No one talking in this city about the importance of the media could fail to recall Thomas Jefferson's observation that if he were forced to choose between a free press and a free parliament, he would always choose the former because with a free press and a free parliament, he would end with a free parliament, but with a free parliament, he could not be sure if he would end with a free press.
I certainly won't become the exception to that practice. But if these words of your third president and the author of the American Declaration of Independence continue to resonate around the world, one of his other observations about the press may be more relevant for our thinking about the current and future tasks of international broadcasting. Responding in June 1807 to a Virginia resident who was thinking about starting a newspaper, Jefferson argued that "to be most useful," a newspaper should contain "true facts and sound principles only."
Unfortunately, he told his correspondent, "I fear such a paper would find few subscribers' because "it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood." And one of the greatest advocates of the power of the media to support democracy concluded sadly, "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."
Jefferson's optimistic comment about the role of a free press came as he was helping to make the revolution that transformed the world; his more critical ones came after his own, often less than happy years as president of the United States. Given my own experiences over the past half century, I can fully understand his shift in perspective and can thus testify that were Thomas Jefferson to be with us today, he would be among the most committed advocates of international broadcasting precisely because of his experiences in the earlier years of the American republic.
For most of my adult life, I lived in an occupied country, one where the communist regime suppressed virtually all possibilities for free expression in public forums. As a result, we turned to international broadcasting like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and the BBC to try to find out what was going on.
Let me go back in memory for a moment. Estonia was already under Soviet occupation when the "Battle of Britain" - solitary England's solitary battle against the totalitarian world - began. This is how I saw it, at the age of twelve, before our family was deported to Siberia. Nazi Germany bombastically boasted of its victories, London spoke of losses. And yet each broadcast from London, day after day, ended with the English newscaster's dry announcement: "Das waren die Nachrichten am 5. Juni, am hundert sechs und fünfzigsten Tage des Jahres, wo Hitler versprach, den Krieg zu gewinnen." - "These were the news of June 15, 156th day of the year when Hitler promised to win the war". There was no irony in these words. Rather, there was the pedantic knowledge of a pharmacist - how many drops of truth morning, day and night were necessary to keep the ability of doubt alive. The end of World War II found me in exile, buried deep into the heart of Russia, a couple of hundred kilometres from the nearest railway station. You had your Victory Day celebrations, and so had I. I bought a crystal of selenium to build a radio receiver. During the time of war, all radio equipment had been confiscated in Russia. Now, suddenly, I was holding in my hands a thumb's length of a glass tube containing a crystal and a short wire - my pass to freedom. The third receiver, built already in Estonia, finally worked, and I have been with you ever since. I doubt whether it is in my powers to give you a convincing picture of our spiritual confinement. Imagine being blind, unable to see colours, to perceive light or shadows; being surrounded by the void space without a single point of reference, without gravity that would feel like motherly love in this spiritual vacuum. And then, for a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even - a royal luxury - for a whole hour - the void would suddenly be filled with colours, fragrances, voices, the warmth of the sun and the fresh hope of spring. How many of you remember the Moscow Conference of 1946, to which so many Estonians for some unknown reason looked forward with hope? I remember Mr. Peter Peterson from the BBC covering the conference, I remember, the intonation of Winston Churchill, when he said of the winners of this very "Battle of Britain": "That was their finest hour". I remember the lectures of astronomer Fred Hoyle, to which I listened taking notes from week to week. Under Soviet rule, his discovery was banned as "idealistic".
Some years ago, when I received Javier Solana, the Secretary-General of NATO, in Tallinn, I compared the inevitability of the expansion of the island of democracy and NATO security structures with Fred Hoyle's expanding universe, and noticed when I was still speaking that Mr. Solana was deeply and personally moved by my speech. "You could not have known," he said afterwards, "that Fred Hoyle was during my university studies my research subject." This is how the radiation from an antenna materialises into attitudes, actions, and landscapes. Allow me two more comments. It is my duty to thank from this chair your predecessors for the decision to start broadcasts in Estonian on Radio Liberty, and even more for the decision to transfer the broadcasts in Estonian to the responsibility area of Radio Free Europe - in full concord with the non-recognition policy of the United States. I do not know how this decision was taken. During the Korean War, I heard from the Russian broadcasts, that the next day, the first Estonian broadcast would be on the air at 1800 hours. I was still a student and lived in Tartu, in a dormitory, which housed more than 500 students. I mentioned the forthcoming Estonian broadcast to one single friend. Stalin's terror was rampant in Estonia. For the time when the broadcast begun, my room was full of people, and more were coming. I will never forget that day, those solemn thirty minutes, and least of all the atmosphere in my room. Those people were the friends of my friend's friends. I knew a few, most were strangers to me. Every listener stood apart, in different directions, motionless, no glance met another, no word was spoken, we parted in silence. Such gatherings were punished with twenty-five years of hard labour. Not a single one of these twenty or thirty people got into trouble, which bespeaks of a high morale.
