Vietnam - Media

Vietnam's postal, telegraph, and telephone services are under the Ministry of Communications. The country made significant progress in upgrading its telecommunications system in the 1990s: all provincial switchboards have been digitized and fiberoptic and microwave transmission systems have been extended from the major cities to the provinces. However Vietnam still lags behind its Southeast Asian neighbors. There were an estimated 2.6 million mainline telephones as of 2000, with an additional 730,155 cellular phones in use.

Hanoi has a strong central broadcasting station, the Voice of Vietnam, boosted by local relay transmitters. Since 1975, almost the entire country has been blanketed by a wired loudspeaker system. Radio programs beamed abroad include broadcasts in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian, Khmer, and Lao, and there are special broadcasts to mountain tribes. Television was introduced into the RVN in 1966, and an extensive service, reaching some 80% of the population, was in operation by the early 1970s. A pilot television station was inaugurated in the DRV in 1971. Many of the major cities now have television stations, all under the guidance of the Ministry of Information, which replaced the State Committee for Radio and Television in 1987. As of 1999, there were 65 AM and 7 FM radio stations. In 1998, there were seven television stations. In 2000, Vietnam had 106 radios and 185 television sets for every 1,000 people. In 2001, there were 160,000 Internet subscribers served by about five service providers.

Most newspapers in the south were shut down by the PRG in 1975, but some papers that had been sympathetic to the NLF/DRV cause were allowed to continue publication. All press is strictly controlled by the Ministry of Culture and Information. Principal Vietnamese dailies (with their estimated 2002 circulation) are shown in the following table:

	AFFILIATION	CIRCULATION
HANOI
Nhan Dan	Communist Party	200,000
Quan Doi Nhan Dan	Army	60,000
Hanoi Moi	Communist Party	35,000
HO CHI MINH CITY
Saigon Giai Phong	Communist Party	100,000

The English-language Saigon Times was established in 1995.