For a very short time in the spring of 1968, the Czechoslovak press and other media enjoyed a considerable measure of freedom hitherto unthinkable in a Soviet-style Communist dictatorship. With the ‘normalisation that followed the Soviet intervention in August of that year, the media returned safely into the hands of the Party, the supervision of the printed word as well as of radio and television being as rigorous today as it was in the Stalinist fifties. In a recently completed 164-page study. The Experience of Prague Spring 1968, the author — himself a Czech journalist now living in exile in Switzerland — analyses the role of the mass media in Czechoslovakia, showing how the ruling Communist Party controls them, and at the same time how that control was weakened and finally almost abolished during the period of liberalisation. This is an edited extract from his study. Dusan Havlicek was born in 1923 and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Imprisoned for his underground work two years later, he took up journalism after the war and worked in the Institute of Theory and History of the Mass Media at Prague's Charles University. In 1968 he was appointed head of the press, radio and television department of the CP Central Committee. In 1969 he was sent as a CTK (Czechoslovak News Agency) correspondent to Geneva, where he asked for political asylum. He is the author of a number of works on the mass media.
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