And my last point. I have myself worked at the radio, and know and knew the most distressing doubt - or ignorance, to be more accurate - whether your message did find your listeners. The broadcaster's work is like a dialogue with the stars: he can hear his own voice, but never gets any answer. The listener's temptation to respond is overwhelming. In spring 1976 Radio Free Europe informed that the Estonian polar explorer August Maasik had died in Canada. I picked up the phone and dictated a message for the writers' newspaper; and it appeared two days later, on June 18. In the circumstances of totalitarian seclusion, this was quite an accomplishment, which, I hoped, would morally support Radio Free Europe's Estonian staff. I must confess I also wrote to your countryman Alistair Cooke the following lines, and I am quoting: "Your word has always penetrated the Iron Curtain. Every week you have been a member of our family. I don't remember if you have ever spoken about Estonia, but you have always spoken as a European about the democratic world, which is the same". I was deeply moved to get Alistair Cooke's reply, which I would very much like to read to this audience: "It will be plain to you", Alistair Cooke wrote, "why I particularly cherish letters from people who listened, sometimes at their peril, from behind the Iron Curtain. Of all such, your letter is at once the most touching and the most gratifying. I am deeply grateful to you and wish you all good things as you approach what (to me) is early middle age! Most sincerely, etc. Alistair Cooke". That was the role you have played, and I doubt whether you yourself are aware of how much an antenna can outweigh the world's biggest army.
Frequently, these sources provided the only reliable news we could get about what was going on not only in the outside world but also in our own country. These broadcasts were our universities: They provided us with the materials we needed to understand our world and ultimately to build a movement capable of reclaiming our rightful place in world.
Indeed, one of the key moments in the recovery of the independence of my country is directly tied to international broadcasting. On January 13, 1991, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin flew to Tallinn in the aftermath of the Soviet killings in Lithuania. While there, he not only signed agreements acknowledging the right of the Baltic states to seek independence from the Soviet Union but he issued a statement calling on Russian officers and men not to obey illegal Soviet orders to fire on freely elected governments or unarmed civilians.
Through a series of FM and telephone connections from Tallinn via Helsinki to Stockholm to Munich, Yeltsin's words reached RFE/RL's Estonian Service and then were broadcast throughout the Soviet Union on all of that station's language services. I am convinced that that broadcast by itself prevented Moscow from taking even more radical steps against our national movement and thus set the stage for the recovery of our independence as well as for the dissolution of the Evil Empire as a whole.
Just one indication of how important that action was to us is the fact that the head of RFL/FL's Estonian Service at that time, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, is now Estonian foreign minister.
I can't stress too highly what these broadcasts meant to me and to my fellow Estonians in another sense as well. During the long years of occupation, these broadcasts in our own languages demonstrated that the world had not forgotten us, that we had allies among the free peoples of the world, and that there was no basis for pessimism about our future. And these broadcasts, especially those which were about our country, reminded not only us but the Soviet authorities that they would never be able to prevent us form regaining our freedom.
When we finally did so in 1991, I like many other Estonians and, I suspect, like many of you, looked to the future with enormous self-confidence. And also like many of you, I was sure that the chief contribution of international broadcasting to my country lay in the past. Indeed, it was in that spirit that I nominated Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour I still believe it should ultimately receive.
Surely, we thought, with communism overthrown and with our own independence reaffirmed, we could quickly establish our own free press, one that would provide our citizens with the information they would need not only to recover from the past but to allow us to re-enter Europe and the West.
But the experience of the past eight years has shown that such optimism was misplaced. First of all, the privatisation of the media did not make it free. Because of economic difficulties, privatisation both reduced the number of media outlets, thus paradoxically stifling freedom, and encouraged those remaining to seek readers and listeners by appealing to the lowest common denominator among our citizens. Instead of elevating the understanding of their audiences, all too many of our media outlets played to the worst in them, filling their pages or their broadcasts with sex, violence, and charges of corruption.
