History class, meet journalism class

I just finished my term paper for my history class on East-Central Europe. Because our professor suggested we write about something that interested us, I chose to write about the alternative media in opposition to the Soviet-controlled media in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Here's a little summary about what I wrote:

Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s promoted freedoms, including free speech, and journalists wrote for a brief period without censorship. Journalists encouraged discussion by inviting people to talk in journals' offices.

Many of the journalists in Hungary during the 1956 uprising were not willing to write against the Soviet Union with their names attached to their ideas, but one man named Miklos Gimes founded the paper, Hungarian Freedom, edited the illegal paper Oktober Huszonhatodika, and founded the Hungarian Democratic Independent Movement. He was arrested that year and executed in 1958.

The Literarni noviny offered people a way to write against the Soviets during Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Media executives stepped down and party officials were too preoccupied to fill those positions with journalists in the Communist Party who they trusted, so journalists self-managed themselves for a while. When they were forbidden to write about something, they wrote an article about how and why they were censored.

Eastern Europe had to fight for the fundamental right of freedom of speech that is written into our Bill of Rights. They wrote the facts when the Soviets wanted the journalists to act as public relations people. I think it's about time more people realized how difficult it was for journalists only a few decades ago in Eastern Europe when journalists were supposed to represent an ideology rather than the people.