British media expert talked to Mourad Teyeb recently on the freedom of the media in post-revolutionary Tunisia and Egypt, comparing it to Eastern Europe after 1989 You have compared what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia to what happened in Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. So far as the media is concerned, in what ways is the situation similar? As I was watching the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt unfolding on TV, I heard echoes of the revolutions in Eastern Europe 21 years ago and the words of Romanian student friends who joined the street protests that resulted in the demise of the Ceausescu regime on Christmas Day 1989. The Communist system in Eastern Europe imploded dramatically in 1989, first with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then as part of a domino effect as economic collapse added to the lack of freedom of speech and travel in the minds of a highly educated younger population. However, the Romanians lived under the illusion that a free and prosperous society could come about immediately. This illusion lasted just days for those who faced reality, though it took most people months for the bitter truth to set in. Many of the old guard stayed in control because they were the only ones who understood how to operate the levers of power. Living standards even went down for a couple of years. It was not freedom but chaos. Meanwhile, the media interpreted freedom literally, meaning that they said what they liked when they liked. Nobody understood that freedom requires a sense of responsibility. However, such was the euphoria of the time that it made everybody irresponsible. In June 1990, you left the BBC to run the Thomson Foundation, which was heavily involved in the post-Communist reforms of the early 1990s and improved governance in the region. What is good governance to you? Good governance is targeting three related democratic aims: establishing the rule of law through training the judiciary; enforcing the rule of law through training the police; and enabling radical change in the broadcasting system. These aims meant transforming government broadcasting organisations into public broadcasting services or public service bodies (PSBs) -- organisations similar to the BBC -- making programmes for the viewer instead of for politicians. They also meant introducing commercial TV as competition to the new public service bodies for the first time in Eastern Europe. But there were three big differences between the evolutionary development of broadcasting in the UK, for example, and the revolutionary zeal in Eastern Europe. In the UK, new channels were rationed over many years. Indeed, by 1982 we only had four TV channels in the UK and five in Wales, including S4C. In Romania, believe it or not, they issued 70 licences in one night. The chairman of the panel asked me, "what else could I do? What right did I have as a democrat to turn anybody down?" The result was too much competition too soon. The economy was too weak to generate the advertising income required for good quality programmes, and many companies never even got off the ground. Secondly, the state broadcasters were staffed by civil servants paid by the government. There was therefore an automatic dilemma facing any new organisation trying to change into a public broadcaster: who was the journalist expected to serve -- the audience or his paymaster? Advice and training of journalists went forward, but the biggest success was the creation of regional TV stations in very remote places, places eager to communicate for the first time with local audiences instead of listening to command and control from the capitals of Sofia and Bucharest. "Big Brother" always had less control the further you were away from the centre. In the capital cities some early experiments in reform were bizarre. New governments came and went, swinging between anti-Communist and old Communist every couple of years, voted in and out by electorates unhappy with the slow growth of the economy. And every change of government led to new broadcasting chiefs being appointed. The experiences you have led in many other countries, such as Georgia, Bulgaria, China and South Africa, have shown that weak transitions towards democracy have hindered the development of a free media. What would your advice be to those who led the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt? The question is whether people want democracy or stability. Will they really want democracy, as they have no experience of it? Or will they settle for strong leaders? Saachi Jain, an Indian media expert, recently said in Cairo that "you can have a vibrant democracy with bad governance, as in India, which surely has the largest bureaucratic ministry of communications in the world. You can have good governance without democracy, as in Singapore. And you can have a good PSB set up by a military government, as in Thailand. Democracy cannot ensure the success of a PSB, but a PSB can help create a more successful democracy." In Egypt, you have just had a popular revolution led by the people. This is an opportunity to use the momentum of bottom-up pressure to enable legislation and an appropriate framework at a time when there is a break with the past. The media, mainly the new media, played a major role in toppling the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as in the uprisings in Libya, Yemen and Syria. Is that a sign that the future of the media in the Arab world is brighter than it was in Eastern Europe? There is hope in some countries of the Middle East because of the existence of two very good regional Arab TV stations: Al Jazeera and Al Arabia. These act as role models for the new democracies. These channels have been the main source of Arab knowledge of the Arab world seen from an Arab perspective over the last decade. If Twitter, as a form of unofficial media, provided the spark for the Arab Spring, it was nevertheless Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya that provided the bonfire with trustworthy coverage of the Middle East. The protests are still continuing in several countries, and none of us can guess the future of the government-controlled media in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Bahrain. I cannot imagine where the change of leadership in an already failed state like Yemen is going to lead. In the end, only democracy allows the media the freedom to monitor the success or failure of governments for the sake of their audiences, the very audiences which vote them in and out of power. The trouble with revolutionaries crying out for democracy is that in the short run they face chaos. Their feelings of freedom may be short-lived, as the Romanians discovered in 1989.
