Europe: Page 2

Ever-growing self-censorship related to economic pressures in Turkey

Posted on June 18, 2015 Leave a Comment

The IPI special report on Turkey 2015, Democracy At Risk, points to the increased pressure on media in recent years, part of a drift toward authoritarianism that has led to a pervasive climate of self-censorship and one of the most troubling press freedom pictures in Europe.

Apart from bans on covering certain topics and direct pressures, the report highlights the political leaders’ efforts to control media via huge tax fines, calls for boycotts, advertisement embargos, seizing media outlets and transferring their ownership to supporters, frustrating journalists with legal cases on insult claims, targeting opposition journalists with social media trolls, and cultivating Internet sites and columnists tasked with scaring and intimidating critics.

The report expresses concern about the “ever-growing self-censorship related to economic pressure, particularly as companies active in other economic sectors acquire ownership of a greater number of media outlets, sometimes at the alleged behest of government officials in exchange for favour”. According to the analysis, “those companies are, in turn, increasingly dependent on state contracts and government connections to survive, leaving journalists with the choice of suppressing critical reports or losing their job, which, amid a polarised media and political climate, effectively can equal loss of career”.

As the report summarizes, the effects of these pressures ara that “media owners suppress criticism to protect their profits, journalists suppress criticism to protect their jobs, and the Turkish people are left with- out information necessary to make informed decisions or hold leaders accountable”.

Read more: Steven M. Ellis (2015) Democracy at Risk. IPI Special Report on Turkey 2015. Vienna: International Press Institute: http://www.freemedia.at/fileadmin/resources/application/IPI_Special_Report_-_Turkey_2015_Final.pdf

Investigation reveals advertising allocation breakdown of Northern England town halls

Posted on May 18, 2015 Leave a Comment

EUROPE – UK – ADVERTISING AND INFLUENCE

The responses to a series of Freedom of Information requests to six of the big city councils – Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Middlesbrough and Newcastle- reveal big differences in the amount spent in advertising, an investigation released in early 2015 found.

According to this analysis, millions of pounds is being spent by town halls at a time when local authorities are also being asked to make cuts to frontline services. The Manchester Evening News along with other Trinity Mirror owned papers in the north are revealed as the biggest earners from the statutory notices system required by law.

Manchester City Council has paid out more than £1.7m to news organisations to publish its public notices during the past five years. Newcastle Council spent a total of £1.9m on all forms of advertising in the same period, but was unable to separate out the statutory notices element. Equally, Middlesbrough Council confirmed that they spent a total advertising budget of £2.24M over the five years, but refused the Freedom of Information request on the basis that it would take too much time to work out the breakdown of suppliers and statutory notice payments.

In fact, the article stresses that the responses received varied greatly, with some of the councils being unable to provide full breakdowns of their spending.

Source: Sarah Hartley, Revealed: The true cost of advertising for local councils – Prolific North

The Moldovan government advertising spending goes to public media

Posted on May 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

EUROPE – MOLDOVA – ADVERTISING AND INFLUENCE

In Moldova, the ruling parties openly use public funds to buy broadcasting time and space in newspapers, according to a report by the Media Law Institute, based in Ukraine.

The parties usually prefer to advertise in public rather than private papers, as they charge below market prices. In return, public newspapers respect the unwritten rule not to criticise parties that provide financial support. As a result, private newspapers find themselves subject to unfair competition for advertising, while journalists working for national newspapers find themselves under pressure to censor their views.

Source: Media Law Institute (Ukraine)

Tax investigations and arbitrary evictions used against media by Albania’s former government

Posted on May 11, 2015 Leave a Comment

The government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha, which stepped down in September 2013 after the ruling Democratic Party (PD) lost the June parliamentary elections to the opposition Socialist Party (PS), used administrative mechanisms, including tax investigations and arbitrary evictions from state-owned buildings, to disrupt the operations of media outlets it perceived as hostile, according to Freedom House.

The press freedom organisation denounced that the partisan bent of many news outlets was visible during the 2013 election campaign, with the main television stations favouring either the PD or the PS in the amount or tone of their coverage. The election commission’s media rules were weakly enforced, and a decision by the panel in early June appeared to require broadcasters to air party-prepared footage during newscasts, disregarding a 2011 court ruling.

According to a 2013 report by the researcher Ilda Londo, the development of Albanian media during the last two decades can be divided in two phases: the first, from early to late 90s was marked by the so-called politically engaged media, while the second saw the emergence and expansion of clientelistic media. The pressure on the media became more sophisticated during the second period. Even if Albanian media rarely faced open threats or assaults on journalists, they rather experienced problems of an economic nature, such as financial pressure, distribution issues, non-transparent funding, ownership issues, difficult labour conditions and corruption in the media

Source: Ilda Londo (2013) Limited Assistance for Limited Impact: International Media Assistance in Albania. Sarajevo, Analitika and Albania Media Institute.

