Foreign Ideas Seen by Some as Suspicious
Well, the new Director of News at Czech Television Ivan Kytka was hardly in his job for a week when he came under attack for a crime of the worst sort: having foreign ideas. People have already criticised Kytka and new CT Director Puchalsky for their self-confessed admiration of the BBC, and a new thinly-veiled attack on Kytka was reported in CTK on 11.4.98 (see above).
Due to the way the article is written, and due to the fact that I was unable to watch the original programme on Nova, I cannot say whether CTK or Nova is unreasonably noting Kytka's foreign experience, but I can say that it is absolutely unjustifiable to remark on it in the context of the issue of rescheduling plans at CT. Put bluntly, Kytka's time abroad has nothing to do with the issue of scheduling at CT, so why mention it?
Certain people in the Czech media, either at CTK or at Nova, obviously look at foreign experience with considerable suspicion. He was abroad for years, this logic goes, so he is suspicious, he may have ideas that are not "our" kind of ideas and maybe he is no longer one of "us" any more: asi se odrodil.
I do not think that this would be a majority opinion in the Republic as a whole. When I worked with educators in the Czech Republic, I had many colleagues who expressed interest in American and British teaching methods and education systems. When I worked as a translator between the Czech and British armies, I saw many officers in the army of the Czech Republic who were very eager to learn British military techniques and employ them in the Czech army. On a wider scale, the general public is very positive about joining the EU, a tightly-knit international and multi-cultural community. A suspicion of things foreign is thus not universal among citizens of the Czech Republic by any means.
Noting Kytka's years abroad represents the suspicion of someone at CTK or at Nova, not the suspicion of the whole Republic. I would like to know who found this factlet important enough to mention, and how he or she could possibly justify it in this context. Does it have anything to do with the fact that Kytka is establishing an independent news gathering service at CT to challenge CTK's current domination of the information market?
Or is this attack more related to the fact that Kytka is altering TV schedules to allow viewers to see both major national evening news programmes? Is someone at Nova upset that Kytka is giving citizens access to more daily sources of information? Is someone at Nova frightened that when the two presentations of the day's news are examined side by side, Nova's will appear amateur and tabloid?
I would like to hear from readers who actually saw the programme with Zelezny so they can tell me whether it was he or CTK which should be held responsible for this foolishness. No matter who is to blame, I trust this blatant attempt to brand Kytka as an odrodilec will appear preposterous to everyone.
Most importantly, I would like to know whether these media men will continue with this pathetic line of argument. Will every change in the Czech Television newsroom in the upcoming months and years under Kytka be analysed by the other Czech media on a pointless scale of "Czech vs. foreign"? Who would that serve? Not the citizen trying to get balanced information from the media. Not the country's ambition to join international structures.
In any case, the Czech public would see through that argument rather quickly. I am confident that people would judge an idea based on its own merit rather than on where it might have come from. People know that a good idea is a good idea regardless of the nationality of the person who had the idea first.
