EU: Media in the new EU member-states have come a long way since having to parrot the views of the politburo, writes Adrian Langan
In the new member-states, there is a well-developed and varied media across TV, radio and newspapers. For the former communist states that are joining on May 1st, this is a remarkable achievement given that they had to literally build an independent media from scratch after the downfall of the old regimes in 1989-90.
Before that date, the media was completely controlled by the state and was a tool to announce continual "triumphs" in economic and social development, while not reporting on any opposition or "mistakes", something we had an echo of in North Korea last week.
This system of state control of media was a vital cog in what Vaclav Havel famously described as the "contaminated moral environment" in which people lived in the old regimes. The media were simply not believed by the overwhelming mass of the population.
The historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out that during the martial law period in Poland (declared in 1981 in order to crack down on the Solidarity movement), walls all over the country were painted with the graffiti - 'The TV Lies'.
While new television and radio stations and newspapers sprung up in the immediate aftermath of the transition to democracy, they have had and continue to have a major cultural task in rebuilding the faith of people that they can be trusted as independent commentators.
The Eurobarometer study that I have been using in this series examining attitudes in the 10 accession states has measured levels of trust in their printed press and in broadcast media.
Highlighting the success of the media in the new members, trust in the media is now similar to the existing members of the European Union.
Radio is the most trusted source of information in the new member-states - 66 per cent say they tend to trust the radio (existing EU 15 member-states: 62 per cent), 64 per cent say they tend to trust television (EU 15: 54 per cent) and 56 per cent say they tend to trust the press (EU 15: 44 per cent).
In Ireland, 76 per cent of us trust radio as a media, 72 per cent of us trust the TV but only 49 per cent trust newspapers - so half of you at least are nodding your heads in disagreement at what you're reading here.
An interesting side point here is that only 17 per cent of people in the UK trust newspapers - surely a legacy of one too many lurid headlines by The Sun et al.
In terms of media use, 23 per cent of people in the new member-states read a newspaper every day, with 14 per cent of people reporting that they never read a newspaper. The picture across the new states shows a lot of difference - Hungarians are far more likely to read papers - with 43 per cent reporting that they read newspapers every day. The Poles however have a quite low rate - with only 18 per cent of people declaring that they read a paper every day.
But, just like us, the people in the new member-states love watching TV. They may trust it less than the radio but they spend more time glued to it. Sixty two per cent of people in the new member-states watch news on TV every day, with only 1 per cent of people saying they never watch it. There are 12 million TV sets in Poland, which is about one for every four people in the country - and Hungary and the Czech Republic have about four million sets each.
As their economies grow, the makers of television sets the world over can look forward to a steady rise in their share price, safe in the knowledge that whatever else happens, their sales in the new member-states are going to grow and grow.
Adrian Langan is executive director of Bill O'Herlihy Communications and a long-time pro-EU activist. Tomorrow: What the new member-states think of the proposed EU constitution