Comment by Hitton

6 years ago

Would you mind sharing which country are you talking about? I'm from another country in central Europe and the situation is same as in the USA or western Europe.

3 comments

Hitton

yreg 6 years ago

I'm talking about Slovak SME, Denník N, Aktuality, HN, Markíza and Czech DVTV and Reflex.

Hitton 6 years ago
Ok, I'm not expert on Slovak media, but quick search shows that SME is owned by Penta (Gorilla), HN by Andrej Babis (Berlusconi-like figure), Dennik N is listed on wikipedia as newspaper having liberal slant, Reflex liberal-conservative slant, Markiza is noted as historically being criticized for being against former owner enemies (owner changed, but did journalists?), DVTV as internet tv isn't great example of mainstream medium, also just cursory search revealed that one of their moderators, Emma Smetana, is well known for not being exactly professional.
The fact that you consider those media unbiased doesn't mean they are really unbiased. Plenty of people consider Fox News and Huffington Post as paragons of objectivity.
- yreg 6 years ago
  
  I'm not interested in defending all of this rapid fire as it would take too much effort on both of our sides.
  I can tell you the story of the first one (SME) and you may take what you wish from it.
  Penta is a shady investment group linked to heavy corruption scandals across the political spectrum. [0]
  As a power move they decided to buy the medium they've seen as their main public opponent — SME. Half of the journalists from SME left, raised money and founded Denník N, which is pretty similar to SME. The other half stayed and convinced the previous shareholders to keep a majority.
  45% of SME is owned by Penta but they have no effect on the content and SME critisizes Penta all the time. Penta knows that if they did anything about it, redactors would speak up and leave and they would be left with a worthless company.
  [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_scandal