“Mojca Šetinc Pašek wants to silence every critical voice in her Commission of Inquiry and has therefore appointed me as a witness (because of the five shares I own in one of the media outlets) and thus disqualified me as a member of the Commission of Inquiry, on the basis of an article of the law which the Constitutional Court has found to be incompatible with the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia,” Slovenian Democratic Party MP Žan Mahnič wrote in a recent post.
It is a fact that the journalist/politician in question, Mojca Pašek Šetinc, is nowhere close to actually being an independent journalist. She is one of the people who finally exposed themselves by running on the list of a left-wing political option (the Freedom Movement party – Gibanje Svoboda). Before that, she worked as an “independent” journalist at the public media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia, which is expected to report in a balanced and impartial manner and to maintain an appearance of impartiality. Most of the employees there strive to do so, as it is not a private media outlet. Radio-Television Slovenia often operates in a professional, balanced and independent manner, but there are a few people there who deliberately spoil the appearance of impartiality. Unfortunately, the socio-political worker in question (affectionately known as the “journalistic troll”) is (was) one of the latter, often demonstrating this with her unconcealed activism/presstitution. Together with Eugenija Carl, they became known as “Milan’s presstitutes.” In the end, it was no longer their original sin that mattered (which was spreading lies on Facebook), but only the unpleasant label that brutally exposed the painful truth.
Former Minister of Finance Janez Šušteršič was right when he said at a public debate on Radio-Television Slovenia journalists that they do not have even “minimal self-reflection.” This criticism does not apply to everyone, but mainly to a certain group of individuals, which includes (or used to include) Pašek Šetinc, even though she is currently not (anymore/again) active in this institution. We are talking about a group of activist journalists who play socialist self-management while enjoying all the perks and privileges that the public media outlet offers them. It is a bit like if a group of workers was arbitrarily controlling a factory, commanding their colleagues in the same or similar positions, arbitrarily directing/determining what will be produced, regardless of the market/buyer demand. And at the same time, not caring about the factory’s leadership or its beliefs at all. But those days are over! Such behaviour is typical of the web portal of the public media outlet, MMC, where Igor Pirkovič is supposed to be the editor-in-chief, but this is far from being true… The whole thing is quite reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm.
We have seen it all on the web portal, including its usurpation for the strike, driven by the privileged few hysterical journalists (those that there are “f**king more” of…) who still have a key influence on the content, reporting and everything else. And the representative of this journalistic-political caste/clique is Pašek Šetinc, who is already fundamentally unfit to hold a mirror to the minority critical media outlets that do not fit the mainstream like-minded media mass and is also unfit to try and silence the critical voices of the right-wing opposition (most recently the Slovenian Democratic Party’s MP Žan Mahnič). This is plain, ugly hypocrisy. At the same time, it forgets the real problem – the highly controversial monopolisation of the media space in favour of its own political option. Namely, before the elections to the National Assembly, the media empire of the garbage tycoon Martin Odlazek brutally attacked the main rival of Robert Golob – Janez Janša. In addition to the highly controversial monopolisation, there are also the controversial business operations of the media empire (the Salomon company is just one example of that), the financial exploitation of the disabled, the controversial financing of some of the journalists from this empire, and so on. By the way: Odlazek has already been sentenced to prison in the past for business fraud.
The investigation also involves the “Necenzurirano.si” web portal that is under the aegis of the garbage lobby
And this is the kind of people that Prime Minister Robert Golob is directly associated with? Recently, various fires have also been attracting lots of attention… The links are said to go as far as the Freedom Movement party. Of course, the “impartial” and “independent” Pašek Šetinc would not even dream of touching these truly controversial matters. Special mention should also be made here of Vesna Vuković, a journalist at Odlazek’s “Necenzurirano.si” (“Uncensored”) web portal, who has presented herself to the public as an exemplary model of quality investigative journalism. This is the woman who was hired by Golob as his public relations representative… In September, we reported that Vuković was supposedly able to afford a luxury apartment (in addition to getting a new job) as part of Golob’s enormous reward, which was financed by the state-owned Gen-I energy company (103 thousand euros were paid by the energy company to Vuković’s private company), but this is of no interest to the “independent,” “professional” and “impartial” Pašek Šetinc. She is concerned about the small Hungarian capital in the Slovenian media space, which contributes a little to pluralism and softens the “stupid” reporting of the mainstream media outlets who all believe in the same things. Meanwhile, she is, of course, not interested in the Czech, Serbian or Austrian capital.