Russia silences independent broadcaster

Posted on May 6, 2015 Leave a Comment

Broadcasting licenses of the award-winning channel TV-2 in Tomsk were withdrawn by the Russian Television and Radio Broadcasting Network (RTRS) and the federal oversight body for telecommunications, as Freedom House reported in February 2015.

Its broadcasts were suspended for a month in spring 2014 due to technical difficulties of a local division of RTRS, the state monopoly that owns terrestrial air broadcasting facilities across the country; in November 2014, RTRS announced it would not renew TV-2’s contract after its expiration in December. Also, Roskomnadzor, the federal telecommunications agency, reversed its decision to renew its cable broadcasting license until 2025.

“The government’s haste and secrecy in silencing Tomsk’s only independent TV station shows that this broadcaster has become inconvenient to the state,” said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of the Freedom of the Press project at Freedom House. “TV-2 has become known in Tomsk, Russia, and abroad as a regional media outlet providing objective coverage of social, political and economic issues rarely covered by state-owned broadcasters. To lose such a champion is a serious blow to the dwindling freedom of speech in Russia.”

Russia is rated Not Free in Freedom in the World 2015, Not Free in Freedom of the Press 2014, Partly Free in Freedom on the Net 2014, and received a democracy score of 6.29 on a scale of 1-7, with 7 being the worst possible score, in Nations in Transit 2014.

Spanish editor denounces that the alliance between political and economic powers affects the quality of journalism

Posted on April 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

In the presentation of his new journalistic project, the news site www.elpañol.com, the founder and former editor-in-chief of the Spanish daily El Mundo, Pedro J. Ramírez, denounced that “the alliance between increasingly intimate political power and economic power has managed to bring journalism to its knees” in Spain, as the Madrid Association of Journalists reports.

According to his view, there are two ways to practice journalism, “one trying to empower readers and another trying to give readers to the power.”

The digital news-site ww.elespañol.com will start reporting in September 2015.

Restrictive legislation on kiosks and points of sell in Ukraine

Posted on April 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

Ukrainian publishers explained that restrictive legislation on kiosks and points of sale was undermining their liability to sell newspapers in the WAN-IFRA mission report in 2012, The numbers of points of sale for the printed press is eight times less than in neighbouring Poland and approximately 15 times less than in countries such as France or Germany.

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Biased awarding of licenses continues in Ukraine

Posted on April 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

The National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council (Natsrada) remains unreformed and regularly applies regulations in a secretive and highly partisan manner, according to Freedom House.

The council used the transition from analogue to digital television broadcasting in 2011 to deny licenses to editorially independent stations such as TVi, TRC Chernomorskaya, and Rivne 1, while awarding digital licenses to pro-government stations or new outlets that were registered abroad to unknown owners.

Allegations of bias in the awarding of licenses continued in 2013. In November, the national channel 112 Ukraina—believed to be connected to first deputy prime minister Serhiy Arbuzov—was created after Natsrada allowed five companies licensed in 2011 to merge. The channel was rapidly integrated into cable, satellite, and Internet platforms, a process that would normally take years.

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Tacit advertising appears to be common in Bulgaria

Posted on April 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

EUROPE – BULGARIA – PAID “NEWS”

In Bulgaria, according to Freedom House (FH) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), while the media environment remains pluralistic, editors and journalists routinely shape their reporting to suit the political and economic interests of owners or major advertisers. A large portion of the coverage of May 2013 parliamentary elections allegedly consisted of paid partisan content, which was often not labelled as such. An editor-in-chief quoted in the KAS analysis provides an example: “During the election campaign, we covered the tacit party publications under a specially-created column because the parties did not want it to be understood that they are paid ones”.

This report highlights tacit advertising as a common practice in Bulgaria. It affects exclusively print media and websites because it is prohibited by law for electronic media with the Article 85 of the Radio and Television Act. Even if the two ethical codes in the country provide that advertisement and paid publications should be differentiated from journalistic content, there have been many breaches of this principle in practice, according to the report. Certain advertisement tariff lists of national dailies show that they allow PR publications in consideration of higher payment.

Commercial advertisers also have a strong influence on the editorial output of Bulgarian media, according to the KAS report. Companies allegedly ask for materials that present them in a positive light as a condition of buying advertising. The analysis also highlights that sometimes they even ask outlets to play down or ignore customer complaints or run critical coverage of their competitors. In addition, many times there is no clear differentiation between the sponsored and editorial content, the report found.

Advertising disguised as news in Croatia

Posted on April 2, 2015 Leave a Comment

EUROPE – CROATIA – “PAID NEWS”

In Croatia, a decline in advertising revenue due to the global economic crisis, as well as rapidly dwindling newspaper circulations, have left many media outlets financially weak, Freedom House found in 2014. This leads allegedly to a blurring of the lines between journalism, advertising, and public relations. Media outlets are unable to publish articles that criticize their advertisers, and it is possible to find advertising pieces disguised as news articles.