Post by Bozur on Jan 21, 2008 13:10:45 GMT -5
Slovenia Chief Is Accused of Censorship
Article Tools Sponsored By
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: January 21, 2008
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — As a young journalist in the late 1980s, Janez Jansa, now prime minister, played a critical role in spurring Slovenia’s pro-democracy movement after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for opposing the Communist government and writing articles attacking the former Yugoslav Army.
In an extraordinary inversion of the past, his opponents now accuse him of trying to censor the news media whose freedom he fought to uphold. A recent report by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog group based in New York, said that the Slovene news media “faced indirect political and economic pressure from the government and business interests” and that government officials sometimes treated journalists as if they were “the political opposition.”
Such is the concern about press freedom in this formerly Communist country that 571 journalists recently signed a petition delivered to Parliament and to European leaders that accused Mr. Jansa of censorship. The petition — supported by the European Federation of Journalists — questioned whether Slovenia, which took over the presidency of the European Union on Jan. 1, was sufficiently democratic to represent the bloc of nearly 500 million people.
The public attack is still reverberating in this Balkan nation of two million people.
“It is embarrassing for Slovenia and for the E.U. that it is now presided over by a country that does not uphold European values of press freedom,” said Blaz Zgaga, one of two journalists who led the petition drive.
Media analysts say that concerns about press freedom in Slovenia reflect a trend across Eastern and Central Europe, where former Communist countries are struggling to shed the authoritarian political cultures of the past. In Slovenia, which was part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito for 35 years, the Communist Party exerted control over the news media and censored opponents.
Mr. Jansa, asked last week whether he was stifling the media, was emphatic. If the main measure of press freedom “is the possibility to criticize the government, then we have 200 percent freedom,” he said.
The government cited several independent studies, including a 2007 report by Reporters Without Borders that ranked Slovenia above France, Spain, Italy, Australia and the United States in press freedom.
Yet journalists, media executives and analysts in Slovenia say that its center-right government has used state-owned funds or companies with controlling stakes in leading newspapers to weed out editors and journalists critical of the government.
The former secretary of state for the economy, Andrijana Starina Kosem, said during an interview that in August 2005, she and the prime minister orchestrated a deal to gain editorial influence over Delo, the country’s most influential newspaper. Delo, of which Lasko, a beer company, owns a majority of shares, was founded in 1959 and is the second largest daily newspaper in Slovenia, after the tabloid Slovenske Novice. Delo’s influence on Slovene public life is comparable to that of The Times of London or Le Monde in their countries.
Starina Kosem, who now runs the supervisory board of Delo and was once a golf partner of the prime minister’s, said Lasko was determined to buy part of Mercator, a large retailer partly owned by the state. In a private meeting in Mr. Jansa’s office, she said, the government agreed to sell part of its stake in Mercator to Lasko in return for the brewer’s promise to install editors and management sympathetic to the government.
“Jansa was determined to gain control of the media, and he did a deal to make sure that would happen,” said Ms. Kosem, who resigned from her post as state secretary in May 2007 before disclosing her allegations of state censorship in a letter leaked to the press.
Anze Logar, a government spokesman, denied that the government had tried to gain control of Delo. The share sale, he said, had been motivated to reduce government ownership of private industry.
Ms. Kosem said she had helped arrange the agreement because she was convinced that as a former dissident, Mr. Jansa, now 49, would still use his influence to expand media freedom.
Instead, she said, he would send a flurry of cellphone text messages each morning berating editors of papers with headlines critical of the government, an allegation his office denied.
Shortly after the purported deal, she said, Delo’s new management installed a new editor, Peter Jancic, whose mandate was to bring the paper into line with government thinking. Nearly a dozen Delo journalists resigned in protest.
Delo journalists say critical reporting of government policies has become increasingly difficult. As evidence, they point to Mr. Jancic’s decision to recall the Delo correspondent in Vienna to Ljubljana in April after he published stories critical of government policy toward the Slovene minority in Austria. The correspondent in Zagreb, Croatia, who had criticized the government for a police buildup at Slovenia’s disputed border with Croatia, was also recalled.
Mr. Jancic, who has since been replaced as editor, said during an interview that the correspondents had been recalled because they were injecting their opinions into stories. He said that as editor, he never came under direct government pressure.
“My editorial policy was to be fair, accurate and unbiased,” he said.
Writing in a recent issue of Delo, Drago Jancar, a leading Slovene rightist intellectual, said that Mr. Jansa was a victim of unprecedented “media lynching” and that “sensationalism making mountains out of molehills is in full swing.”
