Local Owners Criticized For Narrow Interests

Michael Hedges May 1, 2012 Follow on Twitter

Conventional wisdom holds that private sector media holds political influence at bay because of the profit motive. It’s very idealistic. Where local owners are investors with wide and varied interests, new to the media game as well, standards and practices are shaped by “short-term vision.” Add rampant corruption and the media sector is poisoned.

A fact-finding mission to Bulgaria by media watcher South East Europe Media Organization (SEEMO) yielded a blunt and negative assessment. Local owners “are perceived as investors with short-term vision who strive for immediate profits,” said the preliminary report. On the other-hand, foreign owners are viewed as “credible, long-term thinking and generally absent from day to day editorial decisions.”

The SEEMO delegation visited Bulgaria in early April to interview editors and journalists, politicians and NGO officials, and other media watchers. As in of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria’s media scene – like the rest of civil society – has undergone considerable change in the last two decades. SEEMO is affiliated with the International Press Institute (IPI) and, thus, has distinct interest bias favoring newspapers and newspaper journalism.

To that end the report summary points to the WAZ Media Group exit (“retreated”) from its Bulgarian newspaper holdings in 2010 as a particular low point. Throughout that year WAZ Media Group CEO Bodo Hombach voiced critically on “widespread abuse of power” in the Balkans as he moved forward on an exit from Bulgaria and Serbia. In February 2010 WAZ Media Group and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) pressed Bulgarian authorities to provide protection for reporter Lidiya Pavlova who was harassed and physically attacked by thugs reportedly associated with crime bosses after reporting on corruption.

“The close intertwining of oligarchs and political power is poisoning the market,” said Herr Hombach to Handelsblatt (August 2, 2010). “Oligarchs in the Balkans are more and more buying for themselves in order to exert political influence, not in order to win money. We cannot stand up to such market-destroying competition.” By December 2010 WAZ Media Group sold its stakes in daily newspapers Trud and 24 Chasa, weekly 168 Chasa, a printing house and distribution company to local investors.

Bulgaria’s television scene also changed as foreign owners traded for big money. After two years negotiating News Corporation finally exited television company bTV and five radio stations in 2010, selling for US$400 million to Prague-based Central European Media Enterprises (CME). News Corporation had owned bTV, Bulgaria’s first national commercial channel, for ten years. Bulgaria’s second national commercial channel – Nova Televisia – was sold in 2008 by Greek broadcaster Antenne Group to Swedish media house Modern Times Group (MTG) for €620 million.

As newspapers in Bulgaria have migrated to tabloid formats, so has television. “The media conditions in Bulgaria,” wrote media watcher Todor Todorov in the website of Foundation Media Democracy (March 12), “left two types of dominant television models, two ways of television production: the market policy of the expensive beauty parlor and the commentary chatter and rhetoric of the barbershop. Serious, professional commentators and reporters, investigative journalists, analyses, in-depth interviews, expert discussions and documentaries were displaced by talk shows and reality formats, by entertainment shows which colonize the public television sphere, instrumentalize journalism, and reformat the perception of and requirements towards reality.”

The SEEMO media watchers embraced in their evaluation, along with the concomitant bias toward newspapers, the traditionalist view of media usage. With a multitude of sources – and Bulgaria has a very lively online media community – the public “cannot rely on one specific media outlet to acquire information in the public interest. They are required to read different papers, watch different TV channels and switch between…radio stations that produce news and programs, or opt for online media.”

Other media watchers have weighed in on Bulgaria’s press freedom, media sustainability and corruption. Freedom House, in its Freedom Of the Press 2012 report, released May 1, rated Bulgaria’s media “partly free” with a ranking (78) tied with Hungary. In the IREX 2011 Media Sustainability Index (MSI), released April 10th, Bulgaria’s media was downgraded for “signs of political and corporate pressure, editorial bias, sale of news content, and a general decline in the quality and intelligence level of media content.”

Bulgaria was ranked 86th, worst among all EU Member States, in the Transparency International 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index. In Bulgaria, noted the SEEMO report summary, “if an owner is in the oil business, (journalists) abstain from writing in-depth articles about energy.”

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