Pirate TV in Eastern Europe

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1990 by Evelyn Messinger

TELEVISION HAS PLAYED an increasingly significant role in the downfall of Eastern Europe's one-party states. In Poland underground pirate video transmissions kept Solidarity alive for nearly 10 years. Last fall, East Germans judged the effects of their anti-government demonstrations by watching the coverage they received on West German news programs. In Romania, control of the television station is tantamount to control of the government.

Now another aspect of the newly flexible television medium has come into play. Independent broadcasters using jerry-rigged transmitters and home video equipment have sprung up in Poland, Hungary, Romania and East Germany, intermittently broadcasting programs ranging from rock videos to local news reports. Even in the USSR, unofficial pirate broadcasts have taken place, and are credited with aiding the election of radical candidates to government posts in a number of cities.

In late March, I visited the city of Leipzig to investigate Kanal X, East Germany's first and only pirate TV station. Kanal X is a lever stuck into the ironclad media armor of Europe. The lever is slender and fragile, but with the right amount of pressure it could open a large hole, allowing independent broadcasting into the future of Europe, both East and West.

PIRATE TV

To Americans, pirate TV means the guy whose face appeared illegally on a cable TV channel a few years ago. Acts like this are rare in the US, because they're not necessary. Independent producers and activists here have historically agitated for, and often won, access to the spectrum of channels. There are allowances and avenues for all types of broadcasting. The mighty Network is balanced by the lowly low-power station, and virtually all cable systems have some form of public-access programming.

Access to European television, on the other hand, has largely been constrained by government controls. The recent emergence of new technologies in the West has loosened things up somewhat, increasing the number of channels transmitted by satellite, cable and broadcasting. In the face of inevitable change, some countries foresaw the need for independently produced programming and for guaranteeing independent voices some access to the airwaves. In the UK, a new channel (Channel 41 was established in the early eighties. Although commercial, its government-dictated mandate was to have programming which was produced almost entirely by new, small production companies. This single channel became an outlet for all manner of unusual viewpoints, and although Channel 4 has since grown more conservative, the independent companies established by it still flourish, providing a limited counterpart to US diversity.

In Italy, a Supreme Court order guaranteed media proliferation as an aspect of free speech in the seventies. Italy has since fostered what is probably the most diverse television landscape in the world. Every sort of television program imaginable exists there, from nude game shows to coverage of community meetings. Inspired by the Italians, France has recently allowed greater access to TV outlets for independent producers, although channel ownership is more tightly controlled than in Italy or the US.

But the proliferation of new cable and satellite outlets in Western Europe has generally been given over to large media conglomerates which are pan-European, and often global, in scope. These include established publishers like the German Springer Group and the Australian-based News Corp. of Rupert Murdoch. These satellite- and cablecasters have helped to shut out small independent voices in favor of endless American re-runs, locally produced Wheel of Fortune clones, and slick rock videos produced by megabuck record companies.

The medium's development in Eastern Europe has taken a different turn. Pirates here are often dedicated idealists broadcasting a message not to the liking of governments in power. Technology is everything in this context. As equipment has gotten cheaper and smaller, the success of clandestine transmissions has improved.

Before the advent of miniaturization, not only could tyrants terrorize with abandon, but they controlled the spin on news reports of their deeds. No one outside of the USSR, for example, knew what Stalin was doing, because there was no way for an activist to videotape the mass graves, let alone transmit the images to the world. Consequently there were few activists, and no repercussions. But as early as the 1960s, TV technology had progressed to a point where it could begin to change things. The earliest example I've found of Eastern European pirate TV is a series of clandestine broadcasts in 1968 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After Soviet troops took over the city, a remote TV van, designed to transmit signals from soccer matches and the like, was diverted and secretly dismantled. The equipment was set up in a sealed room and anti-government transmissions took place for many months. The Soviet tanks, which could be seen circling the block below the station's secret headquarters, never found the transmitter. Poland's Solidarity movement had a similar system of clandestine broadcasting through the political repression of the eighties, but by this time the necessary equipment could be carried from rooftop to rooftop in a set of suitcases. By the time these repressive governments collapsed (partly from the weight of sins that were no longer hideable), the videos of their undoing could not only be made by anybody with a home video camera, but could be transmitted to local audiences by anybody with a VHS player and a rudimentary understanding of how to do it.