You should really be afraid for the freedom of the media in Slovenia. The situation is alarming. The media has become a political party. They have been taken over by the tycoons. But not the private Hungarian investors – they only have two micro-investments in Slovenia, which do not even represent one percent of the media landscape in Slovenia, combined.
Hungarians are the last thing that the professional defenders of media pluralism and independence should worry about right now. On Wednesday, at the request of MEP Tanja Fajon, the European Parliament discussed Hungarian interference in the media in Slovenia and Northern Macedonia. She allegedly found the evidence for their interference on the obscure web portal Necenzurirano (uncensored).
Well, perhaps it would have been better if, before they convened the debates in the European Parliament where the conspiracy theories of the web portal Necenzurirano.si were being spread, they actually made sure that the MEPs actually understand who the real owners of this portal are, and even before that, what the real image of the Slovenian media landscape is. More than 90 percent of the media in Slovenia are ideologically and capital-related to the left-wing political option and completely dependent on their business with state-owned companies and public procurement.
The main printed dailies in the country (Delo, Dnevnik, Večer) are owned by tycoons who are personally connected to the left political option. All three are very obviously campaigning for their owners, as well as advertising their companies, which are competing in tenders for public funds. The journalists of the largest commercial, as well as the national television, are fleeing to political parties or state-owned companies, controlled by the transitional left. Of the 20 former journalists in Slovenian politics, as many as 18 had joined left-wing political parties. And Tanja Fajon is one of them!
Odlazek’s media outlets were distinctively pro-government, up until the 13th of March
The radio tycoons Odlazek and Oblak, who are both personally connected with left-wing politics, abused the institute of the programme radio networks, destroyed local radio stations and established a regime of nationwide left-wing networks. And speaking about the tycoon and convicted criminal Martin Odlazek – he deserves a paragraph that is entirely dedicated to him. He made his fortune by recycling waste, with lucrative contracts he signed with the state and the local governments. However, in order to never run out of lucrative contracts, he bought almost the entire collection of Slovenian lifestyle magazines, tabloids and, as already mentioned, completely occupied the radio waves with his network and cunning system of programme radio networks. Odlazek’s media outlets were distinctly pro-government – up until the 13th of March 2020, when the government was taken over by the Janez Janša coalition. After that, they became distinctly anti-government. At the same time as the new government, a new media outlet was also created, the only reason for its existence being planned attacks on the government – which includes publishing discredited untruths and misleading half-truths. The web portal is called Necenzurirano (uncensored), and it is run by three former writers of the Siol.net web portal (which was also described as the regime bulletin of Šarec and his state secretary Črnčec during the reign of Marjan Šarec, in the Media Pluralism Monitor). Before working at Siol.net, the three writers worked for the left-wing newspaper Dnevnik.
Necenzurirano does not market its advertising space, but still somehow makes enough to pay for three journalists
Necenzurirano does not market advertising space. Its content is free. And yet, it somehow still makes enough money to pay for three journalists, for whose media liquidation services, the deep state had to pay a lot of money in the past. And still, they can afford to pay for long commercials on the popular Radio Aktual, which is owned by the criminal Odlazek. Their articles (with identical pictures) first appear in the tabloid Svet24, owned by the criminal Odlazak, even before being published on the Necenzurirano web portal. To put it bluntly, Fajon made her European colleagues from her parliamentary group look like fools. They have fallen prey to conspiracy theories about international espionage, published on the pages of an obscure web portal, funded by a convicted criminal and left-wing media tycoon who is waging a completely open war against the current government of Janez Janša.
Freedom of the media in both Slovenia and Macedonia actually is under attack. The Slovenian mainstream media have been very pro-government for the last seven years and have explicitly covered up the indecencies of the former leaders, even when they were practically committing crimes. Former Prime Minister Miro Cerar unconstitutionally took away the parliamentary mandate of the leader of the opposition, organized mafia public tenders, and attacked the decisions of the Supreme Court. Former Prime Minister Šarec instructed the state-owned companies on which friendly media outlets they can and cannot use for the advertising of their services, and completely subordinated the intelligence and security services, the main commercial television (Pop TV) and the second-largest web portal (Siol.net) and made them a channel through which he attacked his political opponents. In all those years, not a single word was uttered in Slovenia about the “attacks on the media.”
Macedonian Prime Minister Zaev has turned the so-called Northern Macedonia into a private Cosa Nostro, where he can extort domestic businessmen for bribes without worry and participate in corruption scandals incognito, through his LGBTQ surrogate Bojan Jovanovski. But the Macedonian mainstream media remain silent. He was already convicted in 2008, and today, he is the Prime Minister, surrounded by friendly media, and no one can touch him – because what is not reported on, does not exist.
The situations in both countries are quite similar. Only the media outlets that are owned by foreigners actually write about the dirty business of the left-wing mafia. The locally-owned media outlets are just part of the mafia story. This is not foreign interference in domestic affairs (those who claim such nonsense apparently live in a different time), but rather, journalism with integrity that is not afraid of domestic, politics-related criminal networks.
Peter Truden