By: Miro Petek
When, a quarter of a century ago, I got my hands on documents about money laundering in the then state‑owned bank NKBM, I sensed a major journalistic story. But before I began working on it, I asked the then editor‑in‑chief of Večer whether they would publish it.
NKBM was the owner of Večer, and the president of the bank’s management board, as well as of Večer’s supervisory board, was Jože Glogovšek. Editor‑in‑chief Milan Predan was determined that I should work on the story, because if we do not publish such revelations, then we have buried journalism. Older readers more or less know what followed: shortly after the article was published, the editor‑in‑chief was replaced, I added a few more articles about the Carinthian economic mafia, and in February 2001 the criminal underworld prepared a “welcome” for me in front of my house.
Glogovšek then stated vehemently before the parliamentary inquiry commission, which was investigating the political background of this attack, that it was not the job of journalists to investigate money laundering. That statement was effectively a directive to journalists, since later none of the dominant media tackled the laundering of billions of euros of Iranian money in NLB. Nor did law‑enforcement authorities. From that time also comes the statement of the then Prosecutor General, Zdenka Cerar, who lectured us that not every filthy act in the country is necessarily a criminal offence. From today’s distance, we see that this legal lesson has in fact become practice. Even the biggest crimes in the country remain at the level of “filth” and are neither prosecuted nor sanctioned.
Glogovšek’s understanding of what a journalist may or may not do has long since been internalised by many politicians, and today’s structure, with Golob at the helm, certainly the most radically. The state of journalism is worse than ever, and of course one cannot expect journalists today to expose their own media owner, even if that owner is an evident criminal. They simply must not. What I find harder to understand is that they are nevertheless so servile to the authorities that they do not perform their journalistic duty and mission. We know why, of course: they must obediently serve the propaganda ordered by the media owner, because that owner depends on advertising from state‑owned companies and on state subsidies – and that is death for journalists. Humiliated and degraded, they have been reduced to the level of propagandists, because their livelihood depends on a tycoon employer who has made a pact with politics. They have lost all credibility, which for a journalist and journalism is death. The marriage of media owners with politics, and the dependence of the media on politics and para‑state companies, has destroyed quality journalism. And the part of the media landscape that is not part of this ideological propaganda machine is being destroyed by the same politics in various ways, including through a Gestapo‑like parliamentary inquiry commission.
Before the elections, we will of course again hear the idiotic clichés about elections as a festival of democracy. Democracy in Slovenia is only partial or apparent, a democracy with a defect. A full‑blooded democracy would be capable of resisting a government that ruthlessly uses autocratic tools in its work, as the current government does.
Golob’s rhetoric, which easily dismisses dissenters as fascists or “Janšists”, the selective directing of advertising money into media friendly to the government, the openly hostile attitude toward certain professional groups, and regulatory pressures backed by harmful legislative interventions, all together form a pattern of conduct that resembles the practices of autocratic regimes more than those of a mature democracy.
Critical journalism is a safeguard against abuses by the state and politics. Because Golob’s court finances the media through various channels, it expects – or rather: demands! – that they do not expose its criminality. And that they build the cult of personality around Robi and Tina, who have become a permanent political prop, and whose posture has introduced into our space all the monarchical symbolism and monarchical logic that even the most traditional monarchies would not be ashamed of.