Tag: media

Pandemic May Reshape North Macedonia Media Landscape for Good

Posted on by BIRD

In March this year, as COVID-19 shut down North Macedonia, Ivana Ramadanova was working from home on a story about textile workers being laid off when she got her own marching orders from the news portal Lokalno.mk.

Management told Ramadanova, 36, and three other journalists they would not be needed from the beginning of April. Ramadanova complained to the Labour Inspectorate, arguing she had been fired based on a termination agreement she never signed. But when the company was ordered to take her back, it did so on worse terms. Ramadanova found somewhere else to work.

“It’s a horrible feeling,” she told BIRN. “When someone needs you, you’re good, but at the very first sign of a crisis they get rid of you.”

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, advertising revenues in the media sector have nose-dived around the world, triggering a wave of job losses.

North Macedonia is no different, but the precarious financial state of many media outlets in the Balkan country even before the pandemic means some face a fight to survive. Coupled with new work practices to adhere to social-distancing regulations, the pandemic has the potential to reshape the sector like never before.

“We have a decline in advertising of about 70 per cent,” said Atanas Kirovski, director and editor of Telma TV and head of the Macedonian Media Association, MMA, which represents five television broadcasters with national frequencies.

“It is happening all over the world, and we are no exception,” he told BIRN. “Our business directly depends on the situation. If it takes two years, I do not believe that all media in the country will survive. If it ends earlier, they still have a chance.”

Aid package ‘helpful at the moment’

Two years is the timeframe the World Health Organisation has put on efforts to rein in the novel coronavirus, providing a vaccine proves safe and effective.

Few in North Macedonia believe the state has the resources to keep media outlets alive that long.

According to a survey conducted by the Independent Trade Union of Journalists, 73 per cent of respondents said they needed financial assistance, and 30 per cent said they knew someone in the sector who had lost a job in recent months due to the crisis.

Since March, the state has provided three million euros in aid to the media sector, in the form of direct injections and tax breaks. Of that figure, 1.7 million went to 116 broadcasters, including 500,000 euros to the public broadcaster.

For a period of three months, the state took on the burden of health and pension contributions for employees of media companies that had managed to avoid any layoffs.

Media outlets also benefitted from a blanket aid package for all companies in the country by which the government covered up to 14,500 denars [235 euros] of each employee’s monthly salary.

Kirovski said the measures had cut Telma TV’s financial burden by about 20,000 euros and that the company was able to make regular salary payments.

“The government measures are helpful at the moment,” he said.


Infographic: BIRN

Dangers of state support

That the likes of respected global media giants The Guardian and the BBC have announced job losses since the onset of the pandemic has sent shockwaves through the global media industry.

“When practically two symbols of quality journalism show that they cannot cope with the crisis, what remains for others?” asked Brankica Petkovic, head of the Centre for Media Policy at the Peace Institute in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana.

While it is only normal in such circumstances that public and private media should turn to the state for help, Petkovic told BIRN, it is crucial that they guard their editorial independence.

This is particularly pertinent in North Macedonia, where the current Social Democrat-led government has yet to fully address the clientelism that characterised relations between the state and the media under former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski between 2006 and 2016.

Mladen Chadikovski, head of the Association of Journalists of Macedonia, said the aid risked turning into a trap.

“When there is a state of emergency as it is now, whether it is officially declared or not, there are dangers of passing solutions that are problematic,” Chadikovski told BIRN. “We would not like to use this period to establish a media fund that would remain and create risks of influencing editorial policy.”

He said media would be better off receiving aid in the former of tax breaks rather than direct transfers from state coffers.

Aid can’t last long

Some media experts believe the recession triggered by the pandemic and the widespread closure of businesses may do what no government or regulator in North Macedonia has dared – cut the number of media outlets.

North Macedonia confronted the pandemic with an unreformed public broadcaster, 115 commercial broadcasting companies, 12 newspapers, hundreds of Internet portals and an advertising pie of about 15-20 million euros.

“The media scene is already in big trouble – many media outlets and a small advertising market,” said Chadikovski. “If the crisis continues, these problems will increase.”

Goran Mihajlovski, owner and editor of the portal Sakam da kazham (sdk.mk), said online journalism was particularly vulnerable. Registered as a non-governmental organisation, his portal also benefits from donor-funded projects.

“If we were dependent on advertisements, we would have not existed either,” he said.

Dejan Georgievski of the Media Development Center, which provides legal and advocacy support to media workers in North Macedonia, said the aid provided by the state was not a long-term solution.

“The aid cannot last more than a few months, half a year at most,” he said

Georgievski is one of only a few media experts in the country to say a reduction in the size of the media sector would not necessarily be a bad thing.

“Those who are lucky to survive will have more resources at their disposal that will help their sustainability and help them offer better content, better information, but also be less dependent on public money and free of any economic and other types of pressure,” he told BIRN.

Working practices changed


Illustration: Unsplash.com

The pandemic has not changed only the financial outlook for media outlets.

