PRESA SCRISĂ – „TIGRUL DE HÂRTIE” AL REGIMULUI COMUNIST DIN ALBANIA

Elsa STAVRO Universitatea „Dunărea de Jos”, Galaţi (România)

Abstract

THE WRITTEN PRESS – “A PAPER TIGER” OF THE ALBANIAN COMMUNIST REGIME Using various research views on the role and power of media in totalitarian regimes as starting points, the article confronts two attitudes. The first is that of the one–party state and of the leader Hoxha concerning the importance of the media and “the freedom and constitutional rights of the journalists and of the people to express themselves freely”, while the second one consists of the people’s lack of confidence in these instruments. Transmitting only the demagogy of the dictatorial regime, the mass media, especially the written press, left untouched everything that was not in line with the successes and achievements in building socialism. This distancing from the reality is the source of the media dualism characteristic to this period: the importance that the regime attaches to it and the indifference of the masses. Brave individuals, who knew that journalists were not excluded from this whirlwind of fear they all lived in, found other ways to express themselves. Their indignation, addressed to the top of the power pyramid, took hold of what people had at hand, from anti-party statements written on bed sheets, to new inventions, but none of it was transmitted through the press, thus proving this instrument of propaganda, which carried the demagogic power of the whole regime, was, in the eyes of the people, a “paper tiger”. Keywords: Albania, media, written press, totalitarian regime, one-party system, propaganda, Albanian Labour Party.