1Representations of the Nation and of the Other in the Slovenian Periodical Press Before and After 1991: Engagements and Implications

In debates on the role of public media that have proliferated throughout Europe after the rise of commercial media in the 1980s and (in former communist countries) in the 1990s, the claims to ‘quality ’ were a common argument in support of the state-sponsored media, usually labelled as ‘public’. However, as various authors have noted, the exact definition of quality was lacking and the notion of ‘quality ’ itself was often used to refer to a variety of meanings, even conflicting ones, and was thus open to manipulation (cf. Keane 1992: 112; Bašić-Hrvatin 2002: 16). Arguably, the definition of ‘quality ’ suggested in the general outline of the project on the quality press in Southeast Europe is similarly open to manipulation. The notion of ‘quality press ’ is not explicitly defined, but seems to refer to those periodical print media which provide a platform for ‘important public debates on the key issues of the societies in Southeast Europe’. Such a notion could hardly be used as an analytical concept. As this paper aims to demonstrate, the chief problem of publications that initiated ‘important public debates on the key issues ’ in Slovenia in the recent past was not necessarily their relatively low circulation and commercial pressure of high-circulation periodicals. Despite their relatively low circulation, some periodicals managed to provoke debates that were featured on the front pages of periodicals with the highes