Social distancing measures have dramatically altered how journalists do their jobs.

“We have introduced work in shifts, so that if a colleague becomes infected and others have to go into isolation, the other shift can cover the work,” said Telma TV’s Kirovski. “But that meant that we always worked at 50 per cent capacity, while the other 50 per cent was on standby.”

Journalists at most Internet portals and some print media worked from home, encountering the same problems as those in other professions in balancing work and childcare. Smaller newsrooms struggled to adhere to government requirements that the parents of children under 10 years of age be exempted from work.

“I had to be a journalist, a babysitter and a mother at the same time, and the editor was not interested,” said one journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If I wasn’t online for 15 minutes he would immediately ask where I was.”

Movement restrictions and limited access to data and interviewees have hurt the quality of output, both in terms of content and technical quality.

“Of course it had an impact on the quality of work – the shifts are smaller, there are fewer journalists, editors, cameramen, editors available,” said Chadikovski.

Mihajlovski of Sakam da kazham said: “It’s not easy when you can’t go into the field, talk to people, but instead you have to work from a distance.”

Those who could not work from home or online paid a different price.

“We have to attend all the events, because of which we are constantly under stress, having even panic attacks,” said a journalist of a regional radio station who declined to be named.

Another, in Skopje, told BIRN: “I was talking to a mayor, who shook my hand to say goodbye. I returned the greeting so as not to be rude. A few days later, when he announced that he tested positive for the virus, I was in a terrible panic for the next two weeks.”

“Obviously one moment of carelessness is enough,” said Hristina Belovska, a reporter at TV 24 Television who tested positive during North Macedonia’s July parliamentary election.

“Our work is fieldwork and that cannot be changed. We were provided with protective equipment, we also had training on how to protect ourselves and recommendations not to put ourselves at risk. However, I ended up positive. I discovered it by accident and I do not know how it happened. It just shows how serious the situation with the virus is.”

In the survey conducted by the Independent Trade Union of Journalists, 22 per cent of respondents said they had not been provided with protective equipment.

Nothing will be the same

Ironically, given the financial strain on media, audiences have grown during the pandemic, with television broadcasters reaching twice or three times their usual number of viewers per day between January and June, compared to the same period of 2019 and 2018, according to surveys conducted by the Agency of Audiovisual Media Services.

For example, the percentage of respondents who said they had watched Kirovski’s Telma TV the day before, grew from 12 to 32.

“Undoubtedly, the fact that many people stayed at home and that something completely new was happening that affected everyone and that affected our daily lives, such as the spread of the coronavirus, contributed to a significant increase in media interest,” said Magdalena Davidovska Dovleva, head of the Agency’s Sector for Research and Long-Term Development.

It remains to be seen which of these changes will stick long-term, but all of BIRN’s interlocutors agreed the media landscape will be altered for good.

“The coronavirus has deepened the problems in the media sphere, but it may also help us find faster solutions,” said Petkovic of the Peace Institute in Ljubljana.

This project is financially supported by The Royal Norweigan Embassy in Belgrade. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of The Royal Norweigan Embassy, the Balkan Trust for Democracy, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, or its partners. 

North Macedonia Editor Faces Charges of Revealing Official Secrets

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Media unions and watchdogs in North Macedonia have said they want to look into why a news portal editor has been charged with revealing official secrets.

The owner and editor-in-chief of Ekonomski Lider news portal, Ljupcho Zlatev, is accused of publishing two articles in July in which he has revealed classified documents from the former Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, UBK, which was recently been transformed into Agency for National Security, ANB, and which he obtained illegally. He faces up to five years in prison if found guilty.

The two texts, published on July 9 and July 12, refer to a former employee of the now-defunct UBK who did not pass the security checks needed to transfer into the newly formed ANB.

Allegedly, this was because his father had participated in street protests against the change of the country’s name, which parliament had approved in early 2019, as part of a historic agreement with Greece.

“In both texts, the accused made available to the public copies of UBK documents – acts from operational checks on a person – which are listed as classified info,” the prosecution in Skopje said on Thursday.

The ANB was formed in 2019 under a law supported by both the government and opposition to replace the notorious secret police, the UBK, which was at the centre of an illegal wiretapping scandal in 2015.

To strengthen oversight over its work, the ANB no longer operates as part of the Interior Ministry but as an independent government body. It also no longer has police powers or is in charge of the technical process of surveillance, which was given to a separate agency.

But, as most of its employees come from the old UBK, a selection or vetting process was introduced to ensure that old corrupt para-intelligence structures did not get through.

Zlatev, who was seen as part of the PR machinery of former PM Nikola Gruevski and often perceived as a propagandist rather than a journalist, defended his action on social networks, saying that he had acted in the public interest.

Over the past two years, seven complaints of unethical and unprofessional conduct have been filed against Zlatev to the Journalistic Council of Ethics, a self-regulation body.

