By: Miro Petek
As we stepped back a little from everyday life during the holidays, which is, after all, what holidays are partly meant for, the media pampered us with soft content, carefully curated to fill the festive void. I am referring to all sorts of selections, rankings, events of the year at home and abroad, person of the year features, and similar clutter that lulls the average Slovenian just enough that they do not notice what has been quietly slipped onto their festive table between the potica, prosciutto, and sarma. This is a media format that reads, watches, and listens well during the holidays, and people do not invest much mental effort when consuming it. Yet within these inventories, neatly wrapped, is the reinforcement of positions dictated by the ruling politics and the media environment loyal to it.
From the vast and unmanageable yearly mass of events, stories, decisions, twists, successes and failures, victories and defeats, processes, scandals, affairs, defections, acts of courage, delusions, and so on, media workers create their own collage, their own selection of events and personalities. If I write here that they skilfully manipulate in doing so, they will of course protest, insisting that their selection is an autonomous decision of the editorial board and the journalist, and they will throw in the phrase that the selection is objective. It is not. Objectivity is a myth; in journalism and elsewhere, objectivity does not exist. There can be honesty, but even that virtue is in short supply. And to speak of autonomy, given the ownership structure of the media and the overreach of politics, is a story for the naïve. I understand that a one‑hour TV show or a single newspaper page can contain only a limited number of letters, sentences, characters, images, and sound. But what matters is the selection, which carries, between the lines, the virus of manipulation. The selection follows the interests of owners and politicians, intertwined as never before. During the holidays, as people read these various inventories, they do not think too deeply, and through these stories the manipulators manage to create the desired effect: acceptance of their version of the truth, who is the best, the most important, the most deserving… These choices are not about the actual significance of events or people, but about media effects and political interests. Any voting by readers or viewers is, of course, a farce, because the list of candidates is in the hands of editors and politicians.
On the eve of the new year, the main printed daily even added a poll on party preferences and, with bold headlines on the front page, announced how trust in Golob’s government is growing. How absurd, given that just a day or two earlier the government had suffered a collapse at the Constitutional Court, which declared the Health Services Act unconstitutional. They did not need even a day, nor did they properly read the decision, before they, together with the media financed by the government through every possible channel and with the wavering health minister, declared victory, claiming that the Constitutional Court had recognised the government’s correctness in wanting to separate public and private healthcare. They tried to minimise the unconstitutionality of the law at every step, and in the dominant media there was not a trace of commentary or reflection on the shameful dissenting opinion of the constitutional judge who does not deserve to be named or described with any adjective, positive or negative.
The media content offered to us during the holidays was not empty at all. Less than three months before the elections, it was carefully planned and targeted at the average Slovenian with lazy and flabby brains. The public must be sold the belief that the invisible work of the current government is successful and beneficial. We have in power a pathological narcissist who has mastered media dramaturgy so well over the years that even when he lies or speaks nonsense, people do not hold it against him too much. This is why we need a strong draft of fresh air in the minds of voters, so they will no longer fall for people who offer easy solutions and who, before elections, buy our gratitude with our own money instead of being punished for all the damage they have caused.
