Slovakia: Fico government tries to take control of state TV and radio

[President Johnson]

Fico is aspiring to be an Orban double.

https://twitter.com/euronews/status/1783148761033703709

[Antonio the Sixth]

Oh God, this is bad. I always thought Slovakia was too chaotic and divided to go the Hungary route but signs like these are still very bad.

[lfromnj]

Wow I could never imagine the state controlled media being used against me -state controlled media supporters.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Wow I could never imagine the state controlled media being used against me -state controlled media supporters.

Cops can also be used to entrench authoritarian governments but that's no reason to support abolishing the police (unless you're a Twitter lefty clown). State institutions are tools and they can be used for good or for evil depending on the way they're structured.

Also worth noting that a lot of Orban's media takeover was done through his oligarch buddies buying up private media companies. Megacorporations love aiding and abetting authoritarian rulers they know will duly reward them for their help.

[Estrella]

On paper, this is a huge change, but also not. STVR will be a whole new organization, but fundamentally the exact same thing as RTVS, except with a slightly different management structure: reorganization is really the only way the top brass can be fired before their term expires, a rule that exists so that, you know, the government can’t just replace them with their people. STVR will certainly be much more pro-government, but for all the talk from far-right about how Slovakia needs “not a public broadcaster, but a state broadcaster” (Andrej Danko), this doesn’t actually do much on that front.

It doesn’t need to though. For the past decade, the Smer/Hlas/far-right nexus — lately they stopped pretending there’s any difference between them anymore — created their own ecosystem of independent but informally connected media: a right-wing soft conspiratiorial magazine, a far-right unhinged conspiratorial magazine, an openly pro-Putin online TV, a very pro-Smer free newspaper, Telegram channels and so on. They do put pressure on opposition media and government politicians started boycotting political talkshows on “unfriendly” channels, but it’s just one part of the strategy.

This move by itself won’t have much impact because RTVS just sucks and everyone knows it. I checked the ratings and all their TV channels put together get like 15% on a good day. But Antonio has a point that private media is also eager to help Fico if it makes them money. The staff at TV Markíza formed a union a few weeks ago and threatened a strike after allegations of pressure from management to make the news less critical of the government.

With their approach to media or Ukraine or many other things, you can see what is IMO the biggest difference between Fico and Orbán. Their goals are the same, but Orbán is an inflexible radical who will stop at nothing, while Fico is more of a salami tactics/fingers in many pies type. And talking about strategy, it was a genius move to use the SNS Minister of Culture — an utterly unqualified national laughingstock who is hated even by many Fico supporters — as his hatchetwoman for this.

[CumbrianLefty]

Wow I could never imagine the state controlled media being used against me -state controlled media supporters.

Stuff like this is why not treating yellow avatars seriously is the general default position on here