“I published [the texts] because after one father attended the protests against the change of name [to the country], his son lost his security certificate and the chance to work in the ANB,” he wrote.

“This UBK construct is a classic blow to citizens’ political freedoms and big public interests, so that is why I published the documents that a whistle-blower gave me.

“If I got similar documents now, I would also publish them without thinking twice!!! I could repeat the act because freedom and democracy are more important to me than any legal provision,” Zlatev added.

The country’s oldest and biggest media union, the Association of Journalists of Macedonia, ZNM, said it would look into the case and demand answers from the prosecution.

“We don’t know all the details of the case and analysis needs to be done. But every time a case is opened by the prosecution in the domain of freedom of expression and the right to inform, it can be problematic,” ZNM head Mladen Cadikovski told 360 Degrees news portal on Thursday.

“The public interest can be stronger than the law if publication reveals the misuse of certain institutions. We are demanding a meeting with [chief] prosecutor [Ljubomir] Joveski on several topics, and this will be one of the issues that we wish to discuss,” Cadikovski added.

Index Sacking Worsens Pressure on Hungary’s Free Media

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Hungary’s largest and most widely read online news site may be the next victim in the fight for press freedom in Central Europe, after Index’s editor-in-chief, Szabolcs Dull, was unexpectedly fired on Wednesday by the president of the foundation that owns it.

The official explanation for Dull’s removal was that, as editor-in- chief, he had created unfavourable market conditions by communicating – a month ago – that the news site’s independence was at stake.

Dull met with the editorial team on Wednesday and said he had been offered a substantial amount of money “if he kept his mouth shut”. He said he declined the offer and instead pleaded for “his colleagues not to be silent”.

Index has no new editor-in chief at the moment; most eyes are on Dull’s predecessor, senior editor Attila Tóth-Szenesi, who is respected by his colleagues.

Dull told his final meeting with colleagues that there had been a lot of pressure on the editorial team recently, but that most of the outside criticism was not based on the content but on the organization of the news site. A few weeks ago, a controversial business plan was leaked that aimed to cut the editorial team into shreds and remove much of its independence. The restructuring would was necessary to keep the company afloat, some members of the board of directors had reportedly argued.

But, according to BIRN’s sources, the site’s financial problems have been over-estimated and exaggerated by some members of the board to put the journalists under pressure. “The money that they said Index owes the sales house could easily have been paid back, but then they came up with further demands, just to keep up the pressure,” one journalist told BIRN earlier.

Index is owned by a foundation, but all its revenues come through the sales house, Indamedia, which is currently owned by two managers close to the government of Viktor Orban. One of them, Miklós Vaszily, is also the chairman of the government-close private television TV2, and played a role at “taming” Origo, the other main online news site, some years ago.

Since Vaszily obtained 50 per cent of the shares in Index’s saleshouse in mid-March, most journalists were aware that the government was preparing for a push against the remaining flagship for independent journalism in Hungary.

Hungary’s governing Fidesz party has an impressive track record when it comes to silencing critical media. It mostly relies on a strategy of sticks and carrots: instead of directly cracking down on disobedient media, it hires loyal businessmen to act as middlemen.

It also conceals its political motives with the excuse of the media outlet’s financial difficulties – mostly created by its own distortion of the advertising market. Government-loyal media receive as much as 87 per cent of all state advertising, regardless of the number of their readers, research done by the Mérték Media Monitor Institute has indicated.

Croatian PM Accused of ‘Shameful’ Accusations Against Journalist

Posted on by Ivana Jeremic

Andrej Plenkovic was accused of “shameful” behaviour for claiming during Monday’s pre-election debate on the private RTL channel that a journalist from the Croatian public broadcaster, Maja Sever, prepared his political rival Davor Bernardic for the televised showdown.

“Shameful behaviour by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, who accused colleague Maja Sever of working for the [opposition] SDP [Social Democratic Party] during a debate with Davor Bernardic on RTL. Unworthy of the office of Prime Minister,” Hrvoje Zovko, president of the Croatian Journalists’ Association, wrote on Twitter.

Zovko also claimed that Plenkovic constantly accuses journalists of working for the opposition.

But Plenkovic told reporters on Tuesday that this was not an attack on Sever, who he said he respects.

“If anyone has a feeling for journalists, then I have,” Plenkovic said.

The long-awaited TV debate ahead of this Sunday’s elections saw the two likeliest candidates for the next prime minister face each other in the studio – Plenkovic from the ruling conservative Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, and Social Democratic Party, SDP president Bernardic.

During the debate, Plenkovic asked Bernardic if Sever prepared him for the show, because Bernardic came to the studio with a sheaf of documents, which included data and graphs that he tried to use to prove the failures of Plenkovic’s government.

Sever is president of the Trade Union of Croatian Journalists and a longtime journalist with Croatian public broadcaster HRT. She collaborates with the host and editor of the HRT talk show ‘Nedjeljom u dva’ (‘Sunday at 2 pm’), Aleksandar Stankovic, on which Plenkovic was a guest on June 14.

