North Macedonia Web Portals Hustle for Election Ads Cash

The prospect of making a quick buck from budget money intended for election advertising has encouraged a staggering 235 web portals, many with obscure backgrounds and identities, to register at the State Electoral Commission, DIK, for a slice of the pie.

BIRN’s analysis of the DIK list of web portals, published in Macedonian language, reveals that many have questionable professional standards and unclear backgrounds and ownership.

Of the 235 web portals that have registered, 92 do not reveal who the journalists and editors who work there are. Of those 92, effectively hiding their staff teams, 44 publish political news; the rest cover other topics, or have no clear theme.

Most of the portals that did disclose their journalistic teams are run by just one or two persons, it was also noticed. There are also cases where one team of journalists works in several portals.

There is no data about the owners or founders of 19 of the portals that have applied for state cash. They are registered in the United States, Panama, or in other places, by companies that conceal their true owners.

Some 50 of the portals are not even registered with the web domain .mk. Some resemble blogs rather than news sites, and have domains such as .live, .info or just .com.

The April 12 general elections are the second in North Macedonia in which the state budget will cover political party adverts in the media.

North Macedonia introduced this practice for last year’s presidential elections, when 83 portals registered for the cash.

The law allows parties to apply or up to two euros for every voter who voted for them in the last elections. The state plans to reserve about 3.6 million euros for this purpose.

While it is expected that most of this sum will be spent on ads on TV and radio and in newspapers, the rules allow one party or alliance also to spend up to 15,000 euros for promotional purposes in a single portal.

The more portals a publisher registers, the bigger its potential gain.

The head of the State-Anti-Corruption Commission, Biljana Ivanovska, was among the first to warn about the problems arising from these loopholes.

In an interview for BIRN, in Macedonian language, in January, she said only web portals that are already registered with the National Council for the Media, SEMM, should be allowed to register at the DIK list as well.

At the moment, the SEMM register contains 101 web portals that have disclosed ownership and journalistic teams, as well as known price lists. They have also pledged to respect professional and ethical codes.

But when parliament last made changes to the electoral law, last month, it ignored this advice and left the situation as is, meaning that any web portal can be registered without scrutiny.

More than half of all the web portals that have registered for part of the state advertising cash are not on the SEMM list.


Among the analysed data from the current DIK register, BIRN observed other curiosities. In few cases, for example, a single publisher has registered several versions of the same portal.

The publisher Prva Republika [First Republic], for example, has registered its site “Republika” three times, counting Macedonian, Albanian and the English versions of the same site as three separate sites. The web site of TV 21, which airs in Albanian and Macedonian, is similarly registered twice.

The DIK register shows a similar trend in several smaller towns, like Ohrid, Kriva Palanka, Delcevo, Valandovo and others, where the same local publishers have registered more than one web portal.

To maximize potential profits, some of the big national TV stations have also registered their websites separately from their TV stations. Some newspapers and many local radio and TV stations have done the same.

Apart from informative portals, the list also shows that sites that follow sports, lifestyle, and automotive industry have also been registered.

Turkey Arrests Journalists Over Reports on Turkish Intel Agent’s Funeral

A court in Istanbul ruled on Sunday to arrest Murat Agırel, a columnist with Yenicag Daily newspaper, and Yeni Yasam managing editor Ferhat Celik and editor-in-chief Aydın Keser over news reports on the funeral of a high-ranking intelligence officer who was killed in Libya.

Turkish prosecutors in Istanbul had previously launched an investigation against the journalists for exposing the identity of a field officer with the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) who served and died in Libya, where Turkey has been supporting the government in Tripoli against a rival eastern faction.

OdaTV news director Barıs Terkoglu and journalist Hulya Kılıc were also arrested on Friday after the outlet ran a news report and images of the funeral in Manisa province.

The court also ruled to block access to OdaTV’s website.

The prosecutor’s office said the journalists revealed information on intelligence activities and documents and that they put intelligence officers’ families and colleagues in danger.

However, the name of the MIT agent had previously been announced by Turkish lawmakers in parliament.

“You cannot escape from the responsibility of what you have done with pressuring the media,” Faik Oztrak, a spokesperson for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), told reporters on Friday.

The CHP and other opposition parties condemned the court ruling as politically motivated and an attack on press freedom.

The arrested journalists are known to be critical of the Turkish government.

The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deployed troops to Libya to support the UN-recognised National Accord Government in the capital, Tripoli, against the Libyan National Army, which backs a rival interim government based in the eastern port city of Tobruk.

Critics accuse the Turkish government of hiding the real number of soldiers and other public officers killed in conflicts in Libya and Syria.

