Calif. In a historic speech in Prague in 1990, as Communism in Eastern Europe was crumbling, Secretary of State James Baker called for international support for independent broadcasting in the emerging states of the collapsing Soviet Union. Since then, the need for independent news outlets of all kinds has become even more urgent in fledgling democracies and old regimes alike. That is why President George W. Bush and policymakers at the State Department and Pentagon should put American support for uncensored news outlets and unfettered access to the Internet at the top of their foreign policy agenda.
Nothing raises more fear in a repressive regime than challenges to the control of information.
And nothing is more important to the development of a civil, democratic society. Free elections may be a first step in establishing the rule of law, but there can be no multiparty elections without a multiplicity of news outlets. Yet press freedom, especially in broadcasting, remains threatened in many former Soviet and East Bloc countries, while in China the democratizing power of the Internet is stalled. In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, about 100,000 protesters recently took to the streets of Prague to support the striking journalists who have barricaded themselves in the newsroom of state-owned Czech Television since late December. Not so long ago, state television was just such a tool in the hands of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president indicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague.