Robert Golob understands that the only way to his re-election is the complete Putinisation of the Slovenian media. He succeeded in doing this with Siol by replacing its editor; he also successfully “depoliticised” the national media outlet Radio-Television Slovenia with the help of Constitutional Court judges, and Odlazek’s extensive media network and the largest commercial television station POP TV have always been on the side of the left anyway. However, it has only recently become clear to the public just how much like Vladimir Putin our Prime Minister has become. Namely, journalist Suzana Kos of the Delo newspaper recently revealed a horrifying detail from her interactions with the leading government party, the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda).
In a conversation with Urška Klakočar Zupančič, the Speaker of the National Assembly, the journalist said or asked the following: “How do you imagine the freedom of the media? My personal experience is that I sent a question to the company Gorenje, asking who chose a company that had no references. We got a call in our editorial office from the top of the Freedom Movement party, telling me not to ask about such things and to stop bothering them!”
In her question to the Gorenje company, Kos was referring to the financing of the parallel company SEE M. & C, which was established by Vesna Vuković, and which received 103,000 euros from the Gen-I energy company, which was previously run by Robert Golob, in addition to 34,000 euros from the Brio consultancy centre owned by the current Minister of Finance Klemen Boštjančič, 73,000 euros from Adventure Investments and 60,000 euros from the company Gorenje.
As Peter Jančič wrote for the media outlet Spletnicasopis.eu, a year ago, when he was still an editor at Siol.net, the said media outlet wanted to know why the company Gorenje was paying Vuković’s company, and Gorenje provided the following explanation: “The contracts relate to the preparation of monthly country risk assessment reports in the markets of South-Eastern Europe, where Gorenje was operating at the time. In this context, the contractor monitored, analysed and assessed for the client the political, economic, social and other risks that could affect the company’s business and the process of establishing the strategic partnership and, subsequently, the acquisition process and the process of setting up the new structure of Hisense Europe, in the context of which the owner was deciding in which countries to close, maintain or merge the former Hisense and Gorenje businesses.”
However, the other companies and Vuković have remained silent on the payments. Even today’s Prime Minister Robert Golob has not commented on it so far. Journalist Kos forgot to add that Vuković was also doing journalistic work without any higher educational qualifications (a university degree). The company SEE M. & C, which Vuković founded and ran when she worked for Siol.net and later worked for the Necenzurirano.si (Uncensored) web portal (before that, she was at the newspaper Dnevnik), was liquidated last year by the Necenzurirano editor Primož Cirman.
When asked about the call and the lack of clarification, the Vice-President of the Freedom Movement party, Klakočar Zupančič, replied to Kos that what happened was certainly not right and added that she wished the journalists had summarised their answers correctly, too. But if what happened was wrong, will she resign from the party? Probably not.
What does the call tell us about the media under the boot of “freedom”?
The fact that the top representatives of the ruling party are calling editorial offices is something unusual even for the Slovenian media landscape. It is, after all, a direct attempt by politicians to influence what the media will or must not report. Left-wing activists, without any evidence, accused representatives of the previous right-wing coalition of doing this, and they even sent letters to Brussels and the world media, where they literally invented transgressions that the Janša government had allegedly allowed. Now we have the public testimony of a journalist from a left-wing media outlet accusing the country’s largest party, which runs the executive branch of government, of wanting to interfere with editorial integrity. This is Putin’s Russia in the year 2000, when Putin was not yet murdering journalists, but his ‘siloviki’ were calling into editorial offices and telling them to ‘back off’. However, some of them did not back off. And we all know what happened after that.
Andrej Žitnik
