At the beginning of November, the Journalists' Union of Croatia sent an open letter to the Ombudsman Lora Vidović, warning of drastic examples of discrimination of union commissioners in Croatian media houses. “We can say that the institutions are working to ensure that trade unionists stay unprotected“ says Paulo Gregorović, union comissioner in Glas Istre, who was fired this year.
The “Games without borders” of the Ministry of Culture about the adoption of the media strategy last from its first mention in 2012 and represent one of the strongest continuities of SDP / HNS and HDZ's cultural policy. H-Alter's publisher, the Association for Independent Media Culture, received a refusal of the Ministry upon request, sent less than a month ago, to submit the working text of the “new” HDZ media strategy.
Juliana Velcheva, a Bulgarian journalist who wrote revelations about the local authorities in Dobrich is being harassed with slanders and fake news in the social media. After a fake alert, now five state institutions are inspecting her work and business.
Restrictions on the freedom of the media during the last two years in Turkey have been alarming – authorities shut down hundreds of media outlets and many journalists were fired or ended up in prison. In Bosnia and Herzegovina there is not much discussion about Erdogan’s role in destroying free press in Turkey, also because he and his political capital play huge role in Bosniak nationalism.
The history of local Albanian audiovisive media is full of attempts by criminals to own TV in order to clean dirty money and put pressure on political authorities. Meanwhile the professionalism goes from bad to worse…
A non-critical eye might think we are in the era of a new Renaissance of the human being: an active, mobile, “prosperous” media user. From the other hand it should be observed that in contemporary times the material conditions of life stands in contradiction with the discursive structure of the individual of the 21st century. Interactive technologies have the potential to create autonomous production, but the revolution in communication technology is shaped by organizations and institutions that have the primary purpose to generate profits.
The commissioner for the access to public information Anamarija Musa cancelled the provisions by which the former Minister of Culture Zlattko Hasanbegovic had prevented Croatian public from being aware of the work of his ministry, in particular as regard non-profit media.
“Life in a Box”, the first book of the Macedonian journalist Tomislav Kezarovski was presented in Skopje. “I could have been silent, but I choose to write”, the author said. In May 2013 Kezarovski had been arrested on the charge that he revealed the identity of a protected witness. The charge relates to an article published in 2008 in the magazine Reporter 92 in which Kezarovski quoted from an internal police report that had been leaked to him. Thanks to international pressures, today he is a free man and “I am Kezharovsky” is the slogan that reunites many politicians, musicians, journalists, activists, writers, young and old.
Lately, in Romania, there have been more cases of journalists who have left the newspapers or televisions where they worked, many accusing editorial pressures. Cătălin Prisacariu, a well-known investigative journalist and member of the Romanian Investigative Journalism Center , is one of them. In an interview for Dilema Veche he stated that every time he left a news paper or a TV station it was “due to political and economic reasons”. “In the middle there was censorship, of lesser or greater magnitude - he stated. I am not at all good in masking the frustration of censorship, and I have never been able to stay when something was imposed to me, or when my investigations were not published. The problem is that when you have almost twenty years spent in the press system and you leave every place for these reasons, you realize in which kind of press institutions you worked.”
The Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo (CIN ) celebrates 13 years of work. During this period, CIN has published over 500 investigative stories, 14 online databases and several documentary films and videos. With CIN's editor in chief, Aladin Abdagic, we talked about the evolution and the challenges of investigative journalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the threats that investigative journalists has been undergone.