Similarly, Šetinc Pašek is also not worried about the fact that Tomaž Modic, another “Necenzurirano.si” journalist, became the professional associate of her investigative team. And as for the third journalist of the aforementioned web portal, Primož Cirman, the inept Golob publicly “blurted out” that “he is one of the best” and that “he would hire him anywhere.” Meanwhile, Cirman’s wife, Petra Bezjak Cirman (the former controversial link between the national media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia and the “Necenzurirano.si” web portal) is already employed in the Government Communication Office, while Primož is expected to soon take the post of editor-in-chief of the state-owned Siol media outlet. The Prime Minister was hit by a wave of outrage for what he said, even though he has only ineptly revealed that “the emperor has no clothes” and that the entire left-wing political pole, which extends from politics into the media, culture, academia, the courts, the prosecutor ranks, state companies, copyright agencies (!!! – AIPA – the Institution for the Enforcement of the Rights of the Authors, Performers and Producers of Audio-Visual Works, AAS – Copyright Agency of Slovenia) and others, constantly pretend that this is not the case. The last piece of information concerns the non-elected candidate of the Stalinist Left party (Levica), Sašo Jejčič (!!!), who has also been engaged by Pašek Šetinc as an outside associate of the National Assembly’s Commission of Inquiry for determining the political responsibility of holders of public office with regard to the alleged illegal financing of political parties and party political propaganda in the media before and during the 2022 elections to the National Assembly with financial resources from state-owned enterprises, state institutions and foreign entities.
In the spirit of Sicily: the blood-red Šetinc clan has dominated the media space for generations!
The Šetinc family is a true media family, which has been wreaking havoc in the mass media and directing editorial policy for some three generations. They are “left-wing privatisers” of the media landscape. In light of this, we can understand all the efforts of Pašek Šetinc – an attempt to protect the interests of a clan that has long been deeply involved in the “jihad” against Janša?! The whole thing is also a bit reminiscent of the pathological symbiosis with the media in the case of the Kovač family (Nika Kovač – her grandfather was the leaden-eyed media giant Božo Kovač). Another member of the Šetinc family, also a prominent RTV personality, was the subject of some interesting sentences a few years ago, said by the current left-wing presidential candidate Nataša Pirc Musar, who is running in the elections with the support of the former Communist party boss Milan Kučan: “RTV Slovenia was, and still is, under the influence of the Social Democrats party (Socialni demokrati – SD). Mr Lenart Šetinc walked around it like a ghost and gave a little direction to the editorial policy. I was not brought down by the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) back then, but by the SD party. Senior representatives of that party were saying that Nataša Pirc Musar does not listen and should therefore be torn down. And that is what they ultimately did.”
The cooperation and links between Mojca and Lenart were presented in an interesting way in the Reporter magazine a few years ago, when they wrote: “Mojca Pašek Šetinc has “made it big” on television under the new RTV management! She was given a free hand by the director of RTV Slovenia, Janez Lombergar, and especially, until recently, by the editor-in-chief of the news programme, Ksenija Horvat Petrovčič. Until recently, because the two RTV comrades have had a few clashes lately, because what Pašek Šetinc is doing can no longer be hidden. The woman sovereignly chooses her own topics to work on, and if she does not like something, she threatens Lenart Šetinc, the Chairman of the RTV Supervisory Board. She tried to raise herself from mediocre anonymity by volunteering to make a documentary on Milan Kučan, which was a pure artisanal failure, not to mention the ideological portrait and biased portrayal of Kučan. Some in the RTV house say that thirty years ago, Mojca Pašek Šetinc would have been a more committed party cadre than her “namesake” Šetinc on the Supervisory Board. Her political cheerleading does not bother any of the people in charge at all, and so she calmly reported from the Kočevje Communist Party Congress when Pahor was being booed, even though her father was a delegate there, which is a professional conflict of interests.
The woman is also, in her own way, an expose of her husband and lobbyist, Mile Šetinc. A well-known affair involving Šetinc says that before last year’s early elections, he sent elected editorial boards and journalists some questions for the SDS party or Janez Janša, and then Mojca Pašek-Šetinc addressed those same questions to Janša herself.”
Domen Mezeg
