"The view of the world has been Americanised"

The renowned journalist Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, 75, became known to a wider public during the Cold War era through her sensitive reporting from Poland and Czechoslovakia for ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Service). Marion Krasek, Vienna correspondent for "Spiegel", has reported on the Balkans, where she has family roots, for over ten years. Two different generations of journalists speak about the working conditions for Eastern European reporters today and in the past.

Antje Mayer: Do the Western media report too little about Central and Eastern Europe? 
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi: My impression is that, in general, there is less room given to foreign news these days. The media are withdrawing their correspondents from many places and at best they fly their people in when things start to get dramatic. In earlier times there were "buffs" who lived in the respective countries, spoke the language perfectly and could deliver soundly based analyses and cultivated their network of contacts. These were real institutions, like the Swede Richard Swartz, who was at home throughout Eastern Europe, a genuine mine of information.

Marion Kraske: In this context I think also of Fritz Pleitgen, who was stationed in East Berlin from 1977 to 1982 for the ARD. For East Germans who could receive Western television he was the face of West Germany.

B. C.-K.: I recently came across a book by a British journalist in which he writes that the USA has rapidly reduced the number of permanent foreign TV correspondents. For this enormous country the ridiculous figure was under twenty. Of these the majority sit in London and process material sent to them by special agencies. This means that information from Europe for the USA is selected to such an extent that this represents a danger for media diversity. A great deal never reaches the editorial offices any more.

Is it difficult to place foreign stories in the editorial offices?
B. C.-K.: This is what I hear from colleagues. It is easier to interest the editors about themes such as prostitution or trading in young women than analytical or political stories.

This sounds absurd; everywhere there is talk of globalisation, but media reporting – or so it seems – is nationally oriented?
M. K.: I think that this essentially has to do with 9/11. The focus of the media has shifted. Global terror continues to dominate the news. When reports do come from Eastern European countries then they are about the themes we have referred to already or about complex issues that have to do with terror, for example, the Wahhabist movement in Bosnia. The view of the world is becoming increasingly Americanised and this has a great influence on reporting from Eastern Europe.

B. C.-K.: Then of course room is always found for the themes that are fashionable in the media at present such as oil, climate change and China. It is essentially okay that such focal points at times move to the foreground and then retreat to the background, but on the whole the palette is becoming smaller and the analyses shallower.

But if individual countries, well-grounded analyses and important themes are excluded from global reporting surely this has political repercussions? The conflict in the Caucasus could be seen coming quite some time ago.
M. K.: The Caucasus conflict is a good example. Now the editorial offices are rushing like the fire brigade to the source of the fire. But continued reporting about a country or a region exists only in a few exceptional cases.

B. C.-K.: The Neue Züricher Zeitung still does this. It is a newspaper that still publishes articles about obscure countries. I find this appealing but it is also old-fashioned. Before the Caucasus conflict who was interested in who the Ossetians or the Abkhazians are?

M. K.: The Caucasus conflict has been threatening for years. When there's really  a crash, or military action, everybody has to first of all look at the map to find where Ossetia is. When there were confrontations between Albanians and the Serb minority in Kosovo in March 2004 the situation was similar. At the time the world wondered why the Albanian mob attacked the Serbs and the Roma. Smouldering conflicts aren't explained or described in the media, only acute political confrontations such as today in Afghanistan or Iraq. I see this as a real danger as a great deal is foreseeable, also for the political decision-makers who ultimately also inform themselves from the media.

Do the Eastern European media orient themselves geographically differently to Western media? Due to their common history do they still focus on the old brother countries?
B. C.-K.: Czech media, for example, are very much oriented on the USA, a trend that to an extent is politically justified. After the fall of communism there was very little interest in the former brother countries, people looked to London and Paris rather than towards Warsaw and Budapest. This has remained the case.

