We recently saw once again what media freedom looks like to Robert Golob and the rest of the members of the current government. But this time, the focus was not on the Prime Minister but on his Minister of Health, Danijel Bešič Loredan, who interrupted a journalist at a press conference in the middle of her question, in front of everyone, and snapped at her, telling her that she should stop asking about the topics they had not previously agreed on.
“I will just cut you off right here… I will not be responding to any questions about the intervention law today. The subject of today’s press conference is COVID, the strategy for tackling it… Please, keep that in mind. When the intervention law is the focus, we will organise a special press conference, and I will be happy to explain everything. You have to show respect to the experts who are here; the topic of today’s press conference is COVID, we have all discussed this topic and prepared for it, and I am asking you to stick to it.” That is how the Minister of Health, Danijel Bešič Loredan, silenced the “Slovenske novice” newspaper journalist. Anyone who has ever attended a press conference knows that such behaviour is highly unusual. It is true that the press conferences are focused on a specific topic, but at the end of any press conference, there are always questions that do not concern only the topic of the said conference but other areas of the politician’s work as well. Every normal politician looks forward to these questions because it gives them the chance to explain their views and previous work to the public.
But obviously, the current government team has a different mindset – on the one hand, they are still enjoying their period of media honeymoon with Odlazek’s bullhorn media outlets, POP TV, Petrič’s Delo newspaper and other media that is favourable to the current authorities, but on the other hand, they seem to not be able to control their authoritarian outbursts anymore, which happen when a journalist dares to ask something they deem to be too much. That is when their smiles disappear, and their faces suddenly fill with grim authoritarianism, which wants to subjugate the last remaining critical voices in the country. One of them is also our media outlet. Apparently, we get on people’s nerves because we show what the other media outlets cut out of their reports.
But Bešič Loredan is far from being the only one who dared to silence a journalist or even a colleague. At the first press conference, when the Prime Minister presented his failed measures adopted to control the high prices of motor fuels, he prevented his own Minister of the Economy, Matjaž Han, from speaking in front of the journalists. “No, this is not planned,” he told Han, who had to remain silent before Golob and the Slovenian public. Minister Han has not yet dared to comment on the humiliating move.
“You will cut that out.”
The true nature of the relationship between the journalists of the dominant media and the ruling politics was recently also revealed by the Speaker of the National Assembly. Urška Klakočar Zupančič dared to suggest to journalists that they should cut her slip-up out of their reports and recordings. Well, the recording still found its way to the public and consequently, it revealed just how the political-media connection on the Slovenian left works.
Blocking people on social media and interrupting people in the National Assembly
One of the new MPs, Lena Grgurevič, is also trying to spread her dictatorial wings. During the hearing of the ministerial candidate Dominika Švarc Pipan, she interrupted the SDS MP Alenka Jeraj without explanation, not allowing her to continue to speak, and she did the same thing just a few weeks later to the new SDS MP, Andrej Hoivik – in both cases under the pretext that the MPs were not actually talking about the right topic. And the Minister for Digitalisation, Emilija Stojmenova Duh, has also silenced quite a few of the more critical voices on social media. This political deserter (remember, she gave up on her previous party, the Social Democrats, immediately after the elections and joined the Freedom Movement instead – in order to get her ministerial position) has blocked absolutely every critical voice on her Twitter profile, including those who had not commented on her posts even once. This happened immediately after rumours surfaced that she was involved in illegal matters related to the distribution of European funds.
My dad, a socialist kulak – in the year 2022
“In the times of freedom, you never know what you can and cannot say. They can lock you up for one wrong word…” That is what the character of uncle Vanč from the movie “My Dad, a Socialist Kulak” (“Moj ata, socialistični kulak”) advised the naïve farmer Malek years ago, and the latter listened to him. It seems that we are living in very similar times now, or we are at least headed towards them. The Minister’s authoritarianism is just one of the excesses of government representatives, who, on the one hand, present themselves as some kind of freedom bringers, but in reality, they are actually little dictators who compensate for their insecurities with authoritarian behaviour.
Andrej Žitnik
