Word: socialists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...premiere of La Six, an MTV-style rock-music channel. With a seventh channel that will present cultural programs planned for later this year, the TV picture in France has never been so lively or diverse. Yet the new offerings have sparked a heated debate. Political opponents of the Socialist government denounced the process by which the new channels were created as "completely scandalous." Cultural leaders, meanwhile, warned that the expected influx of foreign-produced shows, many of them from the U.S., amounted to nothing less than "a state crime against culture...
...most other European countries, state-owned TV has traditionally been stodgy and unimaginative, at least by U.S. standards. The three channels run by the French government offer a lineup of news, highbrow talk shows and inexpensively produced entertainment, along with occasional U.S. imports like Dallas and Dynasty. When Socialist President Francois Mitterrand came to power in 1981, however, he pledged to make the airwaves more independent. The upshot was a proliferation of privately owned FM radio stations and, in 1984, a new national pay-TV channel, Canal Plus...
Last November the government awarded the franchise for a fifth channel to a group headed by Berlusconi and two French businessmen with ties to President Mitterrand. Opposition leaders charged that the new channel would have a pro- Socialist bias and that it was being rushed on the air to beat the March 16 legislative elections, which the Socialists are in danger of losing. Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, a leading Mitterrand foe, even tried to thwart the channel's start-up by closing access to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where technicians were about to install an antenna. Government officials...
Chirac, who once had the nickname "the Bulldozer," is accused of being overly combative and authoritarian, and of changing his positions with shifting political winds. But many Socialists have a grudging respect for him. "He has the qualities of a fighter," concedes one Socialist official...
...year term for the third. The Soviet Union, for its part, was jubilant over the call for the Bulgarians' acquittal. Radio Moscow said the recommendation proved that the conspiracy charges were fabricated by the CIA and its Western allies "to discredit Bulgaria and other socialist countries...