The press—composed of newspapers and periodicals—was the most developed of the Bulgarian media in the first half of the twentieth century. Radio, which was introduced in the 1920s, was under the aegis of what was then the Ministry of Post, Telegraph, and Telephone. The production, importation, and sale of radios were unrestricted. The least developed communications system of the day was the film industry, which was privately owned and operated. Television was not initiated in the country until the mid-1950s.

In the years immediately after the takeover, a strong pro-Soviet policy was established for the media, which was still in effect in 1973. While the new government restricted individual freedom and initiative within the media, it demanded total support by the media of all policies of the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that Bulgaria has never deviated from the policy of complete commitment to the Soviet Union, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia various media conferences were held in which calls for stricter adherence to the Soviet line were sounded.

OBJECTIVES OF MASS COMMUNICATIONS

The government has certain distinct perceptions as to how the media must serve the state. Propaganda permeates every aspect of life from formal education to membership in unions and clubs to the publication of books and pamphlets. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP—see Glossary) is the main political force. It both creates the appropriate condition for the expression of public opinion and forms public opinion itself.

At a recent conference on the mass communications system, a leading member of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party delineated the principal tasks of the media. The major task of the media was "to work for the broadest possible propagation of the congress decisions and for the mobilization of the people's physical and mental powers to make their decisions materialize...." The second vital task of the media was to "help form a socialist outlook on life among the peoples and educate the new man—active fighter for the developed socialist society, ideologically convinced, morally durable, physically tempered, with profound awareness of duty and responsibility." The third task was to promote the economic awareness of the people and to train managers, specialists, workers, and farmers for the greater economic good of the country. The fourth main task was to continue in the active struggle against "bourgeois ideology ... and the ideological subversion of imperialism."

A basic tenet of the Bulgarian system, however, is the belief that mass communications must be actively supplemented by human contact on the individual level. Iliya Georgiev, secretary of the Varna Okrug Bulgarian Communist Party Committee, in an article on the political knowledge of working people in 1972, stated categorically that the interest stimulated in the people by the mass communications system must be maintained and extended by informal means of communications, such as district (okrug) seminars, meetings in enterprises and farms, activities in the trade unions, and the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union (Dimitrovski Komunisticheski Mladezhki Suyuz—commonly referred to as the Komsomol).

The government has spent considerable time in assessing the extent to which these media objectives have been achieved. In the years immediately following the takeover, the government was consistently distressed by continued Bulgarian feelings of friendship with the West and the continual influence of the West upon the country. Although the propaganda efforts of the communist government were tireless, radio broadcasts and printed materials from the West continued to pour into Bulgaria.

As the government's control over both the formal communications media and the informal means of communications widened, the external threat was perceived to be less, and governmental attention turned to the assessment of the relative popularity of the various branches of the media. In a recent study 3,294 people were questioned as to their favorite source of domestic and international information. The vast majority—64.8 percent—of those polled stated that their preferred source was daily newspapers; 24.6 percent preferred television; and only 2.7 percent preferred radio. Although the newspapers were the favorite source of information, they were frequently criticized by the people, who expressed a basic lack of confidence in the press. In a second study dealing with people's attitudes toward the press alone, 48.1 percent of the 900 people polled said they disliked the press, and 52.1 percent complained of the primitive quality of Bulgarian newspapers.

Young people, especially students, appeared to be even less stimulated by the mass media than their elders. A study performed in the 1969/70 academic year indicated that students were indifferent to both domestic political events and international developments. The pollsters concluded that generally Bulgarian students take little advantage of the mass media as a source of information. Unlike the broad public, whose primary source of information was the press, students tended to see television as their preferred source and the press and radio as secondary sources.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION