Controls tighten on press

Press, 23 October 1989, Page 8

Controls tighten on press

NZPA-AP Moscow President Mikhail Gorbachev

moved to assert tighter control over the Soviet press last week with a left-right combination that stunned both Communist hard-liners and proponents of greater freedom. The manoeuvres showed that the press in this country, freewheeling as it has become in four heady years of glasnost, still is not free and serves at the behest of the country’s leaders. The newspapers are informative, unpredictable, critical, even feisty, but their editors cannot always do what they want At a meeting with editors of

major publications, whom Mr Gorbachev has summoned periodically for pep talks on perestroika, as he calls his reform programme, the president rebuked the mass media for stirring public passions at a time of great uncertainty. Beyond that, few specifics are known about what Gorbachev said in the two-hour meeting, another sign the leadership still controls what can be reported. “Pravda,” the Communist Party daily newspaper, normally would have printed a full text of Gorbachev’s remarks a few days later without comment, but it carried nothing about the proceedings.

Mr Gorbachev reportedly called for the resignation of the editor of “Arguments and Facts,” Vladislav Starkov, who has led his weekly in little more than a year from a recorder of social statistics circulated only among party members to a breezily written tabloid that has soared in circulation.

On Monday, Mr Starkov was called to the party’s Central Committee headquarters, where he reportedly was given a dress-ing-down by Mr Gorbachev’s ideology chief. He kept his job. But the edition that appeared on Saturday was a chastened version of its former self.

The lead story said that a poll the paper published two weeks ago indicating human rights activist Andrei Sakharov was more popular than Mr Gorbachev was an unscientific sampling of readers’ letters.

The article then reported the results of what it described as a scientific poll of 2461 people selected by a party Central Committee affiliate as a national cross-section.

Although Mr Sakharov had some popular support among students, the poll showed, Mr Gorbachev’s performance garnered a favourable assessment from 66 per cent of those surveyed.