PRAGUE Eleven years after the velvet revolution, Czech viewers are according to AFP rediscovering censorship and manipulation the main weapons being employed by the new managers at state television.

The viewers got their first surprise four days after Jiri Hodac, 53, was appointed head of Ceska Televize (CT) on December 20 by the Czech audiovisual board.

Journalists at the station held a series of crisis meetings and protests because they feared he was a close ally of the leader of the right-wing Civic Democrats Party of Vaclav Klaus, who will run for president next year.

At 7:15 p.m. (1815 GMT), the evening television news prepared by the dissenting journalists was taken off the air and replaced, in part, with an improvised version broadcast by the new head of News Jana Bobosikova.

Only viewers with cable or satellite television could pick up the "rebel" version, which was prepared in line with the station's normal schedule.

The show of force only served to entrench the two parties. On December 27, Hodac called police to have them remove the protesting journalists from the main CT building in central Prague.

That evening, the two public stations, CT1 and CT2, stopped broadcasting on the network controlled by Czech Radio communications, which has access to 95 percent of the viewing public.

For the next 24 hours, Hodac aired a message saying that unauthorized persons were in the CT building and the internal functioning of the station had been disrupted.

Shortly after, a new communiqu was broadcast calling on the state authorities to urgently "employ all appropriate means to re-establish legal programming and stop illegal activities."

The lines were drawn for an unprecedented audiovisual battle when programming resumed on December 28.

News bulletins were temporarily suspended and Hodac allegedly began ordering radio communications technicians to cut programs if he thought they would be detrimental to his interests.

The rebel journalists managed to air a communiqu of their own demanding that the new director resign, even on the normal network where millions of viewers could have been watching.

From January 1, Hodac's team once again began preparing its own news bulletin, which was broadcast from the studios of the private television station Nova.

To lend more credibility to the program dubbed "Bobo-Vision" after Bobosikova, images of CT's Prague studios were projected onto a backdrop behind the newsreader.

Manipulation? "Decor," according to Bobosikova.

On Wednesday evening, Hodac's program did not report that about 100,000 people had taken to the streets in support of the journalists -- the biggest street protests since the velvet revolution brought down communism.

However the "rebels" did manage to insert pictures of the protest in several programs aired later.

The next day, Hodac's news program broadcast images of a few dozen people in Wenceslas Square saying they were all the support that could be mustered for a new protest. No demonstration had been planned.

The "official" news bulletin was immediately repeated because it was too short to cover up the dissident broadcast.

"Viewers don't like seeing communiqus broadcast," Bobosikova said to explain the repetition.

Hodac has been hospitalized since Thursday after an apparent breakdown, possibly a heart attack.