Getting Off the Party Line
“We lived in a certain kind of society,” she said. “It had absolute power over what was taught to students, including students of journalism. It went on for 40 years. What we really would need is to teach the profession of journalism to students. The teachers are mostly from the old structure–the good ones are exceptions.
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Most reporters who seek her out at Civic Forum are foreigners, Rislingova told us. “The Czech journalists should come but they don’t. There is something missing in their spirit. They are used to going to the press conference, but that is it. The most important thing they were taught was, you have to listen, you have to be obedient.”
The new papers are all organs of political parties or movements, and everybody wants to be an essayist. We asked Suchy about Lidove Noviny, which began as samizdat, emerged from underground as a biweekly, and started publishing daily in April. Its courage and idealism have earned Lidove Noviny the sort of esteem enjoyed by President Havel. But like Havel, it now has to deliver. “It’s not well made,” Suchy told us. “People say it’s like a weekly published every day. The quality of the commentary is very high. But they are not thinking about the normal people in the street. They don’t have enough daily news that makes a newspaper a newspaper.”
Tell us about your arrest, we said. “It was a time when practically everybody went to jail,” he explained. “They found I’d attended a meeting and we had talk, dangerous talk, against the government.” Suchy was accused of agitation, but was released when only one witness against him could be found.
“It may be the best in the country, still, for true information,” Jaroslav Veis told us. “It has the largest circulation–700,000. The most modern facilities. They still have some correspondents abroad, an experienced staff. They have three people covering parliament. The others have only one.”
Porybny, the deputy editor, was a fresh face around the paper. Though he’d worked there 18 years, he’d returned from duty in the United States only in September. He became acting editor immediately, and three weeks later the CP’s editorial board gave him the top job.
