Media freedom Archives - Page 18 of 18

Tips for a Strong Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence Application

Posted on February 18, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence provides financial and editorial support to professional journalists who have strong ideas for cross-border stories. This year’s theme is the Rule of Law.

Mid-career journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia are eligible to apply.

Each year, 10 journalists are chosen through open competition to receive a €3,000 bursary, close editorial supervision and mentoring, and the chance to attend international career development seminars and be published in the most influential regional and international media. In addition, the top three articles chosen by an international jury will receive awards.

So how do you maximise your chances of winning a place on the programme? Here are some tips from our editors, based on reviewing hundreds of applications:

Look at Fellowship stories from previous years.If the theme of your story has been covered by the Fellowship in the last three years, make sure your story has a sharp, new angle. In other words, your story should present the familiar theme through a fresh lens, perhaps even forcing us to question what we thought we knew. (You can find previous years’ stories online in the stories archive)
Be as specific as possible. Don’t just say you want to look at a broad subject; say what in particular you want to explore. For example, not just “migration” but “changes in migration between country X and country Y in the last five years”. And tell us howyou plan to do it and why that matters.
Do your pre-research.You’re not expected to research your entire story but do as much as you can to give a sense of what you expect to show. A proposal that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X” is not as strong as one that says “I want to find out what’s happening with X and my research so far suggests this is the answer and this is why”.
Tell us what’s new. Make sure to include what’s new about your proposal, compared to other media reporting on the subject. What do you hope to reveal or highlight? Why will this be interesting/important to readers?
Remember the investigative/analytical element. Your story does not have to be a hard-core investigation but it should be more than just descriptive. It should show not just what’s happening but why it’s happening. Make clear what you will investigate or analyse — and how. For an investigative story, this might mean obtaining documents. For an analytical story, it might mean analysing data and/or talking to academic experts. But…
Keep it journalistic. The Fellowship features seminars and mentoring and insists on the highest standards of accuracy but it is not an academic programme. It exists to help journalists improve their skills and produce a high-quality piece of journalism, not an abstract academic article. Your story should hold the attention of inquisitive readers all over the world, and not just in your country or region.
Whatever happens, don’t be downhearted. Every year there are more outstanding proposals than there are places on the Fellowship. Don’t take it personally or regret the work you put in if you’re not selected. The Fellowship is such a great opportunity that it’s worth giving it your best shot. If your proposal is strong but isn’t chosen, you may be able to publish the story elsewhere.

The application form, guidelines and further information about the Fellowship are available online at https://balkaninsight.com/fellowship-for-journalistic-excellence/

For more information about the programme and the application process, write to us at fellowship@birn.eu.com

Montenegro Detains Activist for Predicting ‘War’ on Facebook

Posted on January 29, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Montenegro’s state prosecution on Tuesday ordered civic activist Vesko Pejak to be put into custody for 72 hours for causing panic and disorder over a Facebook post predicting “war in Montenegro” – and for claiming that officials were provoking citizens who opposed the recently adopted law on religion.

The law has angered the largest faith group in the country, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and tens of thousands of people have been marching twice weekly in the streets in protest against it.

The Serbian Church, SPC, says it is designed to strip it of its property and land, which the government denies. Opposition political movements are also regular participants in the anti-government rallies.

The Center for Investigative Reporting in Montenegro, CIN-CG, said that by arresting people solely for their thoughts, the government threatened freedom of thought and expression, which is one of the cornerstones of democracy.

“We appeal to all actors in the public arena to take the greatest responsibility regard to the situation and not to exacerbate tensions,” the CIN-CG press release said.

“We urge the authorities to release Pejak and to no longer stifle freedom of speech and freedom of movement,” a member of the Alternative movement, Nikola Bezmarevic, told the media.

The main opposition group, the pro-Serbian Democratic Front also condemned the arrest.

The government has been clamping down hard lately on activists spreading “panic” on social media.

On January 24 police detained a well-known pro-Russian journalist, Igor Damjanovic, over his conversation on Facebook with another person who then filed a case against him. Damjanovic claimed the real reason for his detention was not his verbal exchange on Facebook but his long record of anti-NATO activism, which has irked the government.

On January 23 in a separate case concerning Facebook comments, police arrested Milija Goranovic from Niksic for allegedly insulting the country’s police chief, Veselin Veljovic. Media reports said Goranovic was fined 500 euros for telling Veljovic “not to talk rubbish” below a statement of the police director on Facebook.

One day after Goranovic was arrested, the US ambassador to Montenegro, Judy Rising Renke, reminded the government on twitter that freedom of speech was fundamental to democracy. “This really worries me. Public figures are routinely criticized and even insulted – it’s part of the job. I know. However, at the end of the day, we must defend the right to free speech,” she posted.

Two editors of local news websites, IN4S and Borba, Gojko Raicevic and Drazen Zivkovic, were detained on January 12 on suspicion of causing panic and public disorder. This was in connection with reports of an explosion at the Villa Gorica, a building in Podgorica used by the government for receptions. After they published their stories, some regional media republished the alleged information. The police later denied that any explosion had occurred and said that a minor electrical failure had occurred at the villa, which was soon repaired. They said Raicevic and Zivkovic were arrested for publishing information that had alarmed the public without checking the facts.

On January 5, the editor-in-chief of the Fos media website, Andjela Djikanovic was placed in detention for 72 hours for “causing panic and disorder” after claiming in an article that the government might call on security forces in neighbouring Kosovo to help quell Serbian Church supporters’ protests over the new legislation on religion.

