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Central Europe
May 4, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
national-conservative party that won the Octo- ber 2015 general election, from pushing on with its plan to radically reform Poland as it sees fit, taking no account of those who think differently. Press freedom is one of its project’s main victims. The public media have been formally renamed ‘national media’ and have been transformed into government propaganda mouthpieces. Their new leaders tolerate neither opposition nor neutral- ity from employees and fire those who refuse to comply.”
The remarks on Hungary are less damning but may be a touch too generous given recent me-
dia landscape developments in the country. The report summarises: “Businessmen with close ties to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz,
not only managed to acquire new media outlets in 2017 but also to replace foreign media companies that had invested in Hungary’s media. Their big- gest success was getting control of the last three regional daily newspapers in the summer. Nev- ertheless, the Hungarian media landscape is still varied, and both print and online outlets do not hesitate to publish investigative coverage of al- leged corruption involving top Fidesz and govern- ment officials.”
But across the EU, Bulgaria is ranked the low-
est (111th place), which also puts it below the aspiring EU members from the Western Bal- kans. Corruption and collusion between media, politicians, and oligarchs is widespread in Bul- garia, the report noted, singling out former intelli- gence chief Deylan Peevski, whose New Bulgarian Media Group controls nearly 80% of print media distribution in the country.
Turkey (down two places to 157th), and now known as the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, comes in for huge criticism in the report, which concludes: “The witch hunt waged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government against
its media critics has come to a head since an abortive coup in July 2016. A state of emergency has allowed the authorities to eliminate dozens of media outlets with the stroke of a pen, reducing
pluralism to a handful of low-circulated and targeted publications.”
Commenting on the all too common jailing of journalists in Turkey, it adds: “Turkey is again the world’s biggest prison for professional journalists, with members of the press spending more than a year in prison before trial and long jail sentences becoming the new norm—in some cases, journal- ists are sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of a pardon. Detained journalists and closed media outlets are denied any effective legal recourse. The rule of law is a fading memory under the now all-powerful president. Even con- stitutional court rulings are no longer automati- cally implemented. Censorship of websites and online social media has also reached unprec- edented levels.”
Turkey’s neighbour, Iran (up one place to 164th), gets little praise in its entry, which talks of state control of news and information having “been relentless in Iran for the past 39 years”, adding: “The Islamic Revolution keeps a tight grip on most media outlets and never relents in its persecution of independent journalists, citizen-journalists, and media outlets, and uses intimidation, arbi- trary arrest, and long jail sentences imposed by revolutionary courts at the end of unfair trials. The media that are still resisting increasingly lack the resources to report freely and independently. As a result, it is the citizen-journalists active on social networks who are now at the center of the battles for freely-reported news and information and for political change in Iran.”
The summary for Azerbaijan (down one place
to 163rd) reads: “Not content with crushing all forms of pluralism, President Ilham Aliyev has been waging a relentless war against his remain- ing critics since 2014. Independent journalists
and bloggers are thrown in prison if they do not first yield to harassment, beatings, blackmail, or bribes. Independent media, such as Zerkalo and Azadlig, have been stifled economically. Others, such as Radio Azadlig, have been closed by force. The main independent news websites are blocked.