Author: Vojtěch Berger, HlidaciPes.org, Czech republic
When the first reports of the assassination attempt of the Slovak Prime Minister appeared in the middle of May, the parliament in Bratislava was just discussing a new law on public media. This will bring the current television and radio station RTVS definitively under government control. The parliamentary session was suspended because of the attack on the prime minister, but events are likely to pick up again quickly. Some government politicians are blaming the media for the assassination and are likely to use the incident as an excuse to crack down even harder on journalists.
Before the assassination of Robert Fico completely dominated the news, another, much more marginal report managed to warm up briefly on Slovak websites: Slovakia’s „TV Slovan“ internet television’s presenter duo broke up.
In recent years, this YouTube channel has given space to conspiracy theorists on topics such as covid, migration, LGBT and election rigging.
The actual relevance of this seemingly obscure message was only made by the addendum that one of the main faces of TV Slovan is the current Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová – at the time responsible for the destruction of public media in Slovakia.
In the footsteps of TV Slovan
It was TV Slovan that indicated how the media in Slovakia should look like according to Šimkovičová and co. Apart from conspiracies and pro-Russian guests – such as Matúš Alexa, the head of the Brat za brata motorcycle club who regularly visits Russia – TV Slovan clearly sided with one political stream, in particular the Slovak National Party (SNS).
It was the party for which the two presenters, beside Šimkovičová it was also the orthopaedic doctor Peter Kotlár, successfully ran for parliament last year.
After the elections, the SNS became a minor coalition partner, Šimkovičová became Minister of Culture and Kotlár became the “commissioner for the investigation of the covid pandemic”. He had previously boasted of his cooperation with the chairman of the extra-parliamentary Czech PRO movement, Jindřich Rajchl. Rajchl, like Fico, the SNS and other like-minded politicians in the region, calls for “peace” and “dialogue with Russia”.
The Slovak National Party has already targeted the public media before the elections, but especially afterwards. For more than a decade, the Slovak media have been merged under the umbrella of Radio and Television Slovakia (RTVS). According to earlier speculation, RTVS was to be split up again, opening the way for the coalition to replace its leadership. In the end, Robert Fico’s cabinet chose a more straightforward approach – and wants to abolish RTVS outright and “restart” it under a different name.
Media policy vs. destruction of journalism
It was Martina Šimkovičová, as Minister of Culture, who was put in charge, saying that it was necessary to “return objectivity to the public media”. Paradoxically, according to Transparency International’s data from 2019, RTVS significantly helped the Slovak National Party of Šimkovičová during the then election period.
The party’s chairman and the then head of parliament, Andrej Danko, and the entire SNS were conspicuously favoured in terms of the positivity of their coverage and the number of mentions.
It should be added that in addition to Fico’s cabinet, the previous Eduard Heger’s government also contributed to the effort to control the public media in Slovakia by approving the abolition of licence fees as early as December 2022 and by not accepting any other guaranteed and sustainable funding for RTVS. The proposed state contribution to TV and radio with a defined percentage of GDP was reduced by the Fico government shortly after coming to power.
The rest was a matter of time – and that has now run out. The new law on RTVS (henceforth called STVR) has passed its first reading in parliament and the government has the will and the power to push it through quickly. In addition to ending the current management, the government will get a much greater chance to directly influence the selection of new management – through a supervisory board nominated by the Ministry of Culture and parliament.
However, the Fico government’s “media policy”, if the systematic destruction of independent journalism can be called like that, does not end there.
Andrej Danko, the head of the Slovak National Party, has already announced “the beginning of a political war” against the media: “I believe that even with the new president, Petr Pellegrini, and with Robert Fico, we will make legal changes as we did in RTVS. Now I guarantee you that we will not ‘hesitate’,” Danko announced in his typically peculiar style.
The Earth is round? And how do you know that?
In May, there were also reports in Slovakia that the Ministry of Culture led by Martina Šimkovičová was planning its own “media education” in schools.
The project is to target both primary and secondary schools and aims to “improve awareness of the means of mass communication”, “increase critical thinking and independence of thought” and “make decisions under external pressure from the mass media”.
The preparation of the aforementioned media education should be led by Lukáš Machala, a grey eminence of the Ministry of Culture, which is formally headed by the aforementioned Martina Šimkovičová. Machala has recently made his way into the Czech media with a widely shared interview where he and an RTVS editor argue about whether the country is round.
Paradoxically, it was Minister Šimkovičová who, last autumn, as part of her reshuffle at the ministry and her generally declared fight “against political NGOs”, immediately stopped the subsidy programme to support media education inherited from the previous cabinet. Only six months have passed and her ministry is already preparing something similar – only along the SNS party and opinion lines.
„Kind and strong beings“
However, this line practically does not count on traditional media – on the contrary, it prefers alternative ones, without any editorial structure and fact-checking, with a clear (but non-transparent) preference for opinion, with a tendency to make conspiratorial statements without specific sources.
The Fico government has already announced a public boycott of inquiries from several mainstream media outlets, and openly prefers alternative media like Infovojna.sk, or in some cases even the Russian state media – in which, for example, the deputy chairman of the Smer government, Ľuboš Blaha, has recently appeared repeatedly.
“The alternative media somehow kept the psyche of the people here from going with the crowd. So that they don’t go crazy,” Šimkovičová said, referring to the period of the covid pandemic, in a recent interview with Czech podcast „Radio Universum“ presenter Martina Kociánová. In the aforementioned friendly chat, the two actors also confused the terms “state” and “public” media. No journalistic distance, just open sympathies of the two counterparts during the interview.
And this brings us back to the break-up of the TV Slovan presenter duo. “Our profile worked thanks to mutual respect and love,” wrote SNS MP and colleague of Minister Šimkovičová from the YouTube channel Peter Kotlár. He added that the channel now “belongs to Martinka, a kind and strong being”.
Only the future will tell what this means for fans of this marginal internet television. For Slovakia, however, this is yet another obvious proof that the state is led by people who make decisions based on personal ties, emotions and momentary motives. This is not only bad news for the media, especially at a time when part of the government is openly declaring war on them following the assassination of the Prime Minister.
