1920s the famous sociologist Max Weber wrote a programatic paper on how to conduct newspaper research, he could argue there that the idea of elaborating critical views on the media throug such research was far from his mind because, clearly, the aim of forumlating such critique would diminish the readiness of newspaper owners and editors to cooperate in such systematic research (Weber 1999). Yet this argument had to be in some sense obsolete for a socialist (critical) social science. According to the communist interpretation of Marxism it was primarily the social critique that was capable of guiding the social transformation. The following comment by professor Janez Rotar of the School of Arts in was, we believe, very informative and succinct on what was the prevalent intepretation of the role of social critique in public life. “The critique – social critique – is both in excess and lacking. It is in excess as it is entirely euphemic an ‘courtly’ or it is univited and is thus not responded so that it very quickly earns the label of being criticistical; this, of course, is not impossible, as any critique necessarily must degenerate from the two variants mentioned into the latter version. Nowadays, people very carefully follow – because of the ‘accumulation’ during several past years – diverse public activities and frontmen of our public life, either political or economic. It is understandable that many things in these areas deserve critique. But the critique should prove its intents by pumping the blood in the veins, cleaning it and cleaning the circulation as well, rather than bleeding out into the void…” (Rotar 1968: 72).3 If one was to take the point about the continuous socialist revolution seriously, one would also have to conclude that mass media themselves were excluded from such transformation. They were vehicles of critical ideas and the forum of productive debate, yet rarely

3 This reflection was also prepared in response to the questions for a panel of Teorija in praksa already mentioned above. It is perhaps interesting to add another point on this panel, namely, that after Rotar’s statement was published in Teorija in praksa, other similar opinions appeared in the panel. With respect to this initial reference, an important Slovenian poet, Ciril Zlobec, added another characteristic and noteworthy point. He wrote: “Indeed, we have in some sense too much of critique, and the reason for this is that even smart critical remarks remain practically without any response. When one takes a more careful look, however, one will notice that critique is being reiterated (as are my responses to your questions), simply because most of the unsolved problems from years and years ago remained unsolved even today” (Zlobec 1968: 251).

Page 11 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! were they themselves subject to the kind of social scientific criticism that was expected from the critical social science.4 With respect to this point, by and large the studies of media and their commentaries from the period take for granted the existing Slovenian media as appropriate vehicles of the socialist public life, the following fragment is illuminating. “From newspaper and television news reports, which we receive daily or even every hour, we learn how lively all sorts of plans are being contemplated in our public: short-term, mid-term, and long-term plans and that for all sectors (sic!) of life from economy to science, from sports to the arts. The man and society are thus getting prepared for tomorrow, which they want to shape according to their own needs and their own tastes” (Vidmar 1970: 531). This fragment is taken from a programatic editorial introduction to the 5th issue of Teorija in praksa. It was written by Josip Vidmar, one of the foremost creators of the Slovenian cultural policies in the post WW2 era and a bearer of several distinguished political functions. A noteworthy assumption of this authoritative fragment, as we see it, seems to be that the socialist public in Slovenia only needs to plug into the news reports in order to know about the existing social planing and also about the “needs and tastes” that make such planing necessary. According to Vidmar’s consideration, the mass media themselves are not mentioned as a necessary object of consideration or of reflective “preparation for the tomorrow”; the media, by this account, are entirely unproblematic. However, if one took a look at the mass media from a more narrow perspective of the cultural production, one could note that public debates about the press and publishing in general occasionally touched the issue of how the press operates, how it is funded and what are its goals. In 1968, a Slovenian publicist and editor, France Forstnerič, summarized these debates with the following formulation: “I wish to outline a broadly transparent problem of culture in Slovenia, and in Yugoslav society generally. Specialized debates about this problem fall short of satisfying me any longer. The times are such that they require global transformation not only in the ‘base’, but also in the upper building of the ‘base’. Enough has been written already on individual purely- cultural issues, such as are for instance the faith of the Sovenian book, financing the cultural production, education system, conservation of monumentalia, on stipends, on the press, on