In the new EU countries which is more dominant: quality journalism or the tabloids?
B. C.-K.: The situation of the media in the individual countries is different. In Poland the  "Gazeta Wyborcza", in English "The Election Newspaper", the largest supra-regional Polish daily newspaper with a circulation of almost half-a-million, can match quality Western media such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung. At the time of the first democratic elections in Poland the trade union Solidarność was allowed to publish a daily newspaper, hence the name "Election Newspaper". In other Eastern European countries the media landscape does not always look so good. In recent years the WAZ, partner of the Austrian "Kronen Zeitung", has bought up newspapers and TV stations in the Balkans in great style, all of which function successfully according to the principle of "cash and trash".

M. K.: In my opinion the old socialist mechanisms still function very efficiently in these countries: interviews are not released, statements are withdrawn after they have been given. They still like to present a façade, a kind of Potemkin village. Critics – whether they come from outside or inside – are still denounced as traitors, like during the communist era. Colleagues are put under pressure. There are still telephone calls to the editorial office from the ministry – even twenty years after the collapse of communism!

And what were things like before the collapse of the old political system, Ms Coudenhove-Kalergi?
B. C.-K.: I started reporting on Eastern Europe when I was still working for the Arbeiter Zeitung, a newspaper that had very little money. At the time I had to fight to be allowed to go to the East Bloc in the first place. I had a tiny budget and was dependant on middlemen who established contacts for me. The official sources hardly revealed anything. I met with government representatives but this was essentially something you could have done without. When, for example, in the GDR or in Czechoslovakia you wanted to know what life was like then the best thing was to read what was called quality literature and to establish contacts with culturally creative and active people. They portrayed everyday life and the way people actually felt far more authentically.

Were you not closely watched while carrying out your research work?
B. C.-K.: At the end of the 1960s I made a documentation series for ORF called "Bohemia in Autumn" in which I wanted to capture the dull, leaden mood in the country. Of course we couldn't say this officially. The preparatory work was enormous. You had to present a permit to film anything. And we were accompanied by guy who never left our side and constantly wanted  us to film the lovely pre-cast panel housing blocks rather than the crumbling facades of the old buildings. Naturally we also tried to allow dissidents to speak in front of the camera.

Did this not endanger the dissidents?
B. C.-K.: We always asked the dissidents, especially the young ones, once again if they really wanted to appear in front of our cameras. US American colleagues were at times accused of, metaphorically, going over corpses, in  to get their story. I made an interview with Vaclav Havel when he had just come out of prison; this was just before 1989, when, yet once again, he had had to serve a prison sentence, this time for nine months. He had been instructed not to give any interviews to Western media. He did it all the same. He knew what he was doing.

This was shortly before the political change. But did things always turn out all right for your interview partners and for those who provided you with information?
B. C.-K.: I hope so. For one interview with a dissident we had to get away from our official guide. This was a real adventure. We made the interview in the middle of the night in the Vyšehrad cemetery behind a tombstone. Afterwards there was a frightful row. For the following eight years I couldn't obtain a permit to enter Czechoslovakia. I haven't looked at the secret service records about me, but a friend sent me his Stasi files and showed me what was written about me there.  

What did the secrete service write about you?
B. C.-K.: The accusation was that I wanted to recover the property once owned by my family, which was of course without any foundation. Ridiculous. Most of the material was simply untrue. Secret service records of this kind were just part of the way things were. In the GDR the Stasi repeatedly tried to trip me up by coming to me and asking me whether I would like to write an analysis of the country. Even through a question of this kind you entered the files. Colleagues warned me for heaven's sake not to give them anything in writing, that they would immediately use this against me. I followed this advice. 

You once said something along the lines of "you can only sent the politically left-wing to the East, they are the more severe critics"?
B. C.-K.:  It wasn't I who said this but the former director general of ORF Gerd Bacher, a great devourer of communists. He engaged my services for ORF at the beginning of the 1970s. I told him that I was married to a member of the politburo of the KPÖ (Austrian Communist Party). Gerd Bacher answered: "That's fine! In my work the private connection to a reform communist like my husband was, naturally, more of a disadvantage. Hardly anyone in the East knew about this, except perhaps the secret service.

