Page 88 - bneMag Dec22

88 Opinion
bne December 2022
CONFERENCE CALL
Central Europe's populists follow the Putin playbook to control the media
Robert Anderson in Prague
Central Europe’s authoritarian populists have taken lessons from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by turning state broadcasters into propaganda mouthpieces, spreading disinformation, and using friendly private or state- owned companies to build sycophantic media empires, a conference organised by the Aspen Central Europe platform heard this week.
State broadcasters in Hungary and Poland are already government mouthpieces, and their Czech and Slovak peers have also come under pressure in recent years.
Throughout Central and Eastern Europe public broadcasters are much more state-directed than their counterparts in Western Europe. Only Czechia and Lithuania have fully independent public service media, according to a study by the Center for Media, Data and Society published in September.
“Polish state TV [TVP] is pure propaganda,” Brygida Grysiak, deputy editor in chief of private news channel TVN24, told the conference ‘The future of a free press in Central and Eastern Europe’ held in Prague on November 8.
“We [TVN] are the only truly independent one now,” she said, pointing out that TVN24 also has the highest ratings of any news channel. “The more the government attacks us the higher the ratings we have.”
“We also had problems with previous governments too,” she pointed out, “but we had never had access to public information or access to press conferences restricted, or been called traitors.”
TVN, owned by the US Warner Brothers Discovery, almost lost its licence last year and only had it renewed in September, one working day before it was due to expire, following pressure from the US government. Grysiak said Jaroslaw Kaczysnki, Poland’s de facto ruler, had even admitted that the only reason TVN was not closed down was because it was US-owned.
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Protesters set up tents at an anti-government rally organised by the Shor Party in September.
“If they could shut us down they could do it with everyone," Grysiak said.
Poland’s ranking has sunk in the Reporters with Borders 2022 World Press Freedom Index to 66th, down from 18th in 2015.
“Public broadcasters are the canary in the goldmine,” said Jamie Fly, CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the US Congress. “If you see public broadcasters being co-opted you can almost predict what comes next.”
“The scary thing for me is how quickly this has changed,” he said. “We are heading directly to what Putin has done in Russia.”
Stuffing the media boards
Petr Dvorak, director-general of Czech Television (CT), said for former premier Andrej Babis “public service media became his competitor and target”.
While premier, the populist billionaire, who has his own press and radio empire, regularly attacked the state-owned broadcaster and refused to give its reporters answers to questions or appear on its shows.
Deputies from his ANO party and opposition extremist parties tried to cut or even abolish the licence fee (CT’s main source of revenue), publicised “lying audits” of the broadcaster in the Czech parliament, and regularly made crude verbal attacks on its journalists.
After the laws curbing CT failed to pass in the parliament, ANO and the extremist parties “stuffed the media councils [boards]” with nominees “tasked with destabilising Czech Television”, including by making slanderous attacks on Dvorak himself.
The attacks led to warnings by international journalist organisations.
The new centre-right government elected in October has submitted a reform to give the more independent upper