EP: Government pressuring Top Channel

The seminar entitled “To make the press silent” focused on the difficulties of the critical journalism in Macedonia, bringing examples with incidents that happened in other countries such as Hungary, Turkey and Albania.

Ross Biggam, the General Director of Europe’s Commercial Televisions Association spoke about the ways the governments of these countries attacked media institutions.

“There are three ways how governments can abuse with their power upon the media. The oldest way is to intimidate or attack the journalists physically. This is very serious, but at least we know how this can be fixed: through a criminal code and reforms in the police and justice system. The second way is through media regulations. The European Parliament held a strong stance against the Hungarian law and here, yet, there is a system that allows the European Commission to negotiate for its amends. What we are noticing in other countries outside the EU is a third way, where governments use other legal ways for intimidating independent media”, Biggam declared.

Then he used the most concerning examples of the attacks against media, focusing on the A1 television in Macedonia and Top Channel in Albania.

 “The issue here is not if A1 in Macedonia paid the taxes or not. If not, that doesn’t make it a traitor. Another example is that of a TV in Turkey. The government investigated the taxes only for one media group, and it still seems unclear if the decision for closing that media was based on the tax issue or the line they followed in their articles”, Biggam continued.

“Another case has been seen in Albania. Most concerning is the fact that the governments are using not only taxes, but also other legal ways, with laws of urban development. This way, the government earns the right to evict the most important TV station on the Albanian market from its studios. Is this a coincidence that this TV station is independent from the government?”, Biggam underlined.
 
“The matter here is that we know how to behave with an intimidated journalist. We know how to behave if the media regulations are not in accordance with the European standards. But we must work against the tendencies of several governments for finding even more sophisticated ways for threatening independent media, while they pretend outside their countries that this is a matter of ‘urban planning” or ‘tax evasion’, because the EU doesn’t have the means for treating this third category, which is the most difficult”, he added.

Together with critical journalists of the Macedonian government, present in this session were some other pro-government journalists, who intentionally created an incident for interrupting the debate.

The three Macedonian journalists shouted “traitors” on the room against their colleagues, who were invited in this seminar, and called the Liberal Democrat EMPs “talebans”.

The incident and the verbal attack towards the EMPs with the word “taleban” illustrated even better the level in which the Macedonian government had grabbed the media, and the real situation of the media freedom in this country.

The Liberal Democrats had a wide discussion about this topic and updated the European Commission for this event.

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