By: Bogdan Sajovic
A few days ago, the news portal Info360 published an interview with Dušan Smodej, known from the Fotopub affair. Smodej landed Luka Mesec, or rather the leadership of the Levica party, in a rather awkward position. Almost immediately, left-wing media outlets across our dear homeland rushed, virtually in unison, to defend Comrade Luka’s reputation and legacy. Some even reproached the portal’s journalists for not verifying every statement made by the interviewee before publication; in plain language, they argued that the interview should have been censored. Apparently, this is what is meant by responsible journalism in the public interest.
In the spring of 1918 in Petrograd, the editor of a liberal newspaper stood trial for publishing an interview with a minister from what was then still a coalition Bolshevik-anarchist government. The anarchist minister had been highly critical of his Bolshevik colleagues, and prosecutor Krylenko, a rising star of the future show trials, filed charges, arguing that the newspaper should have “corrected” the critical statements before publication because the media influences public opinion. The editor defended himself by saying that the minister was responsible for his own statements and that the newspaper had merely conveyed them accurately to the public so that people could form their own opinions. Krylenko responded that the government represented the interests of the people and that it was therefore the duty of newspapers to remain in harmony with it and thus influence public opinion responsibly. The editor pointed out that the interviewee was himself a member of the government. Krylenko dismissed this argument, claiming that, as a responsible person, the editor should have known who genuinely represented the interests of the people and who was merely a concealed enemy. And if that was not clear to him, he should have consulted the competent authorities beforehand. The judges endorsed the standards of responsible journalism presented by Comrade Krylenko, sent the editor to prison, and shut down the newspaper.
Krylenko himself was exposed two decades later as an enemy of the people and ended up with a bullet in the back of his head. His standards of socially responsible journalism, however, apparently survived him and remain alive and well in today’s Slovenian left-wing media…