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Slovene leader accused of media censorship

By Dan Bilefsky

Published: January 18, 2008

Ljubljana, Slovenia: As a young journalist in the late 1980s, Janez Jansa, now prime minister, played a critical role in spurring Slovenia’s pro-democracy movement after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for opposing the communist regime and writing articles attacking the former Yugoslav Army.

In an extraordinary inversion of the past, his opponents now accuse him of trying to censor the media whose freedom he fought to uphold. A recent report by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog group based in New York, said that the Slovene media “faced indirect political and economic pressure from the government and business interests” and that government officials sometimes treated journalists as if they were “the political opposition.”

Such is the concern about press freedom in this formerly communist country that 571 journalists recently signed a petition delivered to Parliament and to European leaders that accused Jansa of censorship. The petition - supported by the European Federation of Journalists - questioned whether Slovenia, which took over the presidency of the European Union on Jan. 1, was sufficiently democratic to represent the bloc of nearly 500 million people.

The public attack is still reverberating in this Balkan nation of two million people.

“It is embarrassing for Slovenia and for the EU that it is now presided over by a country that does not uphold European values of press freedom,” said Blaz Zgaga, one of two journalists who spearheaded the petition.

Media analysts say that concerns about press freedom in Slovenia reflect a trend across eastern and central Europe, in which former communist countries are struggling to shed the authoritarian political cultures of the past. In Slovenia, which was part of the former Yugoslavia ruled by Josip Broz Tito for 35 years, the Communist Party exerted strong control over the media and censored opponents.

Jansa, asked last week whether he was stifling the media, was emphatic: If the main measure of press freedom “is the possibility to criticize the government, then we have 200 percent freedom.”

The government cited several independent studies, including a 2007 report by Reporters Without Borders, that ranked Slovenia above France, Spain, Italy, Australia and the United States in press freedom.

Yet journalists, media executives and analysts in the country allege that Slovenia’s center-right government has used state-owned funds or companies with controlling stakes in leading newspapers to weed out editors and journalists critical of the government.

The former secretary of state for the economy, Andrijana Starina Kosem, said during an interview that in August 2005, she and the prime minister orchestrated a deal to gain editorial influence over Delo, the country’s most influential newspaper. Delo, which is majority owned by Lasko, a beer company, was founded in 1959 and is the second-largest circulation daily in Slovenia, after the tabloid Slovenske Novice. Delo’s influence on public life is comparable to that of the Times of London in Britain or Le Monde in France.

Starina Kosem, who is now head of the supervisory board of Delo and was once a golf partner of the prime minister’s, said that Lasko was determined to buy part of Mercator, a large retailer partly owned by the state. In a private meeting in Jansa’s office, she said, the government agreed to sell part of its stake in Mercator to Lasko in return for the brewer’s promise to install editors and management sympathetic to the government.

“Jansa was determined to gain control of the media and he did a deal to make sure that would happen,” said Starina Kosem, who resigned from her post as state secretary in May 2007 before revealing her allegations of state censorship in a letter leaked to the press.

Anze Logar, a government spokesman, denied that the government had tried to gain control of Delo. The share sale, he said, had been motivated to reduce government ownership of private industry.

Starina Kosem said that she had helped orchestrate the agreement because she was convinced that as a former dissident, Jansa, now 49, would use his influence to expand the country’s media freedom.

Instead, she said, he would send a flurry of cellphone text messages each morning berating editors of papers with headlines critical of the government - an allegation his office denied.

Shortly after the alleged deal, she said, Delo’s new management installed a new editor, Peter Jancic, whose mandate was to bring the paper into line with government thinking. Nearly a dozen Delo journalists resigned in protest.

Delo journalists allege that critical reporting of government policies became increasingly difficult. As evidence, they point to Jancic’s decision to recall the Delo correspondent in Vienna to Ljubljana in April after he published stories critical of government policy toward the Slovene minority in Austria. The correspondent in Zagreb, Croatia, who had criticized the government for a police buildup at Slovenia’s disputed border with Croatia, also was recalled.

Jancic, who has since been replaced as editor, said during an interview that the correspondents were recalled because they were injecting their opinions into stories. He said that, as editor, he never came under direct government pressure.

“My editorial policy was to be fair, accurate and unbiased,” he said.

Sasa Vidmajer, Delo’s leading diplomatic columnist, said that shortly after Jancic was installed, her columns critical of the government were routinely rejected. She said interference reached a high point when she wrote a column about former President Janez Drnovsek, a well-known political rival of Jansa’s. The next day, she said, her story appeared under the deputy foreign editor’s name, with only the parts critical of Drnovsek remaining.

Jancic said he did not have detailed knowledge of the incident.

Media analysts say that the Slovene government also sought to tighten its grip on the media by passing legislation in early 2005 governing RTV Slovenija, the public broadcasting organization. Prior to the new bill, RTV’s governing council was composed mainly of members of civil society, ranging from writers to representatives of farmers and trade unions. But Marko Milosavljevic, a media specialist at the University of Ljubljana, argues that the new law expanded government influence by requiring Parliament to appoint 21 of the 29 positions on the programming council.

Milosavljevic noted that such arrangements were not uncommon in Europe; in Britain, for instance, the members of the regulatory body governing the BBC are appointed by the Queen on advice from government ministers. The difference with Slovenia, he said, was that “Britain has experienced hundreds of years of democracy, while we have had only 17 years.”

Media specialists say the slow pace of privatization in Slovenia has abetted government influence over the media since state-owned companies remain a principal source of advertising revenue for newspapers. Grega Repovz, editor of Mladina, an influential left-of-center political weekly whose covers feature mocking caricatures of the prime minister - including a recent one depicting him as a crying chicken - says that after Jansa came to power, such companies stopped advertising in the pages of Mladina, nearly putting the magazine out of business. “What we are seeing here with media freedom is the illness of a young state,” he said.

Logar, the government spokesman, said the government did not interfere with advertising placed by state-owned companies; if Mladina has little advertising, he said, it was because of its small circulation.

Some Slovene writers counter that it is the journalists - rather than the government - who are abusing press freedom.

Writing in a recent issue of Delo, Drago Jancar, a leading Slovene rightist intellectual, noted that Jansa was a victim of unprecedented “media lynching” and that “sensationalism making mountains out of molehills is in full swing.”

He lamented that when a minister’s wife used an official car to go to the store to buy a broom, it was front-page news.