The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News. By Paul Lendvai. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981. Pp. 285. $26.00.)

Abstract

The management of information for both domestic and foreign audiences has been a keystone of Communist rule and a basic element in attempts to export communism since before the Bolshevik revolution. Prior to the publication of Lendvai's book, however, the internal and external information policies of the Soviet bloc states have not been examined comprehensively. Those studies that have been done have looked specifically at one element of information policy or at one particular country, and, in the period after the signing of the Helsinki accords, they have become dated. This narrow approach has been taken in spite of the fact that the Communist media have been our major source of information on events and policies in the Communist bloc and have, themselves, been major political issues both within the Communist states and in their foreign policies. Lendvai uses his experiences as a journalist in the Hungarian press of the Stalinist period and the information he gathered later as a Western analyst and reporter on events in the Soviet bloc. He unveils the methods by which Communist leaderships control the dissemination of information for domestic consumption and casts a dissenting opinion of such practices. The use of foreign broadcasts and advocacy of the Third World's demands for a New World Information Order to strengthen the Communist position abroad is also debunked. In building his case, Lendvai provides previously unavailable data on the variegated systems of media direction and control, thereby providing information on how the media are produced and establishing the limits the leaderships impose on information for domestic and foreign policy. He then provides an even more detailed discussion of Soviet bloc trade in information and media training with the Third World as well as of the duality involved in their noncompliance with information access provisions in the Helsinki Final Act when, at the same time, they rely on those same accords to attack Western broadcasting in Communist states. However, Lendvai's emphasis on the controls and commitments of these leaderships slights the crucial evidence of the failures of their information management. Such evidence is striking. There is, after all, a recurring theme of the need for accurate information and open discussion in the mass media that appears with every thaw and crisis in Communist societies. Communist broadcasts abroad lack an audience in comparison to the high level of interest in Western broadcasts among citizens of the Soviet bloc. Then, too, the thousands of journalists from all over the Third World who have been educated in or aided by the Soviet Union and its East European allies have clearly failed to push their nations or their media into the Soviet camp to any significant degree. For the nonspecialist, the book provides a valuable, if polemical, overview of the various aspects of information policy and its use by the Soviet bloc states. For the specialist, the book has the same failings as the rest of the information available on this subject: too little is known, and the generalizations on the details of the media process are not always totally accurate. In this respect, the book provides not only a sense of the dimensions of the bureaucracy of misinformation, but it also serves as a call for more research to be done.