The Revolution Was Televised

I've been reading books by writers who lived in autocratic countries and this is from Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape. He describes the first indications of Romanian regime change in December 1989.

The first nationwide sign of trouble was booing at a Nicolai Ceausescu speech broadcast over state radio and television, which technicians tried to cover up with canned applause before "going to black." Ceausescu then issued his "shoot to kill" order to local party bosses by closed circuit TV. His regime's public broadcast were limited to two hours per night, and consisted entirely of propaganda; at his trial, Ceausescu said that he didn't want to tire out the people. A few days later, with perfect ironic symmetry that testifies either to the neutrality of the medium or to history's black sense of humor, Ceausescu's own execution was aired over and over on the screens he once controlled...Television literally woke up the country...It was television unlike anything ever seen in the West, an outpouring of images that startled not just Romanians but the world...The extraordinary thing about what Romanians and the world (via CNN and French Television) were seeing on their screens was not just the sudden news and field reports, but the open invitation to the Romanian people to come and speak freely. Consequently, mobs of people milled in front of the tanks outside Studio Four, clamoring to get in with messages ranging from the profoundly serious to the profoundly silly...When the flow of people slowed, the twenty-four-hour station aired things unseen and unheard-of in Romania: MTV videos stolen from satellites, and Italian and German soft porn. Romanians saw bare breasts on television for the first time in history...The National Salvation Front of Romania--prompted by their rapt audience--instituted a series of reforms that often seemed improvised right in the studios: freedom of speech, opening of the borders, release of all political prisoners, five-day work week, landgrants to peasants, abolition of the death penalty, popular elections in the spring...For a time, Romanian television was the central nervous system of the revolution. Gil Scott-Heron was, it seems, wrong when he said, "The revolution will not be televised." This revolution was entirely televised.