Charter 77, in document no. 20 (1 December 1984), cited the above article of the covenant and observed that in Czechoslovakia "all sources of information are controlled by a single political party and its apparatus since 1948 and have become the instrument of ideological propaganda". As a result, not only is the citizen denied access to "basic, truthful and complete information" on current events, domestic and foreign, but is subjected to a massive wave of disinformation in all fields of communication. This includes not only the distortion of news, but the suppression of major events or situations, such as the existence of famine in Ethiopia, or serious ecological problems in Czechoslovakia, and direct interference in the arts. For instance, in reporting the Nobel Prize in literature awarded to Jaroslav Seifert, the media within the country did so tersely, not mentioning the fact that Seifert's recent works remained on the publication index for a long time and appeared first in samizdat editions and abroad. All of this resulted from "the government's exclusive power to decide the nature of information given. The party dictates what can be published and what cannot."¹