Environmental Journalism? Radio Free Europe, Charter 77 and the Making of an Environmental Agenda

The primary aim of this paper is to outline concisely the history of environmental journalism in Czechoslovakia and to compare it to the development of Radio Free Europe’s environmental agenda. This comparison can help us better understand how important a role society – and by extension social constructivism – played in twentieth-century environmental history. An explanation for these discrepancies can, in my opinion, be found not only in the internal discussions at RFE and among dissidents but also in the international context. Upon greater scrutiny, the simple question of why and how RFE’s environmental agenda emerged, and why certain environmental topics but not others were covered in RFE’s broadcasts and reports, appears to be multi-layered, and, if we attempt to answer it, can reveal how and why environmental issues become socially and politically relevant.