During that show, Stankovic confronted Plenkovic with some of his unfulfilled promises. Afterwards, according to media reports, Stankovic received criticism from his superiors for attacking the prime minister too much.

On Monday evening, Sever wrote on social media that before the HRT show on June 14, she and Stankovic prepared a few graphs and a list of Plenkovic’s statements and promises from the 2016 election campaign.

“It is an ordinary and simple journalistic job. I emphasise journalistic… The comments by the president of the HDZ [Plenkovic], who permits himself to say… that I was preparing someone for debate, is another attack by Andrej Plenkovic on independent journalism,” Sever wrote.

On June 23, Plenkovic also accused N1 TV journalist Hrvoje Kresic of agitating for the opposition after Kresic asked him if he would go into self-isolation when it was revealed that he had been in contact with tennis player Novak Djokovic, who was infected with coronavirus during a tennis tournament in Zadar in Croatia.

“I know you like to agitate for a team that you would like to not be in opposition, but in power,” Plenkovic told the N1 reporter. Kresic replied that he was not agitating but asking questions as a journalist.

The Croatian Journalists’ Association responded to this by saying that Plenkovic should stop making “inadmissible accusations against journalists who ask legitimate questions”.

“Journalists work neither for the government nor for the opposition, they work exclusively in the public interest,” the association said.

Erdogan’s Turkey Targets Remaining Media Critics

Posted on by BIRD

Already one of the biggest jailers of journalists in the world, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now turning the screws on the handful of independent media outlets left as the government seeks to silence criticism of its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, media watchdogs and experts say.

Since a failed coup in mid-2016, authorities under Erdogan have closed 70 newspapers, 20 magazines, 34 radio stations and 33 television channels, accusing them of ties to ‘terrorism’ and the man they allege masterminded the abortive putsch, US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

A handful of independent outlets remain, but they too now face fresh pressure over their coverage of Turkey’s efforts to tackle the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus and its impact on the country’s already shaky economy.

The state broadcasting regulator, Radio and Television Supreme Council, RTUK, recently fined several TV channels over their coverage of the government’s COVID-19 strategy, including FOX TV, broadcaster of Turkey’s most watched television news show anchored by Fatih Portakal.

On April 7, the regulator banned Portakal’s show for three days, accusing him of bias.

If FOX TV is fined once more for the same reason, it risks losing its licence. The broadcaster has appealed the decision but there has been no official response.

Erdogan has also weighed in personally, suing Portakal for spreading lies and manipulating the public. The anchor faces a potential prison sentence of three years.

“Some media and politicians are more dangerous than the virus,” Erdogan said on April 13. “They attack and criticise the government instead of supporting it in these difficult days, but our country will get rid of media and political viruses very soon.”

Critics of the government say it fears for its political future after losing a number of key Turkish cities to the opposition in local elections last year, with the economic crisis worsening since the onset of the pandemic.

Gokhan Durmus, General Secretary of the Journalists’ Union of Turkey, TGS, said the saga over Portakal and FOX was symptomatic of the government’s treatment of the press.

“The pressure and investigations against the media increased during the pandemic,” Durmus told BIRN. “In particular, media institutions and journalists who question or criticise government measures face a serious threat from the government via fines, legal investigations and blackmail.”

Government fears for its future – expert


A Turkish policeman with face mask blocks the main road during curfew in Istanbul, Turkey, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/TOLGA BOZOGLU

With some 139,000 confirmed cases and 3,786 deaths as of May 11, Turkey has been hit hard by the pandemic, piling pressure on a government already struggling on the economic and political front.

Media watchdog Reporters without Borders ranks Turkey 154th out of 180 countries in terms of media freedom, characterising the country as “not free” on its Press Freedom Index.

According to this year’s Turkish Press Freedom Report, published on May 3, 85 journalists are in Turkish prisons and 103 journalists arrested and awaiting trial.

The report says that, between April 2019 and April 2020, RTUK applied administrative sanctions against television broadcasters in 20 cases and halted the broadcasting of 16 channels.

It also said that over 80 per cent of Turkish journalists believe they suffer from censorship and more than 78 per cent say they self-censor.

Mehmet Onur Cevik, an expert on Turkish media and politics at the University of Ghent in Belgium, said Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, already control 90 per cent of the media in Turkey.

“However,” he said, “the government left a small floor to a certain degree of independent and critical media as well as opposition parties.”

The AKP uses the existence of a small number of independent media outlets, as well as democratic elections, “to prove its political legitimacy against accusations of being authoritarian and oppressing its critics,” Cevik said.

“However, now things have changed because the economic crisis has deepened following the COVID-19 pandemic and people speak more about the government’s wrongdoings.”

The ruling party has gone on the offensive, he told BIRN, “since for the first time they fear for their political future. They fear that even news about the worsening economy can trigger a tsunami.”