That is why I have complained so often that the path from a controlled press to a free press all too often lies through the worst kind of yellow press.
There is a second reason why our optimism about our own domestic media was misplaced: the experiences and values of the editors and journalists who now work in the domestic media. Not surprisingly, almost all of them are products of the Soviet system. Their understanding of what the media is for and what they do is thus very different from that of journalists who have grown up in a free media environment. They see media outlets as a form of propaganda, something the new owners frequently even encourage, and they see individual news stories as a chance to push their own agendas rather than to report accurately on what is going on.
And there is yet a third reason why we expected too much too soon in this area after the collapse of communism. A free press needs a free audience be it readers or listeners, and such an audience is not something that has been created overnight in any country.
It did not happen overnight even in the United States which never faced the same kind of tyranny that we did. Indeed, Jefferson complained about this as well when he said that for the citizens of his day, "defamation is becoming a necessity of life; in so much that a dish of tea in the morning or evening cannot be digested without this stimulant."
But the impact of the Soviet system in my country was far deeper and more insidious than that and far deeper and more insidious than many people either in Estonia or in the West want to acknowledge. It involved more than the mass executions and deportations, more than the destruction of much of the landscape, and more than 50 years of the stifling of our lives. It involved in the very first and most important sense the deformation of our minds and souls, a deformation that means that even today many of us cannot confront reality except through the filters provided by that past. Estonian is not an easy language to learn, but any of you who can listen to Estonian broadcasts or who read Estonian newspapers or journals will immediately feel what you are listening to or reading is something very different from the media you are used to in this long-established democracy. And if you listen or read while you visit my country - and I invite all of you to do so - you will be shocked by the difference between what you hear and see in the media and what you hear and see all around you.
Jefferson again understood this problem when he wrote: "The real extent of this misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." And he added that "I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time."
I share that feeling almost every time I pick up an Estonian paper or listen to a broadcast by a domestic Estonian outlet.
Now, lest you accuse me of being overly pessimistic, let me hasten to add that there are notable exceptions among owners, among journalists and especially among readers and listeners. There are owners of media outlets in my country who do believe in the principles of a genuinely free press. There are journalists who understand that news is not the same as propaganda and that checking facts is important. And there are many readers and listeners who know what genuine news is and increasingly expect to get that and not the poor substitute they are often given.
One of the reasons that I have some optimism about the future of the free media is that our very oldest citizens remember the media from before the Soviet occupation and our very youngest are growing up without the constraints of the communist system. These two groups have been responsible for most of the positive changes in our country since 1991 not only in the media but in all fields of endeavour. Indeed, I think it is symbolic that I am a representative of those who remember Estonia before the Soviets came and our prime minister Mart Laar, perhaps the youngest national leader in the world, came of age as they were leaving.
Another reason I am somewhat more optimistic than you may think is that international broadcasting has already done some important work. Those of us who listened to what the Soviets called the "foreign voices" not only heard the news but learned what news is - and importantly what it isn't. Many of our best journalists have been regular listeners to RFE/RL, to VOA, to the BBC and to all the others for their entire lives. That gave them the courage to think differently and a model for their profession. Without it, we would have been much further behind.
But there is a final reason for my optimism: the continuing impact of international broadcasting to my country and to its neighbours. Estonians and many other people around the world fudge their own media on the basis of what international broadcasting tells them. That operates as an important constraint on the tendency of domestic media operations to go off the rails, but it also means that these audiences are learning what news is and thus will demand it from their domestic outlets. And when they do, then there will be genuinely free press and the possibility of genuinely free society.
Consequently, I am now convinced that the greatest challenges for international broading lie ahead and not in the past, for overcoming the problems Jefferson identities two centuries ago is not going to be easy or quick. Estonia as many of you know has done remarkably well compared to many of the other post-communist countries, but our problems are still so great in the media areas as elsewhere that we will continue to need your help and your broadcasts long into the future.
On behalf of the Estonian people, I want to thank you in the United States for all you have done in the past and are doing now through your broadcasts to my country and to other countries around the world. I believe that international broadcasting is and will remain one of the most important means for the spread of democracy and freedom. And consequently, I am very proud to greet you today on the occasion of the formation of the Broadcasting Board of Governors as an independent agency - even though I want all of you who are celebrating that fact to know that your greatest challenges lie ahead and that those of us who are your chief beneficiaries will never let you forget it.
Thank you.