Turkish media previously reported that a high-ranking colonel in the Turkish army was killed in Libya but he was buried in Turkey without any ceremony in a bid to avoid public anger.

Eighty-four journalists are currently behind bars, making Turkey one of the biggest jailers of journalists in the world. Media watchdog Reporters without Borders ranks Turkey 157th out of 180 countries on its Press Freedom Index.

Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkish authorities have closed 70 newspapers, 20 magazines, 34 radio stations and 33 television channels as part of Erdogan’s crackdown on his critics.

Senator Sees China’s Hand in Central Europe TV Sale

US Republican Senator Marco Rubio has asked the US Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General to launch “a full review of the national security implication of AT&T’s upcoming sale of the Central European Media Group Enterprises, CME, to the Czech-owned conglomerate PPF Group”.

AT&T is a US multinational telecommunications conglomerate and the largest shareholder at the CME. The owner of the PPF Group is Czech tycoon Peter Kellner, whom the Florida Senator accused of being a “China proxy”.

In 2018, Petr Kellner was set to buy Bulgaria’s largest media company, Nova Broadcasting, which owns some of the most popular commercial TV channels in the country, but the Bulgarian competition commission blocked the deal.

If PPF buys the CME, it will take control of popular TV channels in several Central European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia. It channels, including rating market leaders ProTV in Romania and bTV in Bulgaria, reach an audience of 97 million people, according to Rubio’s letter.

Rubio said this was potentially worrying. “The administration needs to conduct closer reviews of corporate deals like … [the] sale of CME, and understand how the Chinese government and Communist Party work through proxies like PPF,” he said.

Rubio, who co-chairs the Congressional Executive Commission on China, CECC, and is a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, warned of the threat that “the Chinese Communist Party’s political interference in foreign governments and societies” could pose to the countries where CME operates.

He argued that the sale would affect US national security, as Washington’s priorities include “preserving a free and open media environment overseas as well as preventing the Chinese Communist Party from subverting these platforms”.

US legislation authorises investigations of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers when “the acquirer is controlled by or acting on behalf of a foreign government” and when “the acquisition results in control of a person .. that could affect the national security of the United States.”

In Rubio’s view, the PPF Group already has “a record of acting as China’s proxies inside the Czech Republic” and its financial ties to China were clear.

“Approximately one-third of the PPF Group’s profits come from subsidiary Home Credit’s individual lending businesses in China,” the letter stated, adding that this “politically precarious business relies” on Beijing’s non-banking loans license.

The Senator claimed that Beijing uses the company to support “China’s malign activities abroad”. One example he cited involves Serbia, where he said that “PPF-owned telecommunications firms are working with Huawei to develop 5G networks”.

He also claimed that PPF subsidiary Home Credit “hired a public relations firm for 2,000 hours work devoted to manipulating Czech public opinion favorably toward China”.

This included “spying on Czech politicians, pressuring media to withdraw news articles critical of China and creating a new think-tank, Sinoskop, to employ biased analysts to influence public debate”.

INSI: Decline in 2019 Media Workers’ Deaths as They Pull Back from Deadly Conflicts

According to the annual report “Killing the Messenger,” published last Friday by London-based International News Safety Institute, INSI, a total of 48 journalists died in 2019 in incidents and accidents directly related to their work, the lowest number in 16 years.

That does not, however, mean journalists are now safer while doing their jobs, said INSI director Elena Cosentino.

“The decline in casualties was simply because fewer journalists reported from conflict zones in the first place,” Cosentino said.

“Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan were deemed simply too dangerous for either local or international media to cover and were dropped from many outlets’ news agenda.”

The deadliest country for media workers in 2019 was Mexico, with 12 reporters killed, followed by Tanzania (5), Afghanistan (4), Syria (4), Honduras (3) and Somalia (3).

Last year also marked the first time in 21 years that no journalist was killed in a foreign country, which comes as a result of media organisations pulling back their staff from the most dangerous places.

All 48 causalities in 2019 were local journalists reporting from their home countries, and the majority of them died while reporting on crime, politics and corruption by unknown perpetrators.

The past year proved partially successful in terms of investigations into the murders of some prominent journalists, including “significant legal developments in the killings of Ján Kuciak from Slovakia; Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Kashoggi; and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta,” the report said.

Slovak investigative reporter Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, were shot dead in their home in February 2018. The trial of four people accused of the brutal killing started in mid-January, while in December another accused was sentenced to 15 years in jail in a separate trial.

