The national media outlet, Radio-Television Slovenia (RTVS), has been taken over by a clique of far-left activists after the “depoliticisation”, and this is evident in all aspects of programming – from what films are shown, to what they show to children, to the analysts and politicians in the studios of political shows – and the main symbol of the new far-left clique is the anarcho-socialist programme Marcel, which is even more bizarre than the former Studio City. Some time ago, well-informed sources began reporting that the 120-million-euro institution is run by the infamous radical 8th of March Institute (Inštitut 8. marec) clique, gathered around the NGO director Nika Kovač, who is well-connected in this aspect – namely, with the former director of the Centre for Non-Governmental Organisations (CNVOS), and now chairman of the RTV Slovenia Programme Council, Gregor Forbici. A picture recently captured by a reader confirms this horrifying thesis.
The picture shows the head of the so-called “research institute” the 8th of March, Nika Kovač, having coffee with Goran Forbici. It has long been whispered that Kovač and him informally ran the public institution with 2500 employees and 90 million euros a year together. The programme tailored to the Left party (Levica) was a good indicator of this.
The domain of the “researcher”, who has no real official function in the public institution, was not only to dictate programme (or political) orientations, but even to recruit staff. Some time ago, we wrote about the fact that after the fall of Zvezdan Martić, his successor, the acting chairwoman of the RTV Management Board, Natalija Gorščak, chose a personal friend of Nika Kovač – Rok Smolej as her first assistant, whose position was supposedly arranged by Kovač.
Smolej, who is considered to be a conflict-prone person and subject to mobbing of employees, became known when the employees of the show Panorama started to receive decisions on “temporary posting of a civil servant to wait for work at home,” but they were signed not by the management, but by Nika’s friend Smolej (only then it was realised that he did not actually have the authority to sign such decisions and new ones were drafted, signed by the management – without Franko Pavčar Jr., who disagreed with the decision).
Is Nika’s person in charge of personnel policy?
So “Nika’s person” has directly and illegally directed the personnel policy at Radio-Television Slovenia and sent politically unsuitable staff members to wait for work at home, with reduced pay. The photo showing Nika Kovač talking to Forbicci, who drove the national media outlet to the brink of bankruptcy in just a few months, is, therefore, very telling. What we see in the photo is apparently a staff meeting of the actual head of RTV Slovenia, who dictates to her subordinate who are the right people that are socio-politically fit to preach about all the joys of socialism on Radio-Television Slovenia.
It is therefore not surprising that the clique within RTV is demanding an increase in the mandatory contribution. Socialism is expensive, and it costs money. However, they have never had the capacity to manage the largest public institution in a quality way.
M. I.