Intolerance of criticism


A group of workers disinfect the Turkish Parliament General Assembly to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in Ankara, Turkey, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/STR

RTUK and Turkey’s Press Ad Agency, BIK, which controls state advertising spending, are state institutions originally established to protect journalists, regulate their work and make sure media across the board are on a secure financial footing.

“However, in the last two years, these institutions started to do what the government wants and they turned into the government’s hammer,” said Durmus.

“Journalists face continuous legal investigations and the penalties from Turkish state institutions such as RTUK and intensified in recent years. Just during the pandemic, 13 journalists have been detained because of their coverage.”

“The government does not want to hear anything that differs from its own opinion,” said Durmus. “With these recent penalties and continuous pressure, the government indirectly told journalists that they will be fined if they say anything critical about the government’s policies.”

After years of economic crisis, the government has been caught short on firepower to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and is trading political blows with opposition-run cities.

In what critics say is a blatant bid to control the narrative, the government announced new legislation on May 7 concerning ‘manipulation’ of financial markets and targeting allegedly “deceptive” news about the economy.

It has also tabled to parliament a new law on digital rights, to the alarm of rights groups which say it will increase government control over social media platforms and potentially force some to quit the country.

“The AKP had never been so uncomfortable with independent media, social media and the opposition, because it feels that its rule is being threatened,” said Cevik.

“So they target the media, opposition and whoever thinks differently, even at the cost of losing legitimacy.”

Prominent Kosovo Serb Journalist Says Intimidation Worsening with COVID-19

Posted on by BIRD

Arrested on April 11 while trying to report on the fight against COVID-19, a prominent journalist in the mainly Serb north of Kosovo says local authorities have stepped up pressure on her outlet since the onset of the pandemic.

Tatjana Lazarevic, editor-in-chief of the online news portal KosSev, was detained by police on the road from the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica/Mitrovice to nearby Zvecan, where she planned to go to the local health centre to investigate what she said were “multiple complaints” about its readiness to deal with cases of the novel coronavirus.

“It is very difficult to get official information,” Lazarevic, 50, told BIRN.

She was accused of violating a weekend curfew imposed to slow the spread of the disease, despite the fact that, under rules in Kosovo, journalists are exempt from the movement restrictions. Released after several hours without charge, Lazarevic said she suspects the episode was the latest attempt to intimidate KosSev by those who run northern Kosovo.

“I believe that there is a visible intention to create a profile picture of our media as an enemy of the state, an enemy of the people, that we are an enemy of the government,” Lazarevic told BIRN.

That state is Serbia, which continues to hold sway in northern Kosovo more than 20 years after the majority-Albanian territory broke away in war and 12 years since it declared independence with the backing of the West.

The public health system in northern Kosovo continues to function, de facto at least, as part of the Serbian health system, reflected in the fact that COVID-19 tests in the north are processed in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Serbia does not recognise Kosovo as independent.

Pandemic brings more pressure

KosSev was formed in 2014 as an online news portal covering primarily northern Kosovo.

According to Lazarevic, who grew up in Mitrovica/Mitrovice, the site aims to provide properly-reported, impartial and objective information, not necessarily exposés. But in Kosovo, particularly the north, that is enough to invite trouble.

In its short life, KosSev and its small staff has faced cyber-attacks, threats and pressure on a regular basis. And it has recently become worse, Lazarevic said.

“This last phase of pressure has intensified since the start of the pandemic,” she told BIRN.

On Saturday, Lazarevic set out on foot for Zvecan, hoping to see “on the spot” the work of the Zvecan health clinic but also to see the extent of police security along the road during the curfew. Other people were also on the road.

A police car passed her three times. The third time, it slowed down and Lazarevic approached, believing the officers wanted to see her ID. But the car moved on.

“When I was completely alone,” she said, “a van of the [police] intervention unit suddenly appeared. Through an open window, they said, ‘Good afternoon, you have violated the medical prohibition on movement’.” Ten minutes later, Lazarevic entered the vehicle and was taken to the police station.

Lazarevic said she tried to explain to the officers that she was out conducting her work as a journalist and to show them her press credentials. She was released after a couple of hours without being given any further information.

The mainly Serb north of Kosovo is controlled by Srpska Lista, which answers to Serbia’s ruling Progressive Party.

While relations with the Kosovo government in Pristina are far from rosy, she said, the threat comes from the north. Lazarevic described them as “friendly visits” – from a torched KosSev car in 2015 to direct threats, hacks and a wall of silence among public institutions.

“Srpska Lista controls all the power or all the political life of Serbs in Kosovo,” she said.

Greek Govt Support for Media Comes at Expense of Transparency

Posted on by BIRD

A decision by Greek Prime Minister Kuriakos Mitsotakis’ secretary-general to commit 11 million euros from the national budget to an urgent publicity campaign that will run until the end of May to promote measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 has raised alarm among opposition MPs.

Urgent legislation was already introduced on March 11, obliging TV and radio stations to regularly broadcast short public health messages for free.

