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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Laos
Index
Main entrance of the Royal Palace, Louangphrabang, with an honor
guard at rest in front of the doors in 1975. The palace is now a
national museum.
Courtesy Ernest Kuhn
Information and communication have been tightly
controlled in
Laos since the days of French colonialism. During the
years of
revolutionary struggle against the RLG, the LPRP relied
heavily
upon radiobroadcasts in the Lao and Hmong languages.
Starting in
1960, with technical assistance from North Vietnam, these
radiobroadcasts, lasting four hours a day, reached a
largely
illiterate and mountain-dwelling audience. Press
operations,
oriented to the towns of the Mekong Valley, were conducted
secretly, if at all, by the clandestine Pathet Lao.
Radiobroadcasters never mentioned the official name of the
party
until a few months before the seizure of power in December
1975.
Given such a heritage of party control, it is not
surprising
that the postrevolutionary operation of the mass media is
a tightly
controlled party monopoly without private participation.
The joint
party-government organization of the media is reflected in
the
Ministry of Information and Culture and the State Board of
News
Agency, Newspaper, Radio, and Television. The party
maintains the
more narrowly focused Propaganda and Training Committee
whose
chairman is also the head of the state board. The overall
goal of
the press is stated as making the mass media into a link
among the
party, the state, and the masses.
In mid-1994 the official media consisted of the
party-sponsored
daily newspaper, Xieng Pasason (The Voice of the
People)
[Vientiane], in Lao language only. Khaosan Pathet Lao (Lao
News
Agency), a news service of the Committee of Information,
Press,
Radio and Television Broadcasting, distributes daily
bulletins in
Lao, English, and French. The National Radio of Laos, the
stateowned radio service, has a national network and seven
regional
stations that broadcast in Lao and tribal languages. The
four
government-owned Laotian television stations broadcast
daily for a
few hours each. Regional stations broadcast in Lao and in
tribal
languages.
Other media are specialized for particular audiences.
For
example, the daily Vientiane Mai (Vientiane News),
covers
local matters of significance to the party. The journal
Sangkhom
Thoulakit (Society and Business), in Lao, targets
readers
interested in Vientiane business and society. A
theoretical
quarterly, Aloun Mai (New Dawn), established in
1985,
appeared with some regularity to disseminate major
speeches by
party leaders, among other official pronouncements. An
arts and
letters monthly, Vannasin, is surviving, but the
print
output of various mass organizations such as the People's
Revolutionary Youth Union's Noum Lao (Lao Youth), a
fortnightly journal, or those of the Federation of Women
Union's is
only intermittent. Lao Dong (Labor) is the
fortnightly
journal of the Federation of Trade Unions.
Laotian media output is sporadic and relatively
insignificant
compared with the impressions made by Thai television,
radio, and
commercials, and the daily newspapers carried into
Vientiane by
international travelers. Given the proximity of Thai radio
and
television, Thailand remains both an open window to a
different
economic system and provides a perspective on the news.
Further,
outside information and culture have proven to be too
pervasive to
be worth eradicating by surveillance or jamming.
So far as publishing is concerned, the Ministry of
Information
and Culture held a seminar in 1992, which reviewed its
activities
over the previous sixteen years and worked out a "plan of
action"
for the coming period with "provisional regulations on
publication,
printing, and distribution in the Lao PDR." Reinforcement
of this
type of intellectual planning is achieved through periodic
conferences with delegations from the official news
agencies of
Vietnam and Cambodia, and through visits to China. A
delegation of
Thai writers was also entertained.
Data as of July 1994
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