The government has defended its tough response, however, saying it is coming under a systemic and organized attack. On January 14, the Culture Ministry said that the country had become the target of an organised “disinformation campaign” since it adopted the new law on religion. Authorities say they are the victims of a coordinated campaign to spread fake news, organised by a number of media outlets in the country and the region that are spreading religious and national hatred and violence.

Independent Media in Central and Southeast Europe Under ‘Assault’ – Report

Posted on January 22, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Reuters Institute report says ownership concentration and government hostility threaten the future of independent journalism throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Independent media developed in Central and Eastern Europe “in a dizzyingly short time frame” after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, a new Reuters Institute report says – but its future remains uncertain as a result of politicians’ hostility and ownership concentration under politically well connected moguls.

The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.

“In Europe, one of the safest continents in the world for press freedom, three journalists have been murdered in the last three years,” author Meera Selva of the Reuters Institute writes.

The report goes on to list the deaths of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, a country out of the area of study, Jan Kuciak in Slovakia and Viktoria Marinova in Bulgaria, all killed while reporting “on government corruption and organised crime”.

“They [the killings] happened in a climate where many journalists have been attacked and undermined and discredited by politicians, where the media have been captured or financially weakened, and where lawsuits have been used to systematically hamper and inhibit the pursuit of investigative, independent journalism,” the study said.

The report recalls that the 27-year-old Slovak journalist shot dead alongside his fiancée in February 2018 was part of a group of reporters who then prime minister Robert Fico in November 2016 called “anti-Slovak prostitutes” who “don’t inform” but just “fight with the government”.

Similarly aggressive language has been used against journalists in recent months in the Czech Republic, which two years ago dropped from 23rd place to 40th in the World Press Freedom Index, partly due to the concentration of media ownership “driven by the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis”.

In the Western Balkans, the report notes, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama “frequently refers to journalists as rubbish bins (kazan), while the leader of the opposition, Lulzim Basha, refers to the media as ‘captured and bought.’”

Rama’s government has also passed a set of so-called anti-defamation laws that allow state agencies to hear complaints about news sites, demand retractions, impose fines and even suspend their activity, the report reads.

In Montenegro, an investigative journalist, Olivera Lakic, was shot in the leg in May 2018. A month before, President Milo Djukanovic accused the publication she worked for, Vijesti, of promoting “fascist ideas”, after the newspaper revealed the business dealings of Djukanovic’s son’s when he was the ruling party leader.

Montenegrian journalist Olivera Lakic at the offices of Vijesti newspaper in Podgorica, Montenegro, 11 May 2018. Archive photo: EPA-EFE/BORIS PEJOVIC

Around 63 per cent of those who took part in the survey said politicians had criticized them in public speeches or on social media because of content they had published.

Some of the respondents said their harassers had used the same online space that has made publications known for their “fearless anti-corruption reporting”, such as Hungary’s 444.hu and Slovakia’s aktuality.sk, to troll and threaten them.

Over 64 per cent of those questioned said they had been victims of attacks because of their profession. Of that number, 83.3 per cent said they were attacked online, with over 16 per cent of them seeing sensitive personal information revealed online by their tormentors.

Media turned into government cartel

Marius Dragomir, whose own report, Media Capture in Europe, is quoted in the study, said: “The collusion between the political class and media owners has reached unprecedented levels, leading to a phenomenon known as media capture, a situation where most or all of the news media institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources.”

The report said the media had been exposed to this process in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria, among others, “where several commercial media outlets were sold to businessmen who wanted to use the media to boost their political influence”.

In Bulgaria, the report notes how a parliamentarian, Delyan Peevski, “who also owns the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer, gained control of a large number of media outlets, which he uses in an openly partisan way”.

A picture made available 13 April 2014 shows Bulgarian media mogul and politician Delyan Peevski during a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, 17 February 2012. Archive photo: EPA/STR

Hungary was described as the “most egregious case” of “media capture”. The report said: “Between 2014 and 2018 ownership of news assets shifted to and increasingly concentrated in the hands of pro-government oligarchs.”

Governments use the partisan distribution of advertising by the state and public companies against independent media in Hungary, Poland and Serbia, the report added.

Libel lawsuits and anti-terror laws used as weapons

Independent publications in these countries are also systematically subjected to lawsuits focusing on libel and defamation, while anti-terror and national security legislation is also used to make their work difficult.

“In many countries, freedom of information and national security laws essentially cancel one another out,” the report suggested.

One such case of this was Bosnia and Herzegovina, where “the Freedom of Access to Information Act guarantees access to most public records, but the Law on Protection of Secret Data denies access to information of most interest to journalists”.

In neighbouring Croatia, it added, “laws against defaming and insulting the state and its symbols, and laws against publishing what the law refers to as ‘humiliating’ media content, can be used to go after journalists even for publishing proven facts”.

In March 2019, it noted, the Croatian Journalists’ Association, CJA, held a rally to draw attention to 1,100 ongoing lawsuits filed by politicians, public figures and corporations against journalists. “The public broadcaster alone had filed 36 lawsuits against its own employees and others,” the study pointed out.

The protection of sources is often compromised in the region by the violations of journalists’ privacy.

Professionals interviewed in the study described being subjected to phone tapping and recording, email interceptions and pressures to reveal their sources.

Journalists listed the support of media organisations in their own countries as the most important source of protection against such pressures. Help with legal costs and support from international organizations came next.

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