Anyone who thinks power resides at the Straka Academy into which - to quote our prime minister - the Social Democrats walked in through the main entrance, is wrong. Power resides elsewhere in the modern world. Government and parliament in a democratic country do not exercise power but they render a public service, being often engaged in a hopeless struggle with those who wield actual power. I don't have to go into details, as you may have inferred, it was IPB in the case of the Czech government, preceded maybe by Chemapol or ČEZ and doubtless also the media. I personally am intrigued by the theme of media responsibility and how the media judge the public.

If, however, we want to discuss the relationships between the media and the politicians, we have to ask two questions, one of which I am in a position to answer while the other one would rather require the journalists to address. Well, the first question is: What do politicians expect of the media? I believe they have two requirements, one of which is completely legitimate. They want communication, they want the media to be able to convey true and undistorted information to the citizen. Politicians hardly have another possibility to interact with the public - voters, citizens - than through the media. it depends on the media whether the politicians' message what they intend to do, or what they have done and why, gets across. I don't think this first requirement could be satisfied in one-way communication. The media cannot be only the mouthpiece of the politicians. They must do more than that, something we may well call feedback, i.e. the media's ability to reflect both the majority and the minority views in society and to convey them back to the politicians. In this first plane, the media are doubtless irreplaceable and I think the politicians' requirements for them is legitimate, although I realise neither side may, and probably never will be, satisfied by the form, level and degree of mutual communication.

It might not be fair not to mention the other requirement that politicians place on media without ever formulating it. Multiparty democracy is based on the competition of political forces. The media control the advertising market and elections are nothing but the choice of several political products. Politicians pray to God their parties or themselves receive positive media publicity, and even if they don't admit it they doubtless positively gloat at any media move that would criticise or humiliate their rivals. I don't know if this second political requirement on the media is legitimate. I am doubtful but I know such requirement exists. It is strong enough to prevail in many cases over the first-mentioned requirement.

It is very difficult for me to answer the other question, i.e. what do media expect from politicians. In my view, this relationship should be what we lawyers call "sinalagmatic", i.e. it should, in reality, be limited to the first level, the first dimension, that is, the requirement for timely, accurate and clear information. I can hardly imagine this relationship would be "sinalagmatic" also in the second plane, where media would charge fees from politicians for both positive and negative press. Although such developments cannot be ruled out and may exceptionally still occur. I don't mean direct payments but rather, payments through major advertisers.

Which brings me to my original thought. I believe Hans Ulrich Jörges was wrong when suggesting as the biggest current problem of the media-politician relationships the fact that politics wields too much power and that something should be done to protect media against politicians. I personally am convinced that this has long been the other way round, that there isn't a democratic country in Europe where politicians would enjoy dominance over a weak media.

i have no wish to repeat old clichés about "the watchdogs of democracy" and "the seventh power". All these are well-known portraits. Rather, i want to emphasise something which has become alarming in all democracies. Namely, the media have achieved de facto ideological independence from politics but they have not achieved real independence. The question is if they really should be independent, if this requirement is feasible and rational. Most democratic countries seem to have long concluded that the media are not and cannot be independent, and have created a new institution. We have recently labelled it "public law media", nowadays we prefer to call them "public service media". This means that the state and society, apart from the media whose independence they believe cannot be ensured anyway because of their dependence at least on publishers and advertisers, are working to create, within existing structures, a group of at least two leading audio-visual media - radio and television. The tendency is to exclude this group from the market, commercial environment, and to apply legislation which would enable these media to render public services. Personally, i don't see the development in this field, in the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia before that, as particularly fortunate, although i know we have drawn inspiration from advanced Western democracies. This is not to say that our inspiration was wrong, but our society and political culture have not progressed far enough to implement ideas embodied in the very first law on radio and TV broadcasting. Therefore we have made a logical, obvious move that has been made throughout the world - we have completely separated the media from executive power and parliament, or rather, we have empowered the lower house to form a democratic body which would ensure and guarantee their independence, and have endowed it with repressive instruments applicable wherever violations are likely. The result is very sad, because in the event, all the commissions - the Czech Radio Council, the Czech Television Council and the Czech Republic Council for Radio and TV Broadcasting - are appointed along political principles.