4 As a footnote, it is perhaps interesting to mention a paper that, although merely in a small fragment, contrasted the prevailing “attitude” towards the mass media in the Slovenian social science between 1968 and 1970. In issue 4 of the 1968 voulme of Teorija in praksa, a paper by Bojan Danev was published on the political interests of the Italian region of Friulli (slov. Furlanija-Julijska krajina) where a substantial Slovenian minority resides (Danev 1970). The paper was written after the infamous Lorenzo-Sifar affair in Italy (i.e. indictment of a general Lorenzo for alledged preparation of military coup d’etat in Italy) and after the visit of Yugoslav prime minister Mika Špiljak in Italy in early 1968. Danev argues in the paper that the “burgeois pluralist democracies” actually lead a double political life and that this twofolded structure of the public politics in the parliament and in the media versus the politics behind the closed doors reflects also in the interests and activities of the autonomous Italian region of Friulli. In this paper, Danev uses the information on the media to develop his argument. He writes: “The majority parties and their newspapers, yes, even individuals from the right and some outstanding representatives of the catholic Church are henceforth engaged in favor of cooperation with Slovenia, with Yugoslavia and with the East. The official press of the Italian communist party and of the socialist union refrained from commenting, only slovenian groups in both parties publicly expressed their satisfaction with the visit of prime minister Špiljak” (Danev 1968: 611). This fragment suggests – albeit this may seem trivial from the contemporary perspective – that the media figure as actors (rather than merely as fora) of the public life; that they are not homogenous in their editorial policies, that they express opinions, not merely information, and that their individual voices count in the development of daily politics and of the current affairs. The importance of these implications can only be seen by contrasting them with the mass media system in Slovenia, or Yugoslavia.

Page 12 of 17 WP 2: Report on activities # 1 (LJUBLJANA) – work in progress – do not cite! kitsch, and on Slovenian national notions, which we were all supposed to have” (Forstnerič 1968: 48). Also informative is the following example. In an important intreview with the head of executive administration in Slovenia, Stane Kavčič, the following question was asked by the editor of Teorija in praksa, Zdenko Roter: “Why were in your opinion our press and also our national TV this year so reticent about the 20. anniversary of Stalin’s anathema of Yugoslavia when they are so diligent in reminding us about the important and unimportant acciversaries?” (Kavčič 1968: 1194). The point of this question, even if taken as much more bad-intentioned as it really was, is in essence supportive of the Slovenian media rather than critical of the entire system. The answer of Mr. Kavčič was even more clearly in the suggested direction: “That our press had been so humble at the time of the 20th anniversary of Informbureau is, in my opinion, not mainly its own fault. It is a victim of a political illusion that the year 1948 cannot repeat itself. It is evident that we may have to continuously battle with this fiction” (Kavčič 1968: 1194). In the answer of Stane Kavčič, the attention swerwed from the working of the Slovenian mass media to the threat of military aggression which was incidentally demonstrated in Prague in the same year.

