Comment by yreg

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