Self-censorship narrated: Journalism in Central and Eastern Europe

From new censorship theory to the analysis of self-censorship

Traditionally, Western-based scholars adhering to liberal approaches to media studies have analysed journalism from the perspective of normative ethics, comprehending censorship as top-down repression and as the natural opposite of free speech. Since the early 1990s, critical scholars have challenged this take on censorship, turning their attention towards ways in which censorship permeates society even when a top-down powerful censor cannot be easily identified. Matthew Bunn (2015: 39) has termed this latter body of literature New Censorship Theory. In what has become a programmatic statement of this critical turn, Richard Burt (1998) has argued, with respect to early modern English theatre, that censorship is ‘dispersed among a variety of regulatory agents and practices; it [is] productive as well as prohibitive; it involve[s] cultural legitimation as well as delegitimization’ (p. 17).

Burt’s reading implies that censorship should be regarded as the norm rather than the exception, because censorship is a constitutive force of any expression (Post, 1998: 2). This suggests that formal censorship exercised by a powerful institution, typically the state, is not always necessary for upholding structures in society that are favourable to the powerful agent, and that the absence of direct coercion does not always signal the absence of censorship. Censorship resembles practices of micro-power in the Foucauldian paradigm, simultaneously constraining and constituting the freedom of the subject (Butler, 1987 ). The critical understanding of censorship in New Censorship Theory also echoes Marx’s notion of ideology (Bunn, 2015: 34–36) as false consciousness that underpins social control by making certain thoughts and actions literally unthinkable.

In this vein, direct censorship represents a failure of ideology – a form of domination that, in the Weberian understanding, relies on raw power rather than authority. Formal state censorship, then, is ‘only one form of control of society, secondary to the more “productive” systems of ideological production and dissemination’ (Bunn, 2015: 36). The censorial effects of ideology (or, to borrow terms from Gramsci and Althusser, of hegemony and ideological interpellation) blur the distinction between censorship and self-censorship. Building on this idea, the articles in this Special Issue explore how journalistic expression is shaped by social structure, individual agency and subjectivity.

The broadening of the conceptual boundaries of censorship, as advocated by the proponents of New Censorship Theory, has produced conceptual problems of its own. While overcoming the normativity of the earlier literature, their contribution has made it hard to draw an a priori analytical distinction between censorship and other forms of ‘cultural regulation’ (Mazzarella and Kaur, 2009), or, with regard to the scope of this Special Issue, between self-censorship and practices such as self-editing or formatting of discourse in accordance with ideas of ‘proper’ journalistic practice. Such vagueness risks eroding the specificity of censorship and self-censorship as analytical categories that have explanatory value and empirical reference points (Bunn, 2015: 40). In response to this critique, the historian Darnton (2014) argued that it is productive to keep a narrower definition of censorship that entails particular kinds of (usually state-orchestrated) institutional arrangements, and local meanings that allow social actors to distinguish between censorship and editing (see also Plamper, 2001).

In this Special Issue, we do not rely on a single, overarching definition of self-censorship, nor on one research method that allows us to empirically capture the phenomenon. Rather, we seek to attend to and bring forth the empirical specificity of self-censorship in the various contexts we study. The empirical data presented in the papers vary across time and between differing social contexts, but the contributing authors share an interest in the specific social arrangements that enable self-censorship. Collectively, we examine how journalists and editors maintain or resolve the ambivalence of self-censorship, how doing that may be practically, politically or morally consequential for them, and how they evaluate the judgements that emerge around self-censorship.

Post-communist country cases: A common past of censorship

The contributions in this Special Issue account for the mechanisms and narrations of self-censorship across varied socio-political contexts, histories and types of news media. The country cases examined by contributors are united in their shared history of state-led censorship, and in the political and economic pressures that have rendered self-restraint among journalists and editors an integral part of all the media systems we analyse. In this section, we provide historical background for the country cases the contributing authors analyse and discuss the findings of scholars who analyse media systems in comparative perspective. The historical and system-level works discussed here provide the backdrop for the meso- and micro-level studies presented in the Special Issue.

Censorship never existed in the Eastern bloc de jure: all the various constitutions formally ensured press freedom (albeit without explicitly banning censorship). Press freedom was stipulated in Article 124 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, which was widely copied verbatim by legislators across the satellite countries. De facto the various nomenklatura systems exercised strict control, organising the press and media in a hierarchically centralised and coordinated manner (for contemporary accounts, see Miquel, 1972; Siebert et al., 1963 (1956)). Journalists were to refrain ‘from criticising the party itself’ and to remain ‘committed to the socialist project as a whole’ (Roudakova, 2017: 51).

Total political control over the press was never fully achieved: samizdat (self-published) publications existed in a number of communist countries, including Hungary, Latvia, Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union. Although heavily jammed, Western-Europe-based American radio stations such as Radio Liberty, The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were accessible to parts of the population (Sükösd, 2012). The regimes’ grip on the press varied across time and space. In Poland, for example, freedom of speech was less restricted than in the USSR, where the press-controlling system relaxed only with glasnost (transparency) in 1987 under Mikhail Gorbachev.