Another piece of legislation on March 30 suspended payments for six television companies of the annual fees they pay for nationwide licences to broadcast.

As each of them was due to pay 3.5 million euros in 2020, this year’s loss of income would be up to 21 million euros. The content of the legislation is vague and it remains unclear if, when and how the suspended fees will be paid in the future.

The decisions have raised criticism among opposition MPs that the government is using the COVID-19 measures to improve its relations with the media without transparency.

More concerns were raised when the contract to implement the 11-million-euro publicity campaign was directly awarded to a private company with a three per cent commission on the total amount, which amounts to 330,000 euros. The criteria for how media outlets will be chosen to carry the publicity material and what amounts of money will be distributed to the chosen media outlets have also not been made public.

On top of this, the implementation of the programme by a private company removes the responsibility to upload information on the allocation of funds to the public transparency registry, which would have been necessary if the government had decided to implement the programme without an intermediary.

“There are a number of pertinent questions around this campaign that the government will have to answer,” veteran MP Sofia Sakorafa from the Mera 25 party told BIRN.

“Why is this campaign necessary if media are already obliged to broadcast free messages and they are reporting on COVID-19 from early morning till late at night anyway? How was the implementing partner chosen, using which criteria and out of what other companies? Since we are talking about public funds, which state or independent authority will examine which allocations [are made] and under what criteria they happened? Is there going to be transparency so we all learn which media were funded and with how much?”

An urgent meeting of the Greek parliament’s Transparency Committee discussed the issues on April 10. Answering questions regarding the direct award to a private company as well as the suspension of TV licence payments, government spokesperson Stelios Petsas responded that “if we held a tender we would need at least six months” before starting the campaign, which would be completely inefficient.


Greek Parliament building in Syntagma square and the empty streets of the capital city of Athens, Greece, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREAS TSAKNARIDIS

He also insisted that in the end, the amounts given to media companies under the programme will be made public and that TV licenses fees would be paid in full.

But Syriza MP Nikos Voutsis, who was president of the Greek parliament from Oct 2015 to July 2019, told BIRN that the answers were less than satisfying.

“Due to past experience we know the government can bring in an urgent amendment anytime and exempt TV channels from paying these obligations. The future will prove what the intentions of the government are on this issue. Until then, this suspension is a small first gift,” Voutsis said.

But the lack of scrutiny over the 11-million-euro campaign is an even bigger problem, he argued.

“The big issue is that they are evading the obligation to publish the information on the transparency registry. The spokesperson has not taken any step back, it’s not a practical issue but a political choice, since the previous government had put in place a transparent process to distribute ten million euros of support funding to the press,” he said.

“We believe this is a process that should only take place with bipartisan cooperation and consensus based on the existing media registry [of outlets that can receive state funding],” he added.

The Greek press’s circulation has collapsed since COVID-19 lockdown measures were introduced. To contain the downward trend, owners and employees’ associations asked for newspapers to be circulated through supermarket chains – a move to which the government agreed at the end of March.


Illustration. Photo: EPA-EFE/ORESTIS PANAGIOTOU

The association of regional newspapers has asked that 30 per cent of the 11-million-euro package is committed to the regional press. It also claimed that urgent advertising bought by regional municipalities around the country “is not following any of the criteria envisaged by the law”.

According to the law, public funding should follow certain criteria based on circulation and readership as well as the income of each media outlet being funded, in order to protect pluralism and objectivity and avoid influence.

Meanwhile, according to experts, TV viewing ratings have increased by 25 per cent since the lockdown, and bymore than 60 per cent among four-to-17-year-olds, but profits are estimated to have plummeted by 30 per cent since mid-February.

Greek journalist Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou, a member of an investigative journalists’ consortium called The Manifold, told BIRN that transparency is the key issue that must be addressed.

“Support for the media is necessary, but distributing money in a habitat like that of the Greek media, which is notorious for its lack of transparency and clientelistic relations, without making clear immediately who gets what and why, is a very serious issue,” Papadimitriou said.

He argued that without transparency, no matter how much support is given, the big issues that shape the media situation in Greece won’t be addressed.

“There is no excuse for a lack of transparency in distributing funds from the government to a media landscape that was already largely abstaining from contesting the government’s actions, even before the coronavirus crisis,” he said.

“It is even more worrying when that happens in a situation in which media, their owners, who are also involved in other sectors of the economy, and the political class have proved to be co-dependent in many ways,” he added.

‘Vox Populi’: How Serbian Tabloids and Twitter Bots Joined Forces

Posted on by BIRD

Tweets by a more than 8,000-strong ‘troll army’ promoting Serbia’s ruling party and President Aleksandar Vucic regularly found their way into news stories published by Serbian media in the last couple of years before Twitter took them down last month.

Twitter deleted 8,558 accounts engaged in “inauthentic coordinated activity” – some 43 million tweets criticising the Serbian opposition, independent media and individuals critical of Vucic and his Progressive Party rule.

