What is the state of the media in former communist countries?
Christopher Walker: In the non-Baltic former Soviet Union, Freedom House findings overall are quite grim. Nevertheless, there are some distinctions among the countries in the region. You have on the weakest end of the scale some of the world’s worst-performing countries. These are retrograde regimes that have not pursued really any meaningful reforms: Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan. And they are among the world’s worst performers, let alone the region’s worst performers. At the same time you have countries that perform poorly in our analysis, but nevertheless have economic-modernization ambitions. And in this category you might find countries such as Russia and Kazakhstan. And here the question is whether regimes that have economic-modernization ambitions can advance their objectives while suppressing the development of a healthy and mature media sector. And that’s one of the quandaries they confront. I think what you see is differentiation among the countries in the region, but
