This thesis examines the relationship between the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front Government and the media in the provincial state of West Bengal, India, during the thirty four years (1977-2011) period when the party was in government. The main aim of the thesis is to investigate the relation between the CPI (M) led Left Front Government and the media in West Bengal (1977-2011), the role of the media in stabilising or destabilising the Left Front Government, the impact of neoliberalism on the Left Front Government and their relation with the media, the role of the media in communicating developmental policies of the LFG to the public and finally the role which the mainstream and the party controlled media played in the public sphere. These questions are addressed through document research of CPI (M)’s congress and conference reports, manifestos, press releases, pamphlets, leaflets, booklets; and interviews with the CPI (M) leadership and the Editors and Bureau Chiefs of the key newspapers and television channels in West Bengal. The findings are contextualised within a broader discussion of the political and historical transitions India and West Bengal have gone through in this period (chapter 4). This is the first study looking at the relationship between the media and the CPI (M) led Left Front Government over a period of thirty four years (1977-2011). The thesis finds that neoliberalism in India had considerable effects on the CPI (M), the media and their relationship. The research finds a continuous effort from the mainstream and the party-controlled media to dominate the public sphere leading debates in order to seek some form of political consensus in order to govern. The media in West Bengal were politically divided between the left and the opposition. The research finds that this generated a market for political advertisements and political news contributing to a politically polarised media market in West Bengal that assisted in generating revenue for the media. The findings also suggest that the media contributed to rather than played a determining role in destabilising the Left Front Government. Finally the research finds that the CPI (M) had an arduous relation with the media since 1977 when the party decided to participate in the parliamentary democracy. The LFG and the mainstream media entered into an antagonistic relationship post 1991 contributing to a politically polarised media market in West Bengal.

Trying to overcome the traditional analytic nihilism of papers dealing with Czechoslovakia in 1968, which arises from the military occupation, the author puts the fact of freedom of speech into his work's central interest. In a comparative study this work studies the different interpretations of its role and meaning, including: the dogmatic point of view concerning the freedom of speech being a source of organized counterrevolution; the effort of the reformers to include the freedom of speech into their reform and meanwhile to make it an instrument of it and the way it instead became an autonomous control of their politics; the realistic criticism concentrated on the manifestations of irresponsibility in the press endangering the reform on the one side and not being able to exit the temporary system imagination on the other; it equally pays attention to the 'unnamed', non-members of the Party, who process their self- establishment as an opposing political current, who however rest being no less than a source of interesting subversion; and finally examines the radical democrat approach understanding the freedom of speech as an obligatory condition of their politics together projecting the reconstitution of the society as an autonomous political subject. The work uses contemporary documents and texts...