The political transformations that unfolded in 1989–1991 shook the media landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe. Media policy-makers made efforts to establish independent public service broadcasting modelled after the British Broadcasting Corporation (cf. Mungiu-Pippidi, 2003). The journalistic communities of these countries formally adopted professional and ethical codes, copying those that existed in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria and the Nordic countries, attempting to introduce self-regulation based on neutral and objective reporting (cf. Chalaby, 1996; Kunczik, 2001).

As many media scholars have argued, however, instead of the anticipated Americanisation/Anglicisation of the media, the 1990s brought about a process of Berlusconisation/Italianisation (Splichal, 1994; Wyka, 2007), and the media systems in the region developed a number of similarities to those prevalent in Southern European countries (Jakubowicz, 2008). Politicians who survived from the old party state maintained the same attitudes towards the media, expecting journalists to carry out ideological and educational tasks (Trionfi, 2001: 95; Vajda, 2001: 155). The press market remained underdeveloped, as did journalistic professionalisation (Hallin and Mancini, 2004).

Market pressures were a major factor in shaping the new media landscape (see Balčytienė et al., 2015; Schimpfössl and Yablokov, 2020). Many outlets were unable to sustain themselves in the turbulent economic transformations of the 1990s, others fell victim to the 2008 financial crisis. As a result, many outlets fell back into the hands of powerful patrons. Media outlets were instrumentalised in political and economic struggles. Some argue that such phenomena were part of a struggle between competing elites for not only the control over economic assets, but for power over the institutions of the state itself (Grzymala-Busse, 2007; Koltsova, 2006; Ryabinska, 2014).

Following the 2008 financial crisis, multinational media investors withdrew, legal regulations became more restrictive and domestic media oligarchs and government cronies gained ever more power, growing to dominate the landscape through their oligarch-state ownership combined with ‘media-political clientelism’ (Roudakova, 2008; Freedom House, 2016). Some countries, such as Hungary and Poland, even gave way to a Russification/Putinisation of media control (Sükösd, 2018; Tokarczuk, 2019; Vartanova, 2012: 135).

Taking note of these dynamics as a backdrop to their analysis, the articles in this issue shift their focus onto the mesa- and micro-level. The subjects of inquiry are media managers, editors and journalists, as well as their social interactions with each other, with state authorities and elites, and with their audiences.

The contributions in this issue

The authors of the articles in this Special Issue analyse self-censorship from the bottom-up, that is, as revealed in the practices and in the narratives of journalists and editors. The authors approach self-censorship both through the analysis of questionnaires and qualitative interviews. Some of the stories emerging from our data pointed to constraints journalists imposed upon themselves, while others shed light on intentional and active adjustment to new social, political and economic circumstances the journalists found themselves in.

The accounts of journalists analysed across the articles in this issue reveal that journalists often evaluate their practices as altruistically motivated and as working for the benefit of someone else, either their editorial board, the owners of the outlets they work for, their advertisers, their audiences or the staff they are responsible for. In this sense, it is not a priori obvious whether self-censorship is an expression of self-repression stemming from internalised external constraints, or whether it results from other social forces. Based on the analysis of interviews with public broadcasting journalists in Kyiv who work for organisations funded by Western grants, Taras Fedirko argues that journalists engage in several different forms of self-censorship that do not necessarily have a relationship to direct external censorship. His work demonstrates that self-censorship may work simultaneously along to several differing logics for a single individual at a single point in time.

Olga Zeveleva also addresses differing forms of self-censorship that can coexist within one local media landscape, drawing on her analysis of how Crimean journalists adapted to the Russian state’s imposition of new rules in the local media sphere after 2014. Zeveleva argues that the post-2014 transformation did not bring about passive acceptance of the new ‘rules of the game’ from the side of local media professionals; rather, many of Zeveleva’s interviewees understand self-censorship as a form of active contribution to the wellbeing of their local communities. Zeveleva demonstrates how the Russian state intervened in the local media sphere actively through censorship in 2014, but as Russia’s de facto control over Crimea stabilised by 2016, journalists began to reproduce the new practices more easily through self-censorship.

In their work on Russia, Latvia and Hungary, Schimpfössl and Yablokov did not observe community-mindedness among self-censoring journalists; rather, in all three countries, journalists and editors were most concerned about their own fate, albeit to varying degrees and differing logics of justification. The authors’ initial findings echo previous research on Russian journalists and editors, who emphasise the ‘professionalism’ of the practice of intuitively toeing the Kremlin’s line without restricting themselves in their creativity. The journalists interviewed by Schimpfössl and Yablokov (2014) in Russia euphemistically called this skill or strategy ‘adekvatnost’, best translated as the ‘right instinct’ and a ‘feel for the game’, something apparently effortless, which does not require any identifiable censor.

Despite the differences in motivations and justifications for their practices offered by journalists across the studies presented here, the ‘right sense for the game’ (in a Bourdieusian sense) is described by all the authors of this issue as an element that defines the boundaries of the profession. Anda Rožukalne’s survey-based research note explores how self-censorship is chosen by the Latvian journalists as the main strategy to avoid political and economic pressures and, at the same time, helps them reconcile with their professional principles.

All four contributions draw on differing theoretical and conceptual propositions in order to contribute to our common task of challenging traditional normative notions that surround censorship and self-censorship in existing scholarship, contributing to the body of work on New Censorship Theory by drawing on empirical case studies of post-communist countries. We hope that this Special Issue opens up the floor to further discussion about how to understand self-censorship.