He lamented that when a state minister’s wife used an official car to go to the store to buy a broom, it was front-page news.
www.nytimes.com/
Article Tools Sponsored By
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: January 21, 2008
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — As a young journalist in the late 1980s, Janez Jansa, now prime minister, played a critical role in spurring Slovenia’s pro-democracy movement after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for opposing the Communist government and writing articles attacking the former Yugoslav Army.
In an extraordinary inversion of the past, his opponents now accuse him of trying to censor the news media whose freedom he fought to uphold. A recent report by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog group based in New York, said that the Slovene news media “faced indirect political and economic pressure from the government and business interests” and that government officials sometimes treated journalists as if they were “the political opposition.”
Such is the concern about press freedom in this formerly Communist country that 571 journalists recently signed a petition delivered to Parliament and to European leaders that accused Mr. Jansa of censorship. The petition — supported by the European Federation of Journalists — questioned whether Slovenia, which took over the presidency of the European Union on Jan. 1, was sufficiently democratic to represent the bloc of nearly 500 million people.
The public attack is still reverberating in this Balkan nation of two million people.
“It is embarrassing for Slovenia and for the E.U. that it is now presided over by a country that does not uphold European values of press freedom,” said Blaz Zgaga, one of two journalists who led the petition drive.
Media analysts say that concerns about press freedom in Slovenia reflect a trend across Eastern and Central Europe, where former Communist countries are struggling to shed the authoritarian political cultures of the past. In Slovenia, which was part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Tito for 35 years, the Communist Party exerted control over the news media and censored opponents.
Mr. Jansa, asked last week whether he was stifling the media, was emphatic. If the main measure of press freedom “is the possibility to criticize the government, then we have 200 percent freedom,” he said.
The government cited several independent studies, including a 2007 report by Reporters Without Borders that ranked Slovenia above France, Spain, Italy, Australia and the United States in press freedom.
Yet journalists, media executives and analysts in Slovenia say that its center-right government has used state-owned funds or companies with controlling stakes in leading newspapers to weed out editors and journalists critical of the government.
The former secretary of state for the economy, Andrijana Starina Kosem, said during an interview that in August 2005, she and the prime minister orchestrated a deal to gain editorial influence over Delo, the country’s most influential newspaper. Delo, of which Lasko, a beer company, owns a majority of shares, was founded in 1959 and is the second largest daily newspaper in Slovenia, after the tabloid Slovenske Novice. Delo’s influence on Slovene public life is comparable to that of The Times of London or Le Monde in their countries.
Starina Kosem, who now runs the supervisory board of Delo and was once a golf partner of the prime minister’s, said Lasko was determined to buy part of Mercator, a large retailer partly owned by the state. In a private meeting in Mr. Jansa’s office, she said, the government agreed to sell part of its stake in Mercator to Lasko in return for the brewer’s promise to install editors and management sympathetic to the government.
“Jansa was determined to gain control of the media, and he did a deal to make sure that would happen,” said Ms. Kosem, who resigned from her post as state secretary in May 2007 before disclosing her allegations of state censorship in a letter leaked to the press.
Anze Logar, a government spokesman, denied that the government had tried to gain control of Delo. The share sale, he said, had been motivated to reduce government ownership of private industry.
Ms. Kosem said she had helped arrange the agreement because she was convinced that as a former dissident, Mr. Jansa, now 49, would still use his influence to expand media freedom.
Instead, she said, he would send a flurry of cellphone text messages each morning berating editors of papers with headlines critical of the government, an allegation his office denied.
Shortly after the purported deal, she said, Delo’s new management installed a new editor, Peter Jancic, whose mandate was to bring the paper into line with government thinking. Nearly a dozen Delo journalists resigned in protest.
Delo journalists say critical reporting of government policies has become increasingly difficult. As evidence, they point to Mr. Jancic’s decision to recall the Delo correspondent in Vienna to Ljubljana in April after he published stories critical of government policy toward the Slovene minority in Austria. The correspondent in Zagreb, Croatia, who had criticized the government for a police buildup at Slovenia’s disputed border with Croatia, was also recalled.
Mr. Jancic, who has since been replaced as editor, said during an interview that the correspondents had been recalled because they were injecting their opinions into stories. He said that as editor, he never came under direct government pressure.
“My editorial policy was to be fair, accurate and unbiased,” he said.
Writing in a recent issue of Delo, Drago Jancar, a leading Slovene rightist intellectual, said that Mr. Jansa was a victim of unprecedented “media lynching” and that “sensationalism making mountains out of molehills is in full swing.”
He lamented that when a state minister’s wife used an official car to go to the store to buy a broom, it was front-page news.
www.nytimes.com/