Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education, and Media

9. MEDIA AND CIVIC VALUES

9 MEDIA AND CIVIC VALUES Zrinjka Peruško T he role of the media in constructing our reality and setting our public agendas is a well known, if contested, part of media social theory. The expected role of media in contemporary democracies is alike in political theory and in actual political consensus. It includes the role of the media in democratic procedure, in which media activity in informing people about the political process is expected to enable citizens to make informed choices at election time. This procedural role also includes the legitimation of government, where the consent of the citizens is constantly reevaluated, and displeasure can be publicly voiced. The media in this sense are the forum for political debate and enable political actors to contest their ideas in the public arena. In order for this to be possible, the cultural aspects of democracy have to be present as well. Equality of access to the public sphere, tolerance for the opinion of the other, freedom of public dialogue, diversity and plurality of ideas available, civility, and nonviolence are all necessary ingredients of this democratic role the media are expected to play. They are all the ingredients of a civic culture flourishing in civil society. MEDIA AND DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION The relationship of media to civil society in a transition context is viewed in two main ways. The first approach (and this is the area that preoccupied the East and Central European media policy agendas in the 1990s) is the MEDIA AND CIVIC VALUES 225 separation of the media from the state, and their placement within “civil society.”1 Lifting of the censorship rules was just a first step in the democratic transitions of the media. In this dramatic separation of the media from the state, attention focused on creating a free press—the cessation of the government or political influence on media content, structure, editorial policies, staffing, etc. The policy agenda in all the countries in question included legislative changes enabling freedom of expression and the media, transformation of state broadcasters into public service broadcasters, and the creation of commercial media and media markets. Most analyses of the media democratization in the Central and Eastern European transitions of the 1990s have focused on this aspect and analyzed the new legislative frameworks for the media in relation to the Western democratic media standards .2 The second aspect involves the ways in which the media facilitate civil society, through enabling access for different groups and by making available, through their content, all the diverse opinions and ideas growing within the society.3 The media contribution to the culture of democracy and civic culture in this respect rests on commitment to values like freedom of expression, equality, impartiality, independence, tolerance, inclusiveness, civility, pluralism, and diversity. In the restructuring of the media system in democratic transition, a value transformation was necessary for both aspects of the media role. In this chapter, I analyze the development of democratic civic values and the media in Croatia in two complementary ways: as underlying the legislative reshaping of the media system and its relation to democratic consolidation, and the development of civic values espoused by the media. Only by looking at both aspects of value construction can we get a clearer picture of the state of development of civic culture and the status of present-day democratic consolidation in Croatia. The Croatian road to democratic consolidation saw several distinct phases in the development of an independent media system, where the state, civil society, and the media themselves changed positions and altered their relationship to one another.4 I compare the situation before and after 2000, in order to contrast the civic values in Croatia before and after the liberal democratic consensus. DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY A normal and stable civil society has a broad consensus over the meaning of words, and they are known as the generally accepted values.As John Wesley 226 ZRINJKA PERUŠKO Young observes, “Over the generations of their life as a nation they will have drawn up by degrees what Saussure called a ‘contract between concepts and sound patterns.’”5 The problem with an unstable society (Young discusses society in a revolutionary era) is that the language consensus also breaks down, especially in relation to the more complex words “notably the names for abstractions like freedom, justice, virtue, legality, nation, democracy , and equality.”6 I view the Croatian transition as...