But the bots were not alone.

Analysing just five of the thousands of accounts, BIRN found their tweets were embedded in stories published by the likes of pro-government tabloids Informer, Kurir and Espreso at least 23 times, suggesting the total number across the network may run into the hundreds.

The tweets were often presented as supporting evidence of the unpopularity of Vucic’s opponents; others were picked up by both Serbian and Russian media as proof of the popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the time of his red-carpet visit to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, in January 2019.

“Weighing in on Twitter disputes and dogpiling onto opposition tweets did not just alter the Twitter landscape in favor of SNS-aligned figures and to the detriment of the opposition,” the Stanford Internet Observatory, a US-based research, teaching and policy program that looks at abuse of information technologies, particularly social media, said in a report in early April.

“In some cases, these tweets would get taken up by web publications as “organic” critical content,” it said, noting that some stories cited tweets from multiple accounts in the network.

In the April 2 report, “Fighting Like a Lion for Serbia”: An Analysis of Government-linked Operations in Serbia, the Observatory said that another important function of the deleted accounts was to “push out links to content on SNS-aligned news websites,” including sns.org.rs and vucic.rs [the official websites of SNS and Vucic, respectively], as well as media outlets such as informer.rs, alo.rs and pink.rs, all staunchly pro-Vucic.

The report, for example, cited a tweet by the editor-in-chief of Informer, Dragan Vucicevic, in which he criticised opposition politician Borko Stefanovic. The tweet was replied to 64 times by the troll accounts.

“This kind of propagation suggests that the network’s influence extended beyond Twitter—although it is impossible to assess the extent of this influence with much precision,” the Observatory wrote.

Snjezana Milivojevic, professor of Public Opinion and Media Studies at Belgrade’s Faculty of Political Sciences, said the Twitter bots and pro-government media were “parts of the same strategy”.

“The Internet is a large free space, so, by directing attention, bots help to prevent the dispersal of the public and help friendly media such as Informer, Pink and Alo to function as a well-run factory of the same fake news,” Milivojevic told BIRN.

Network built to boost retweets and reply counts


Some of the tweets that ended up in mainstream media such as Epreso, Kurir, Informer and other media outlets. “Local government in Cajetina put a mortgage on a parcel where the bones of World War II victims remain. Unbelievable what these people are capable of. Stamatovic, aren’t you ashamed?”Ivan Ilic, wrote on Twitter, later was republished in Informer. Illustration: BIRN

According to the Stanford report, one of the top three bot accounts taken down last month operated under the name ‘Mirjana Kujovic’ [@1kujovic].

The account’s tweets found their way into Serbian and Russian media more than once. Following Putin’s 2019 visit, the Russian website fontanka.ru cited a January 17, 2019 Kujovic tweet as evidence of the warm welcome Putin received.

Months earlier, in October 2018, a negative comment made by the Kujovic account under tweets by Serbian opposition politicians Bojan Pajtic and Vuk Jeremic was then embedded in a story by the tabloid Espreso.

The same month, another tabloid, Srbija Danas, published a Kujovic tweet criticising academic Dusan Teodorovic, a founder of the opposition Movement of Free Citizens, PSG.

Kurir also got involved, quoting another later-deleted bot popular with pro-government tabloids in Serbia – Ivan Ilic [@grofodValjeva]. 

The more than 8,500 accounts deleted by Twitter “worked steadily to legitimate Vucic’s policies and undercut public support for his opponents,” the Standard Internet Observatory wrote.

The accounts tweeted more than 43 million times – 85 per cent retweets.

While some were active in 2009, within months of the Progressive Party’s founding the year before, the network began ramping up its activities in mid-2018, the Stanford report said, right before the start of large, regular anti-government protests under the banner “1 of 5 million’.

The average number of followers attracted by the accounts was just 66, but combined they reached roughly 2.3 million Twitter users. @belilav11 and @1kujovic racked up 12,167 and 10,867 followers and more than 330,000 and 390,000 engagements respectively.

Engagement, however, was not the primary purpose, the report said.

“…they existed primarily to boost retweet and reply counts for other accounts,” it said. “This was consistent with the political aims of this network, which revolved around artificially boosting Vucic and his allies on Twitter.”

The network and its media allies, Milivojevic said, were working to manipulate the Serbian public.

“With 43 million messages [tweets] in which someone is praised or criticised, that manipulation also entails a decline in trust in the media by erasing the boundary between truth and lies,” Milivojevic told BIRN.

And the bots work in concert with genuine, popular Twitter users and pro-government tabloids and broadcasters, she said.

“What is published in tabloids is taken over by influential Twitter users… Then anonymous bots retweet and spread it, and from there on their tweets are going back to informative talk shows, where politicians or analysts bring them in [printed] and show them around,” Milivojevic said, referring to the Pink TV talk show Hit Tvit [Hit Tweet].

