ated from the
policy of complete commitment to the Soviet Union, after the invasion of
Czechoslovakia various media conferences were held in which calls for
stricter adherence to the Soviet line were sounded.

OBJECTIVES OF MASS COMMUNICATIONS

The government has certain distinct perceptions as to how the media must
serve the state. Propaganda permeates every aspect of life from formal
education to membership in unions and clubs to the publication of books
and pamphlets. The Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP--see Glossary) is the
main political force. It both creates the appropriate condition for the
expression of public opinion and forms public opinion itself.

At a recent conference on the mass communications system, a leading
member of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party
delineated the principal tasks of the media. The major task of the media
was "to work for the broadest possible propagation of the congress
decisions and for the mobilization of the people's physical and mental
powers to make their decisions materialize...." The second vital task of
the media was to "help form a socialist outlook on life among the
peoples and educate the new man--active fighter for the developed
socialist society, ideologically convinced, morally durable, physically
tempered, with profound awareness of duty and responsibility." The third
task was to promote the economic awareness of the people and to train
managers, specialists, workers, and farmers for the greater economic
good of the country. The fourth main task was to continue in the active
struggle against "bourgeois ideology ... and the ideological subversion
of imperialism."

A basic tenet of the Bulgarian system, however, is the belief that mass
communications must be actively supplemented by human contact on the
individual level. Iliya Georgiev, secretary of the Varna Okrug Bulgarian
Communist Party Committee, in an article on the political knowledge of
working people in 1972, stated categorically that the interest
stimulated in the people by the mass communications system must be
maintained and extended by informal means of communications, such as
district (_okrug_) seminars, meetings in enterprises and farms,
activities in the trade unions, and the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union
(Dimitrovski Komunisticheski Mladezhki Suyuz--commonly referred to as
the Komsomol).

The government has spent considerable time in assessing the extent to
which these media