RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

rnean the prevention ot the nation s social emancipation. Yugoslavia is, therefore, one of the rare countries in the wor!d which has put into practice its fundamental pohtical postulates in this domain too. At the beginning there was much discussion, both in open and veiled terms as to whether Vugoslavia, which is aYelatively роог country m the material sense, really must have eight television stations, especially if it is bome in mind that television is an extremely expensive medium. However, the abandoning of such process would mean the rejection of some fundamental principles in an important domain, especially as in Yugoslavia television, as a product of the bourgeois society, has quickly ceased to be an entertainment box and grown into a major social institution. It is on account of the importance of such a social insitution that television must be seen as part of the whole system. Through this development, from the point of view of programme policy there has been much effort to make the most of these specifically Yugoslav characteristic in the domain of television and assure that they represent an advantage for a better television programme and the brake to such endeavours. At the present, we afe, in my opinion, at the phase where we have abandoned the old but are still in search of the new. In this search for the new there is much stumbling and confusion. What is a Yugoslav programme? What is Yugoslav information. In Yugoslavia there аге the Serbo-Croadan, Slovenian and Macedonian television language areas and recendy Kosovo and Vojvodina have been added. We have not had a Yugoslav programme as such. In the Serbo-Croatian language region I consider that we аге going away from a practice whereby Yugos av U nity was founded on a mechamcal approach, the pubuc manifestation of which was in the television distribution of Ume spots with programmes bemg put into their own »drawers«. Such a programme can in the mechanical sense of the word be said to have had a Yugoslav character for all the studios from the given language region were represented. In order, however, for a programme to have a Yugoslav character I consider that it must fulffl essenUahy different criteria, that is criteria based on Yugoslav ideological, aesthetic and cultural factors - Yugoslav in the sense that from the ideological political point of view they contribute to socižu progress as concerns non-ahgned policy and attempts to assert some ethic values of the self-management society. Its Yugoslav character is not therefore guaranteed by the fact that it fits into the Yugoslav scheme. Television as part of the national cultural hentage, part ot a socio-political community in аД its social components, has the task of reflectmg some of these specific characteristics of the region u also of being a bridge of cooperation and a bndge of umty and

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