Experts tell MEPs of media curbs in Slovenia

“First you check the media to see who attacked you, who wanted to discredit you, or who is spreading lies to discredit you,” Petra Lesjak Tušek, the president of the Slovenian Association of Journalists, said, describing what might be a typical Slovenian reporter’s day.

“You read that and then you start working. You follow current events and you try to come up with ways to write stories. If you want to have answers from any government bodies you have to wait a long time, maybe you don’t even get your answers.”

Lenart J. Kučić, a reporter with Pod črto, an independent nonprofit investigative news site, said he and his colleagues had written more than 20 articles on media ownership in Slovenia and found that many outlets were controlled directly or indirectly by politicians, especially at the local level.

“There is no control under how public money can be used for financing propaganda in political activities especially in local and municipal media, where especially mayors are usually the owners de facto and the editors,” Kučić said. “They are using this media and public money for self-promotion and even for attacks on their political opponents.”

Kučić said similar tactics were also used on a national level by Janša and his Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), a member of the center-right European People’s Party alliance.

mep要管到特定國家的媒體自由這個有點過頭了

“Another big problem is that one political party which also happens to be in power owns a private parallel media system that consists of a political weekly, TV station and a series of 17 or 18 online internet portals,” Kučić told the MEPs.

“And this is also a part of this Hungarian regional expansion and what we see is there are also vested interests here, because for example the minister for the interior and the secretary-general of this government, they were both running some media outlets, in the media system of the political party SDS.”

Marko Milosavljević, a professor of journalism and media policy at the University of Ljubljana, testified that the government in the past year had proposed four major pieces of media legislation that seek to tighten controls.