NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN CENTRAL ASIAN MASS MEDIA RESEARCH
The end of the Cold War represented an apparent victory for NATO, capitalism, free enterprise, and democracy over the Warsaw Pact, Marxism-Leninist communism, and the Russian-Soviet empire. In 1991, five newly independent republics of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) emerged from the wreckage of that watershed event. Each new government proclaimed its commitment to free enterprise economic systems and democratic governance. Western democracies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and human rights groups lauded that commitment to democratic mass media systems as stabilizing, modernizing, and nation-building tools. Unfortunately, significant obstacles remain to functional and effective press systems able to maintain economic, editorial, and political autonomy. Because Russian and Soviet-era press conventions still strongly influence the press in Central Asia, this article begins with a brief overview of the Russian colonial and czarist press system from the 1860s to the Russian Revolution of 1917. It then presents a brief history of press controls under the Soviet Union. Thus, forms of Russian domination of Central Asian journalism persisted for almost 130 years, leaving deeply entrenched czarist-Soviet press methods, controls, and traditions. The study then summarizes significant arenas of contemporary research on Central Asian mass media, including detailed evidence of the complexity, diversity, and depth of barriers to free and effective press systems. It establishes that imposed Soviet-era journalism philosophy and practices remain much of the foundation for current professional ideology. Although there were some positive aspects to the Soviet press system, inherited professional habits, conventions, ideology, and socialist economics still obstruct adoption of aspects of Western models hallmarked by independent journalism and advocacy of a more operative form of social responsibility to audiences. The article then outlines the conflict between external and internal pressures to establish free and democratic press systems where regimes actively resist such efforts. That resistance includes formal and informal policies of censorship and repression that restrain journalists and the mass media they serve. Despite outside efforts to promote democratization of the press, these repressitarian governments remain highly authoritarian and exert varying but high degrees of direct and indirect censorship and content control. Among them are onerous libel laws, fabricated criminal charges against journalists, unfair tax audits, license terminations, and pressure on advertisers and printing houses when media content is deemed overly critical and adversarial. Recent murders of journalists further chill independent reporting. This synthesized examination of recent mass media research makes clear that five separate systems have replaced the unitary Soviet one, but with such shared attributes as official or quasi-official censorship; self-censorship; lack of free-market sustainability; constraints on independence and professionalism; and a press ideology that values service to the state above independence, fairness, balance, and accuracy. Distinctions among the systems include the presence or absence of independent and opposition media outlets; degrees of public access to the Internet and foreign media; and availability of university and professional education and training. Collectively, this research illustrates the limited success of external forces in furthering media pluralism. Those forces are foreign governments and multi-governmental entities, international media-building and civil society-building NGOs, Western journalism trainers and professors, and foreign media outlets that disseminate print, broadcast, and Internet content. In addition, these studies summarized demonstrate how regimes and elites use—and abuse—the law to control news and information about public affairs, controversy, and public issues and how they disregard constitutional and statutory assurances of press freedom. Democratization of the press will also require changing journalists' widely accepted role as acquiescent or reluctant—let alone enthusiastic—apparatuses of the state. The impetus and energy for developing free press systems in Central Asia are primarily external. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the region has been under pressure, mostly from the United States and Western Europe, to create and sustain "free press" systems essential to civil society. To a great extent, such external advocacy manifested the neo-conservative U.S. foreign policy ideology promulgated by former President George W. Bush and his advisors. Their interest was to democratize authoritarian nations when politically and economically expedient, as in oiland mineral-rich Central Asia. Intensive Western efforts to encourage marketor advertising-supported media in former communist nations generally succeeded in Eastern and Central Europe. Such efforts failed in Central Asia, where media generally lack mass audiences and economic resources to attract advertisers and support the free market concept of news as a commodity. Supporters and funders of democratic press projects in the region include the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars; British Broadcasting Corporation; Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; Civic Education Project (Soros Foundation); International Research and Exchanges Board; Cable News Network; Freedom House; Internews; and the International Center for Journalists. Other NGOs, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, Amnesty International, International PEN, Reporters Sans Frontières, and Human Rights Watch do not directly engage in journalism education and training but monitor press freedom and advocate against harsh restraints. Some regimes recognize advantages of modernizing media content, even while controlling it, by allowing journalists to learn Western news writing and reporting styles and conventions. Professional writing and reporting skills are useful to journalists, even if they are not permitted to report in an unfettered manner, and to propagandists. Western educators have taught in otherwise tightly controlled newsrooms and universities because of donor nation and funder pressure; allowing democratic journalism trainings to take place presents at least a façade of a commitment to free press systems. Yet it remains relatively easy for authorities to censor media content that is too reflective of Western news values and reporting conventions. That is particularly true if content criticizes the regime or other powerful interests. Journalists are often punished for stories they print or broadcast. Not surprisingly, self-censorship remains a domineering force, even in the absence of official censorship. We now discuss the Soviet colonial period and its influence on contemporary Central Asian media.