The debate for the large amounts of money spent by the Albanian
government for what is called state owned media advertisement, besides
the exaggerated expenses with the Albanians’ money has brought to light a
series of problems.
Analysts Lutfi Dervishi and Aleksander Cipa focused on the figures published by the opposition, saying that this is a scandal, since the Ministries have a legal obligation to publish all their expenditures online.
“What’s more impressive is that the fact that the publishing of the money that has been paid for the advertisements is treated like if they are bringing out a state secret. Lecture no.1 must be the publishing of the expenditures online”, Dervishi declared.
The lack of transparency is only one side. The inequality of funds, not based on the ratings, has deformed the media market. The Journalists’ Union Chairman asked a common reaction of this entire environment.
“It is not only logical for the opposition to report and the victim to stay silent, which in this case is the media. The media must react for the respecting of the basic equality criteria for the distribution of advertisements”, Cipa declared.
“When feeing a media that has no audience, the government damages the competition”, Dervishi added.
But the effects of the state owned advertisements are not over with this. The government’s misuse with the right to public information, by turning it to political propaganda, is the worst case of corruption, since it combines the financial corruption with the moral one, according to Arber Mazniku, expert of the political communication at the Agenda institution.
“The government must spend other money to inform the citizens for concrete matters, such as food, tourism, security, etc. But on this specific case, we have not only a bad management of the procurement of TV spots, but also a bad management of the message of these spots. It is the worst form of corruption with the public funds”, Mazniku declared.
“In most of the cases, the right to inform is converted to biased propaganda”, Cipa added.
“You cannot spend the tax payers’ money with propaganda. This is unnecessary”.
While we are entering an electoral year, almost everyone is expecting the repeating of the same phenomenon. The money of the Albanians are used for pro-government propaganda, according to the representatives of the civil society.
The representatives of the Agenda Institution proposed the creation of a non-government institution that filters the state owned advertisement, in order to divide the public information from the public propaganda that is paid with their money.
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