The debates of American media scholars are fascinating to read from a country like Hungary. Suffering from the aftermath of the communist decades, and home to ten million people, Hungary is a tiny dot on the global media map. As such, it might be considered highly susceptible to whichever logic shapes the media scene. In Robert McChesneys bleak projection, this country would be a plaything of global media interests, with local outlets and locally produced content gobbled up by the likes of News Corp or major European companies. To which Benjamin Compaine would say: if thats what customers want, theyre getting it. As the Hungarian experience shows, both of them have a point.
The communist media system proved that without markets and competition, there are no guarantees that people can enjoy their right to be consumers as well as citizens. In the late 1980s, satellite dishes began to mushroom in Hungary. People were purchasing them to watch long hours of western programmes, even though most of them could not understand a word of what was said. Artificially suppressed demands do tend to find outlets for themselves, and popular pressure seems to favour the emergence of media markets. (Compaines example of the success of VCRs in Europe also illustrates this point).
The Magyar mixture
In this sense, media ownership matters a great deal. People are not served well by non-market media systems. But are they served well enough by market-only media? To this question, McChesney replies with an emphatic no. The Hungarian experience illustrates his concerns. Foreign-owned local commercial television stations are flooded by comparatively cheap global entertainment, quiz shows, game shows and B-movies, interrupted by frequent and lengthy commercial breaks.
Yet there is competition even within this flood. The US is a major supplier; but so is Latin America (Brazilian and Mexican soap operas are hugely popular in the whole East and Central European region); and there are also some European players, including France, Germany and Britain, whose series and soaps carry these countries distinct visual and cultural traditions. At the same time, many of the most popular programmes are Hungarian in both origin and style. The success of even licensed programmes which are built along globally tested patterns of consumer preferences depends on how well they are adapted to local circumstances and culture.
All this does not necessarily mean that home-grown talent transforms imported media content into something that educated citizens could be proud of. Sophistication galore is not the right description of the programmes that most suit audience tastes. Still, more refined tastes are also being catered for by public service stations that continue to carry documentaries, and studio debates of talking heads on socially important issues. The fact that public television is plagued by catastrophic ratings and often less-than-subtle intervention from political parties is not an argument against it. It only shows that there is a need for alternatives. For while the commercial stations are clearly unable to satisfy those people who are faithful to public service broadcasting (like many elderly people who are unable to follow commercial televisions characteristically faster pace of visual presentation), they do enjoy a far greater freedom from the political intervention that remains a problem in all post-communist countries.
Between the extremes
The newspaper market, where the costs of staying in business are far below the levels required by television, exhibits diverse patterns of ownership. Despite Hungarys small size, there are nine national dailies (including tabloids and a sports paper) and six quality weeklies, making sure that the interested public can inform itself about current affairs. Foreign ownership is significant in the press, but strong local players also get sizeable chunks of the market. And there are as yet no real signs of concentration in the national press. Some publications can afford to operate on a non-commercial basis, funded by state sponsorship or private foundations. In all publications, editors have significant power in determining the line they take on issues. It is usually up to them, not the owners, to decide what direction the publications take. In this sense, the market simply provides the competitive environment in which it is up to media employees to make professional decisions.
I do not mean to paint an idyllic picture of the Hungarian media scene. The introduction of market mechanisms to the media may have provided new opportunities for journalists, but the market alone cannot guarantee that the potentials are fully realised (they are not).
All-market and all-state media are not the only options. Most media systems are mixed, allowing for experimentation with balancing budgetary and journalistic concerns. And the fact that such experimentation can be done in markets as small and open as Hungary is already an argument against McChesneys scepticism.