As an obvious exception, we should mention a text by the sociologist Peter Klinar of the School of political science, University of Ljubljana, who commented on several aspects of the results of an opinion survey among the Slovenian communists conducted early in 1968 (Klinar 1968). Among other issues Klinar there discussed the problem he thought existed concerning the degree to which members of the CP were informed about the key documents and action plans of the party. The problem, according to Klinar, was that “only” 60% of the CP membership surveyed were informed about the resolutions of the last party session (i.e. the 7th session of the central committee of the Slovenian CP). Klinar buildt up an even stronger case, by saying that among these 60%, only a portion was “genuinely informed” and that, in general, the estimated level of “informedness” among the members of the Slovenian CP was not satisfactory. Among the possible reasons for this situation Klinar listed a number of speculations. Mass media were to an important extent to bear the blame for the situation. Wrote Klinar: “The resolve of the problem indicates itself in a more detailed research of the causes for this condition, but surely also in the modernization of the means of mass communication, in their more openness and scope for different opinions – even for unofficial opinions, in reducing the monopol over important information, which are accessible only to a small circles and so forth” (Klinar 1968: 1201). Klinar’s reflection in this case is not focused on the uses of the media by their reader – although, in the final analysis, it is the readers, the communists who are the problem of his sociological research –, but on the production of the media contents. In this interpretation, several important elements of the working of the Slovenian mass media in the period under investigation are mentioned. Albeit briefly treated, they figure as explicit and legitimate objects of the scoiological analysis. Specifically under the attack is the practice of publishing only “official opinion” and of serving as a means of information dissemination rather than as a genuine forum the confrontation of different information and/or their intellectual interpretation. By implication, one could also detect in this passage Klinar’s discontent with the lack of competition among the information sources, as well as his criticism of the arbitrary selection of information that is published by the media. Thus explicit criticism of the Slovenian mass media and the socialist information system was rarely seen in the Slovenian social sciences between 1968 and 1970. it was thus important to draw our attention to its broader context in which it appeared.

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3. Gaps and disparities

Among the pivotal requirements of WP 2 guidelines, Lancaster mentions to identify »tendencies, traditions and links within media studies as well as most conspicuous gaps in the theory and research on media within our defined relevant periods«. In addition to the issues defined above there are several other problematic areas that appeared during our preparatory research. (1) As there was practically no market-driven competition among the Slovenian media, the lack of any substantial comparative analysis of the Slovenian media is understandable. However, the problem is that there were different media and that they did focus on different issues, events and interpretations. The problem for us is how to present this diversity as meaningful and significant from the contemporary perspective. (2) A most conspicuous gap in the period we investigated was complete absence of the uses of different mass media. Circulation numbers of journals and newspapers were even treated as secrets. There is practically no way to recount the users’ aspect of the mass communication process. (3) Marginalization of radio seems to be another such obvious gap in the “media studies” and “media comments” of the period. The predominant sources of information were obviously press and television.

4. Conclusion

Several issues and problems as emerged in our preparatory investigation are indicated in this report. The difficulty of demarcating “media studies” from “media commentaries” was a continuous problem of our preparation. The present report, in effect, systematically included some so-called “media commentiaries”, although we suggest that the final decision on this is discussed at our meeting in Florence, along with formal implications of any such decision (in terms of cross-country comparison, in terms of extent of the work undertaken, in terms of preparation of the “country-specific” report, and so forth). Our present work on this material even indicates that perhaps a different methodology should perhaps be employed in order to better grasp the intention and relevance of these “media commentaries” for the academic reflection of (in this case, Slovenian) media or public sphere or “European values”. As it turned out that authors of “media studies” and “media commentaries” to a substantial degree overlap, such a consideration seems additionally meaningful. Another argument in favor of such approach may be that that “media commentaries” in the period between 1968 and 1970 indeed influenced the existing public life – or the socialist public sphere, if one is allowed to actually thus name the framework of public life in the socialist Slovenia. The so-called “media commentaries” were widely read also by those who shaped editorial policies and who influenced the production of media contents; sometimes, editors, writers or journalists reacted to such “media commentaries” themselves thus further strengthening the presence of issues and ideas discussed in the Slovenian public life (see for instance Murko 1970, Zilkerbach 1970). Examples of media commentary are given in appendices to this document. Other issues covered by this document include detectable tendencies of the Slovenian “media studies” and of the general social, political, and academic context in which they were embedded. Further information on these topics will be prepared in due time by the Ljubljana team.

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Boh, K. and Mesec, B. (1970). Otroci in televizija. Ljubljana, Yugoslavia: Cankarjeva založba.

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Cerroni, U. (1968). ‘Nova partija za novo državo’ Teorija in praksa 5: 1367-1374.

Danev, B. (1968). ‘Težnje avtonomne dežele Furlanije-Julijske krajine in Trsta’ Teorija in praksa 5: 609-615.

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