The Mood Swings In Media Regulation

Michael Hedges December 13, 2012 - Follow on Twitter

Regulation, more or less, is receiving considerable attention from media people. The dividing line is not simply between old and new media. But all media people, even where the heavy hand of regulation is the tradition, see that habits are changing and it is a race to keep up with it all.

More than two decades on, once tightly controlled media in countries of the former Soviet Union faces an uncertain future. Media representatives from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Baltics and Georgia meeting in the Belarus capital Minsk for the Forum of European and Asian Media (December 9-12) straddled past and future. The Forum was organized by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which certainly counts on healthy customers, around the big themes of “integration in the post-Soviet space and new media.”

Challenges abound in the broad post-Soviet media space, where authoritarian governments impose harsh control over broadcast and print media. Among the media people, government people and academics in attendance there was consensus that traditional media is in decline. “By 2020, the habit of not reading yesterday’s news will win,” said Expert Ukraine editor Andriy Blinov. “In many post-Soviet countries, publications are not a pure business.” Print media in the post-Soviet space will “die” before Western media, he said, because of dependence on advertising sales.

Traditional media must fight to survive, said Russia’s Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Communications Alexei Volin, quoted by Narodnaya Gazeta (December 11). Media consumers are reacting to the “markedly reduced relevance” as “a significant portion of people no longer require a reliable source of information. The media are increasingly faced with competition from so-called unstructured media resources; the internet, social networks, some bloggers. In this situation, there is a question about the survival of the industry as such.”

”There is this view that government support, to some extent, can be a kind of prop for the media,” noted Mr. Volin. “This is short-sighted and not very effective. On crutches you can walk and stand but you cannot run a race.”

Modern city dwellers are spending 100 hours a week online, noted Vasily Gatow, head of RIA Novosti’s Media Lab. “This is two times more than the person operates.” Media consumption overlaps as people watch TV and simultaneously send text messages and contribute to social media.

And so, as in media conferences the world over, the internet took over the presentations and discussions. “The problem is with internet news,” observed Latvian blogger Kristians Rozenvalds. “People just read the headlines. Half the people do not read further, the whole story. We have become very superficial. We know who launched a rocket in Syria yesterday…but what is happening in Syria, no one knows.”

There was little appetite shown for government regulation of the internet, though privacy rights and freedom of speech collide uncomfortably. Noting that Wikileaks gives “open access to closed information,” the director of High-Tech Park in Belarus, Valery Tsepkalo asked, “would you want your personal medical records or phone list of friends and family in the public domain?” And, too, “no social network should allow insults from anonymous users.”

“Most modern states are not moving toward regulation,” observed RIA Novosti’s Gatow . “Citizens, corporations and professional associations prefer self-regulation. This is always a better, wiser, and much cheaper than establishing public institutions.”

The Forum did, of course, offer a political venue to Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who urged the new Georgian government to return to the CIS, the Armenian government to “liberate” Nagorno-Karabakh and the Kyrgyzstan authorities to pay former dictator and current Minsk resident Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s pension. Turning to media, Mr. Lukashenko said it should be “the mood indicator in society and prevent the penetration of outlying and destructive ideas.”

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