‘Like the plague’


Serbian progressive party (SNS) leader Aleksandar Vucic (front- C) addresses the media at a polling station in Belgrade, Serbia. Photo: EPA/ANDREJ CUKIC/ANDREJ CUKIC

Andrej Petrovski, head of tech at the SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based digital rights NGO, said Twitter’s deletion of so many accounts should serve as a warning to Serbia’s ruling party.

Creating and managing such a vast network takes a lot of time and people, he said, people he described as members of the SNS “party machinery” each running at least 10 Twitter accounts.

“Twitter made it clear with this move: if you do it all over again, we will do the same, and then you will think whether you want to invest that amount of time, effort and money again knowing it can all disappear overnight,” Petrovski told BIRN.

Some, however, say the bots are back already, promoting the party line amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They are like plague now,” said Jovana Gligorijevic, a journalist with the weekly political magazine Vreme and a frequent target of the SNS bots.

“They are all parts of the same machinery,” she told BIRN. “They create a fake vox populi [voice of the people].”

Gligorijevic said that whenever she uses the words ‘Aleksandar Vucic, ‘minister,’ ‘SNS’, ‘the president’ or ‘the prime minister’, she is bombarded by insults and negative comment, to the degree that she once deleted her account. 

“The bots react on those key words,” Gligorijevic said. “This is one network for absolute media control.”

BIRN editor Slobodan Georgiev has also been ensnared.

“First they insult you on Twitter, then that is published in tabloids and then you end up in the ‘analysis’ on tabloid TV stations,” he said.

A bigger problem, however, “is that they make you an ‘enemy’, and that comes directly from the top of SNS, which leads these bot divisions,” he said. And that makes journalism difficult.

“Then you are labelled a danger to the state and people working in the system start avoiding you and stop responding.”

Serbian Govt Takes Control of Information Flow About Pandemic

Posted on by BIRD

All local crisis headquarters and medical institutions in Serbia must send any information about the coronavirus pandemic to the central Crisis Staff led by Prime Minister Ana Brnabic – which will then inform the public about anything regarding COVID-19, the government in Belgrade has decided.

“Mayors and municipal presidents and emergency staffs of local government units are obliged to direct all information regarding the condition and consequences of COVID-19 … exclusively to the [national] Crisis Staff, which will carry out the necessary checks and take appropriate measures to inform the public in a timely and accurate manner,” the decision taken on Sunday says.

“Information on health measures taken and other information related to the treatment of COVID-19 … given to the public by unauthorized persons cannot be considered accurate and verified,” the government added by way of explanation, going on to warn of the “possibility of applying regulations relating to liability and legal consequences for the spread of misinformation in a state of emergency.”

As a result, local crisis headquarters in Serbia may no longer inform local communities of developments directly. Media outlets on Tuesday were also notified that they will no longer can get information from local authorities directly.

Dejan Kovacevic, president of the municipality of Gornji Milanovac, told a press conference that while he understood the new rules, local government units will still hold press conferences “as needed about what they have done, and are doing, to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Some NGOs in Serbia have voiced unease with the move to control the flow of information, saying that the solution is not in line with the advice of United Nations experts, or of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has called for journalists to be allowed to work without obstacles “in order to provide citizens with access to key information”.

Serbia imposed state of emergency on March 15. By April 1, 23 people had died from complications caused by COVID-19 and 900 cases of infection were confirmed in total.

Rama Takes his War on Media to Albanians’ Phones

Posted on by BIRD

Albanian mobile phone users have unexpectedly received a recorded message from the Prime Minister, advising them on how to protect themselves from the coronavirus – and the media.

“Wash your hands, don’t move from your house for pleasure, open windows as much as you can, protect yourself from the media,” the message from Edi Rama said.

However often mobile phone users called, they had to listen to the message again, as there was no way of silencing it.

Users of Telekom Albania mobile network got a slightly different message, merely advising them to protect themselves from false information.

The media is an old target for the Socialist premier, who over the years has seen his image tarnished by reports of links with organised crime, of controversial public contracts awarded to local companies without competition and of other scandals involving misuse of public funds.

Rama has often attempted to deflect the blame by running a war against the media, and claiming all the allegations against him are manufactured lies.

He once called Voice of America the voice of “the garbage bin” and more lately, he sued the German tabloid Bild for defamation, over leaked tapes that apparently showed close collaboration between Socialist politicians and underworld figures in vote buying and pressuring public officials to vote for the party.

Last November, as the country faced another crisis caused by an earthquake – and faced with questions over government preparedness against natural calamities – Rama threatened unnamed media with closure, claiming he would use extraordinary powers against those who “spread panic”.

Albania is now facing one of the most serious crises in its recent history as the economy goes into freefall thanks to the stringent restrictions Rama has put in place to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

The PM recently attempted to push forward law changes to create a regulatory body for online media, which has proven more difficult to control than the conventional TV networks that operate through government-awarded permits. The law has been blocked amid intense international pressure, however.

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