Jamal Kashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist, entered the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul in October 2018 and never came out. At first, Saudi Arabia denied having anything to do with the reporter’s disappearance, but then the authorities finally acknowledged that their own officials were behind the murder. The whereabouts of his body is still unknown.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese journalist, writer, and anti-corruption activist who was killed in a car bombing near her home in 2017. Last November, the case saw an important development when the main suspect and alleged sponsor of the crime was arrested. He then accused Keith Schembri, the chief of staff of former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, of ordering the assassination.

The murder, like that of Kuciak in Slovakia, sparked mass protests that forced the prime ministers of both countries to resign.

However, INSI said that the legal developments happened thanks to the enormous pressure brought by Caruana Galizia’s family and international media coverage.

“Daphne’s case proves that with enough time and pressure even the most powerful could one day be held to account,” Cosentino said.

“As happened in Malta, raising the cost of killing a journalist is the ultimate aim for everyone in the news industry. Despite the progress made in 2019, that still feels like a long way off.”

Serbia Urged to Come Clean on Journalists’ Surveillance

International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, RSF, has called on the Serbian authorities to investigate how much surveillance goes on in the country – after the Serbian news agency Tanjug on February 16 published a response written by the Defence Minister to a never-published opinion piece by a former defence minister.

The former defence minister and current opposition politician Dragan Sutanovac emailed his article on defence issues to the editor of the weekly Nedeljnik, Veljko Lalic, which decided not to run it.

RSF noted its concern that current minister Aleksandar Vulin felt able to respond to the unpublished material – and that he had said in his article that he was replying to the article Sutanovic had published in Nedeljnik.

On February 19, RSF’s European bureau chief, Pauline Adès-Mével, called on the Serbian authorities to investigate whether opposition politicians were being spied on.

“We are concerned that emails between opposition politicians and independent media outlets are being spied on and intercepted by the government,” Adès-Mével said.

“We call on the authorities to shed all possible light on this matter,” the press release added.

After the news broke, Vulin apologized to Nedeljnik and said he would ask the relevant bodies to look into the matter. Vulin’s staff later said its PR team had mistaken Nedeljnik for Kurir, a Belgrade-based tabloid that recently published an interview with Sutanovac.

But in his response article, Vulin only referred to Sutanovac’s comments about Serbia-Russia cooperation, which the unpublished piece contained, and was not mentioned in the Kurir interview.

Nedeljnik also said the authorities needed to find out whether any officials used the resources of the secret services to intercept emails between Sutanovac and Lalic.

“It is hard to believe that a person working constantly with the media, for example, someone in the defence ministry’s public relations department, would confuse the daily Kurir with the weekly Nedeljnik,” the weekly said.

This, however, is not the first time that concern about surveillance of politicians and journalists has arisen in Serbia.

In March 2016, the tabloid Informer published some of the findings of an investigation into the assets of Aleksandar Vucic – now president of Serbia, who was then prime minister – which the investigative website Krik had carried out but never published.

Serbia has been falling for years in the rankings of the World Press Freedom Index. It was ranked in 90th place out of 180 countries in the 2019 Index.

Serbia’s Independent N1 Portal Buffeted by Cyber-Attacks

N1 said the latest attacks happened last Thursday when a paid DDoS strike from China hit the Serbian website twice that day.

The attacks started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday afternoon. The second attack was five times stronger, with up to 300,000 access requests hitting the portal server a second.

The Independent Association of Serbian Journalists, NUNS, urged Serbia’s High-tech Crime Prosecutor to urgently discover who was behind the attacks.  

They come after a row erupted between the owner of the N1, United Group, and state-owned Telekom Srbija over broadcasting rights. 

After the two sides failed to reach a deal, Telekom stopped airing N1’s programmes, causing a stir among the general public and the media community as N1 is among the few remaining independent TV channels in the country. 

Luxembourg-based United Group claimed the real reason for the shutdown was political pressure and an attempt to silence government critics and the free media. 

But Telekom Serbia denied this, arguing that an agreement was not reached because United Group proposed an extension agreement that was not in line with Serbian legislation. 

Support for N1 has meanwhile come from the European Federation of Journalists. “We see the state-owned cable operator’s decision to drop N1 TV as an attempt to silence a critical voice in Serbia,” it said. 

Several recent reports have highlighted the lack of media freedom and pluralism in the Serbia, where the media is now largely controlled by the government, it allies or its proxies. 

According to the latest annual report by the rights organisation Human Rights Watch, Serbian journalists continue to face attacks and threats, while media plurality has become compromised, with most media now aligned to the ruling party.

Pro-government media outlets frequently smear independent outlets and journalists, describing them as “traitors” and “foreign mercenaries”, the same report noted.

A recent report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford said the future of the independent media in Southeast Europe remained uncertain as a result of political hostility and ownership concentration under politically connected moguls.

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