a brief history
The Commission on Radio and Television Policy - A Brief History
The Commission on Radio and Television Policy was founded in 1990 by former US president Jimmy Carter to encourage democratic media policies and practices. Today, the Commission brings together media practitioners, managers and experts in both the public and private sectors from more than 20 countries in Central, East, Southeast and West Europe and the United States, to discuss and debate alternatives for media policymaking. Ellen Mickiewicz, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, and Erhard Busek, former Vice Chancellor of Austria and coordinator of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative, co-chair the Commission's annual meetings.
The idea for the Commission was born in the mid-1980s when Dr. Mickiewicz began working with former President Carter on issues of international security and arms control. They discovered that changes in the way the Soviet Union used television signaled an extraordinary departure from past policy. In the fall of 1991, the first official Commission meeting was organized at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, bringing together media practitioners, experts and policymakers from both the United States and Russia.
The Commission adopted a unique format. First, it is preceded by a small planning meeting in which a working group examines an emerging media policy issues and identifies the dilemmas and trade-offs involved in varying policy solutions. These form the agenda for the larger Commission meeting. Second, when the Commission meets, it does so to construct a comprehensive menu of policy options and the trade-offs each entails so that participating members can consider a range of alternatives to meet local needs. Third, the Commission formulates recommendations which place the policy options in the context of a freer and more responsible media. They move through difficult and often contentious negotiations, from a diversity of positions, to a set of strong recommendations.
Since 1991, the Commission has met annually and made substantive recommendations on a range of policy issues, including the following:
- November 1992, Alma Ata, Kazakhstan: Television News Coverage of Minorities
- November 1993, The Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia: Changing Economic Relations Arising from Democratization, Privatization, and New Technologies
- September 1994, St. Petersburg, Russia: Broadcaster Autonomy and the State
- October 1995, The Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia: Pluralism in the Electronic Media: The Role of Technology
- September 1996, Salzburg, Austria: Principles and Paths for Democratic Media
- September 1997, Vienna, Austria: Globalization and Public Broadcasting
- October 1998, Vienna, Austria: Television and Political News
Until 1996, the Commission focused on media policy development in the former Soviet Union and a small number of countries in Eastern Europe. Then, in 1997, the DeWitt Wallace Center at Duke University became the Commission's home and its focus expanded, becoming more regional to include East and West Europe and the United States, as well as the European part of the former Soviet Union. This has provided a far broader range of models with which to consider policies for democracy and media and enables the Commission to include countries in which public-service broadcasting is the preferred model, as well as the United States where commercial broadcasting both preceded and overshadows public broadcasting.
One of the most often noted results of the Commission has been its guidebooks. The first of these, Television and Elections, is available in more than a dozen languages. There have been three editions in Russian and two in Ukrainian. The USIA makes it mandatory for some of its training programs. It has been used in the Romanian, West Bank and Bosnian elections. A prominent Lithuanian translated the book into his own language and was subsequently sent to Bosnia to advise on the elections. He found the book's Bosnian translation being used there. The book has influenced parliamentary debate and parts have been written into Russian law. Three additional guidebooks have been published, Television/Radio News and Minorities (Russian, Belarussian, and Lithuanian and forthcoming in Kazakh and Ukrainian); Television, Radio and Privatization (English and Russian); and Television Autonomy and the State (English and Russian). An update of Television and Elections and a compendium volume entitled Democracy on the Air were published in November 1999.
The Commission is headquartered at the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. The Center is founded on the premise that free and responsible news media are essential for a democratic society. The Center's research, undergraduate and graduate classes, international media policy development, and a media fellows program - the largest in the U.S. - are dedicated to encouraging open and responsible media policies and practices around the world.