The seminar is a two-week training course, primarily for academics and media professionals, mostly from post-communist countries of the former Soviet empire.

One of the classes in Olympia was devoted to examples of good journalistic practices from the broadcasts of BBC television. I showed the students clips from a program in which Jeremy Paxman, a BBC interviewer, questioned Prime Minister Tony Blair in a live broadcast from February 2003, a few weeks before the American-British invasion of Iraq (full transcript available at: HERE). Admittedly, the interview is fairly hard-hitting, and included questions such as:

"Prime Minister, for you to commit British forces to war there has to be a clear and imminent danger to this country -- what is it?"

"You believe American intelligence? Because there are a lot of dead people in an aspirin factory in Sudan who don't." Paxman was referring to the controversial 1998 U.S. bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical firm that American authorities believed was associated with the terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.

For a British television viewer this line of questioning would not be considered unusual. But seminar participants from post-communist countries were shocked. It would not have been permissible in their countries. "If a journalist in our country talked to a politician like that, he would be arrested," said one television broadcaster.

Is the British television experience so exceptional? I also showed the students an excerpt from the award-winning documentary "In the Line of Fire" by correspondent John Simpson that shows how the BBC TV crew was bombed by an American fighter plane in Northern Iraq in April 2003. The documentary was a homage to the crew's young Iraqi interpreter who was killed in the raid.

I asked those present: Why don't the television stations in your countries purchase and broadcast programs like these? First, the answer was an intrigued silence. Later, one of the students told me that programs like these would not be interesting for people in their countries because "they are not about local issues."

The students said television stations in their countries would gladly buy entertainment programs from the West, but shy away from programs dealing with serious current-affairs issues. The humanitarian and professional ideals that some of the best journalists in Western Europe and the United States still often uphold in their work do not seem to inspire these budding journalists from the East.

In many respects, the Czech Republic is very advanced regarding developments in the media sector. Because it was one of the first to try its hand at a free press, the country was also often the first to make some serious media mistakes in the past 15 years. It would be useful if the Czech experience served as a caution to other post-communist countries. What seems more likely, however, is that many of these mistakes will be repeated. Perhaps every country must undergo such crises on its own before it can establish a free and fair media that acts in the service of the public interest.