I cannot imagine for the time being that our parliament could produce a different model which would apportion seats on these commissions to existing parliamentary parties, and so, the media councils emulate the movements on the national political stage. Hence I infer these bodies are not living up to their task. Our government put forward a very ambitious plan and a new media bill was duly passed, which would meet new requirements towards the media. To give you a framework let me quote the following. At first, there is a 1945 verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice: It says that freedom to publish means freedom for all, not just for some. Freedom of the press to publicise state interventions does not empower private interests to suppress this freedom. Thirty years later, the Canadian Government Commission for the Media ruled that freedom of the press is not the right of the owners, it is the right of the people, part of their right to the freedom of expression, inseparable from their right to be informed. Why have I used these two quotations? Firstly because I believe that the main problem for Czech and other legislative was not how to protect journalists against politicians. This goes without saying and nobody would probably dare to table a bill that would give the political sphere the right to meddle with any media, including public-service, by the way.

In a way, the Czech Republic's liberal approach to the press is unique. No politician in this country is legally entitled to speak through a public medium. Presidential speeches on the New Year and October 28 are a historical predicament. No member of government or parliament has the possibility or the right to pick up the phone, contact TV and say - There's something I need to tell the people. Such as, mad cow disease broke out. In our legal system, this right was first mentioned in our emergency legislation - the law on state security - solely in connection with the state of war and similar legal contingencies. When drafting the new media law, the problem we faced was not in what it should include to protect the media against the politicians but rather, how to protect the media against the impacts that modern society has learned to check on all the other markets barring the media market.

Economic competition is the basic prerequisite of not only economic prosperity but also democracy. If, however, one examines the case Microsoft vs. the U.S.A., one can see there are very rigorous rules of any state intervention aimed to prevent anyone from gaining a dominant or monopoly status within his province of activity. On a national principle, this has been attempted only by France and then Canada, which does not allow foreign capital into its media, or rather severely curbs its flow. However, no legal system has ever found sufficient controls to prevent the media from misusing their monopoly or dominant status.

Now, what the Czech government has attempted and in which, regrettably, I have failed. We have drafted a press bill in which we asked: Is it desirable to sanction by the law either duties or restrictions concerning the media? We on the Continent think, yes it is. In Europe, this applies mainly to ban on spreading racial intolerance, xenophobia, and in keeping with our international commitments, of child pornography. If such a ban is embodied in the law, it will have a meaning only if there is an institution that would issue a sanction, and an organ which would enforce it. We were facing a crucial dilemma. We would have instantly found ourselves in a situation where it would have been the state - no matter if the attorney general or the ministry of culture - which is what we did not wish to happen, hence the government draft envisaged the following: 1) it is not permissible to spread child pornography, nazism, fascism, racial hatred, 2) offenders can be fined by the court or stripped of their licence, and 3) - which is what I thought was revolutionary but our journalists were scared and rallied against it - lawsuits cannot be filed by the state but they can be filed by everyone else, any citizen who feels harmed by attacks against these basic human rights and values.

Old Roman law defined this as "accio popularis". I regret that the media and parliament rejected this option because I think it's most relevant. The media are a public instrument and should be controlled by the public. They are not, both de facto and de iure. In conclusion, let me stress my report was not meant to be against the media. I think the media scene, just like the Czech political scene and indeed the whole society, are scarred by deep wounds sustained in the past 40 years, and it will take a lot of time and many generations for these wounds to heal. When evaluating this situation, I cannot think of anything better than the words Shakespeare put in the mouth of the dying Mercucio, describing his wound: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but 'tis enough."