Was the ORF more involved than average in reporting from Eastern Europe?
B.C.-K.: During my time in the Eastern Europe office of the ORF before the collapse of the communist system often not very much of political interest was happening in these countries. I was more interested in the life in the countries that bordered Austria directly, independent of the regime. At that time the ORF was very open to all suggestions.

M. K.: When something then did happen it was certainly an enormous advantage to have people in the editorial offices who knew these countries.

B. C.-K.: That's right. Shortly before the Solidarność movement started at the end of the 1960s I was in Poland and met Adam Michnik who had been in prison for many years. He revealed to me that they were thinking of implementing free trade unions. That of all things, I thought to myself. That will never be allowed. Then, a short time later, a report arrived in the ORF by telex – these were strips of paper – and I read: "Strike in the Danzig shipyard – one of the demands: free trade unions!"
I headed off immediately. We were one of the first from the foreign press and I knew a few people there. Our radio stories were played throughout German-speaking Europe. Then Gerd Bacher came up with the idea of setting up an Eastern Europe editorial desk in the ORF.

Were there sources in the East bloc countries that people in the West could regularly refer to?
B. C.-K.: Emigrants, many of whom lived in Vienna after 1968, were good sources of information. Radio Free Europe was a very important source. They had their people locally, they followed media reports in the respective countries very closely, and they had, for example, economic statistics at hand that we could never have obtained. What they called their research material was an indispensable source.

In the Internet era things are easier in this respect, don't you think?
M. K.: Well, you still can't use the official sources of the government for the most part because the former East bloc countries and the countries of the former Yugoslavia still tend to dress things up. The sources that we journalists can use are often the local critical NGOs, like the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Collaboration and Security in Europe, institutions that are involved in building up the civil societies there. These are reliable sources, as they are often in opposition to what officially happens there.

Do Western governments not tend to prettify situations also?
M. K.: My impression is that they do. In Vienna I have had this kind of experience while carrying out my research. If you ring up the Ministry of the Interior and want to have official figures about Islamists, you don't get an answer, even though public prosecutors and police in Bosnia warn that radical ideas are exported to Bosnia from Vienna. As a journalist in Austria you at times encounter resistance that you wouldn't expect in a Western democracy.

Do Austrian and German media report differently about Eastern Europe?
M. K.: Very definitely. The Austria media report more comprehensively and more regularly from Eastern and South-eastern Europe than do the German media. This is due to family ties that still exist in Austria from the joint past under Habsburg rule, but naturally is also due to new business links. In Austria there is a vital economic interest in this region. And geographically it is, quite simply, far closer.

Marion Kraske (born 1969) studied political science, political economics and Slav language and literature. After a traineeship with the Deutsche Presse Agentur she worked as a journalist for the news service of ARD television.  In 2002 she moved to "Spiegel-online", and one year later to the foreign office of the German news magazine "Spiegel". Since 2005 she has been Spiegel correspondent in Vienna, where she is also responsible for the coverage of Southeast Europe.

Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi was born in Prague in 1932 and since she was expelled from her native country in 1945 has lived in Vienna. She wrote as a journalist for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Die Presse, Neues Österreich, Kurier and Profil. From  1975 sh worked for the Eastern Europe office of the ORF, for which she reported from Prague from 1991 to 1995. She was already known to a wide public y through her reports in ORF radio, particularly from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Today she writes as a free-lance journalist for various Czech and Austrian newspapers (including Der Standard) and has published a number of books with texts on the history and the present of the countries of Eastern Europe. In 2001 she was awarded the Tomáš-Garrigue-Masaryk Order by Vaclav Havel. Among her many involvements she is one of the founders of the citizens initiative "Land der Menschen" which strives to improve the coexistence of foreigners and natives.

 
Book tips:
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, Oliver Rathkolb, (eds.), "Die Beneš-Dekrete", Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2002
Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (ed.), "Meine Wurzeln sind anderswo (Österreichische Identitäten)", Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2001

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