“Today, I regret that I accepted your invitation and participated in the online meeting. The Memorandum shows that you had a preconceived opinion on the situation in Slovenia. You have invited some of us to participate, just so you could claim legitimacy for the Memorandum, saying that people with different worldviews took part in the meeting. And obviously, you did not actually want to find out what we think, but instead just wanted to reinforce your opinion. Therefore, your report is extremely biased and one-sided. You missed the opportunity to present the real situation in Slovenia. I never want to participate in such dirty games again,” the editor-in-chief of the Demokracija magazine, Jože Biščak, wrote in a letter to the Council of Europe Commissioner Dunja Mijatović.
In a report published on Friday, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović called on the Slovenian authorities to stop worsening the situation in the areas of media freedom and freedom of expression in the country.
As expected, the report was biased, which is why the editor-in-chief of the Demokracija media outlet, Jože Biščak, wrote a letter in response to the report. We are publishing the letter in its entirety below.
“Dear Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatović,
I will not waste our God-given time, neither yours nor mine. So, I will be very brief.
I am reading your Memorandum on Freedom of Expression and Media Freedom in Slovenia, which is supposedly based on your numerous conversations, as well as conversations of your professional associates, with Slovenian journalists, representatives of the civil society and media experts. At your invitation, I also participated in one of the online meetings, together with some of my colleagues. Unfortunately, I can now see that the issues we highlighted at this meeting were mostly not even used in your Memorandum. Therefore, it seems to me that this report was written about a different country and not about Slovenia.
In the Memorandum, you constantly refer to the reports of various international or Slovenian associations, which have been speaking up very intensively in the last year – which was (in my opinion) mostly unnecessary and unjustifiable. It seems (as can be seen from your report) that the biggest “victims” in Slovenia are journalists and editors with a left-wing worldview. You write about them and their cases very concretely. However, this does not apply to the journalists who have a different worldview or opinion.
You specifically mention the case of threats against the host from the national television, Jože Možina, and the vandalised façade of the conservative television Nova24TV. Let me kindly remind you that Nova24TV, as far as I know, does not have an office, an editorial office, or a correspondence office in Maribor – Nova24TV’s headquarters are in Ljubljana. I believe that this was an unintentional mistake, perhaps something got lost in translation, but the question arises as to how many other similar “mistakes” are in your Memorandum.
You write about the advertising of the state-owned companies, which is not regulated, and about how every party that is in power can use the state-owned companies to “reward” their own media. However, you did not mention a very concrete example – in 2018, the left-wing government led by Marjan Šarec called on the state-owned companies to not advertise in the conservative media, which allegedly spread hatred. An attack on the media like this one by Šarec has never before happened in independent Slovenia.
That is all I am going to mention in my brief letter, even though I have at least as many comments regarding your Memorandum as the Memorandum itself is long.
Today, I regret that I accepted your invitation and participated in the online meeting. The Memorandum shows that you had a preconceived opinion on the situation in Slovenia. You have invited some of us to participate just so you could claim legitimacy for the Memorandum, saying that people with different worldviews took part in the meeting. And obviously, you did not actually want to find out what we think, but instead just wanted to reinforce your opinion. Therefore, your report is extremely biased and one-sided. You missed the opportunity to present the real situation in Slovenia. I never want to participate in such dirty games again.
Jože Biščak, editor-in-chief of the Demokracija magazine and President of the Slovenian Association of Patriotic Journalists”
Sara Kovač
