Have socialist states featured any sort of press liberty? Is a meaningfully free media possible when the tools for communication have been centralized under the ownership of the state? According to this entry from Moscows USSR: 100 Questions and Answers, the better question might be: is freedom of the press possible under capitalism? Question 42: Why is there no freedom of the press in the USSR? On the contrary, there is, only we understand this freedom differently than the West...freedom of the press in the USSR is much broader than in any Western country. Nominally, anyone in the West can publish a newspaper, but in reality only those who have money can afford to. Significantly, the big press in the West is owned either by large companies or multimillionaires. Naturally, they determine its political contents. In the USSR both the newspapers and magazines are public property. They are published by government departments, Soviets, Party and trade union organizations, unions of professional people, etc. For instance, the All-Union Temperance Society was set up a short while ago, and it immediately began to put out its own journal. From our point of view, this arrangement is more democratic. It is only natural, in our opinion, that we do not publish materials that reflect bourgeois ideology...incidentally, Soviet publications, engaged in unending polemics with Western ideologists and politicians concerning various issues, do carry material reflecting the views of our opponents. In most cases they provide readers with greater detail than the Western press does when it acquaints its readers with our point of view.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 15:26:02 +0000
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