Page 89 - bneMag Dec22

bne December 2022
Opinion 89
house a voice in electing the public broadcasters’ boards, which should prevent political parties terrorising the public broadcasters.
The Czech ranking in the Global Press Freedom index collapsed from 13 to 40 between 2014 and 2019, but then recovered to 20 in 2021.
“You often have to fight a long-term battle to preserve your independence,” Dvorak said. “The bad news is how unstable the media position in Central Europe can be,” he concluded.
However, his deputy editor in chief, Martin Reznicek, pointed out how Czech politicians continue to deliberately underfund the very well respected public broadcaster, a pattern common to the region. “CEE broadcasters are still fighting for their very existence,” he said.
Governments of all stripes have failed to increase CT’s licence fee for 14 years, and the broadcasting law is “obsolete” (it was originally passed in 1991). “It comes from a different century,” he said.
Disinformation super spreaders
A second tactic used by populist political leaders is to promote disinformation outlets, which have become a regular source of news for many Central Europeans. Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban or Poland's ruling Law and Justice party can create their own fake news through state-controlled or friendly media and state-funded advertising campaigns, while opposition leaders such as Slovakia's Robert Fico are regular spreaders of disinformation through social media.
Czech President Milos Zeman has regularly appeared on fringe TV channels such as partly Chinese-owned TV Barrandov,
and given interviews to news site Parlamentni Listy, which often in the past acted as a super spreader of Russian-inspired disinformation.
“Strengthening more marginal disinformation media was an important part of [Zeman’s] agenda,” Dvorak said.
Babis regularly attacks the media for lying and even took out full-page advertisements in his own newspapers in September telling voters to ignore it and watch his social media show instead.
The spread of fake news by disinformation sites creates confusion and promotes lack of trust in independent media.
“Noise has become the new censorship,” said Natalia Antelava, co-founder of Coda Story, a New York-based online crisis reporting news platform. “For journalists to get through the wall of noise is more and more difficult. Unless we can break through this noise we are in deep trouble.”
An IPI report entitled “Media Capture in the Czech Republic”
in March commended the new government's planned reforms but said much still needed to be done to both strengthen the public service media and fight disinformation.
“The new government has a crucial challenge ahead of it to promote the sustainability and pluralism of media and to weaken the influence of disinformation sources. A priority task is to revise media legislation to strengthen the independence of public service media and weaken the influence of politicians over content,” the IPI report concluded.
Building fake independent media
The third main tactic used by rightwing populists such as Kaczynski, Orban, as well as more centrist populists such as Babis is to build up their own friendly private-owned media empires to spread their message and give a false impression of media diversity and independence.
“You can be much more subtle by using friendly oligarchs to buy media in the public space,” said Fly.
Babis bought his own empire in a Czech media scene that has now become dominated by domestic tycoons. Some of these oligarchs curried favour with Babis through their media, maximising his reach.
“Czech businessmen soon discovered that owning media is not very interesting from a business point of view but was interesting from an influence perspective,” said Dvorak.
“Media capture in the Czech Republic differs fundamentally from countries like Hungary. Rather than a state-led media takeover, the Czech Republic witnessed the acquisition of many of the country’s largest private media outlets by a handful of oligarchs for whom media could be used to promote their wider business interests,” the IPI report stressed.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party used the state-owned refiner Orlen to buy up the dominant Polska Press chain
of regional dailies in 2020. “They have taken over the local media landscape in Poland,” said Grysiak. She added that state advertising and adverts from state-owned companied were also channelled to friendly media.
Orban perfects the model
Hungary has gone even further down this road, with more than 500 media outlets gathered in one foundation to co-ordinate their output, and independent media blocked from receiving information. Hungary’s press freedom ranking has collapsed from 10th in 2006 to 85th.
“The biggest problem is access to information,” said Marton Karpati, CEO and founder of Telex.hu, a news website created by journalists from Index.hu when it was taken over by a government-friendly oligarch. “We have no invitations to press conferences, no answers from government politicians, no interviews with government politicians.”
www.bne.eu