By: Mitja Iršič
In the pre‑election fervour, the party Levica recently boasted with a campaign video in which a certain Mr. Vladimir thanked the party because, on Saturday mornings with his coffee, a newspaper awaits him, accompanied by the caption: “Levica is felt in everyday life.”
“Every Saturday I come here; we meet with friends and acquaintances and read newspapers, which are very important for our community because we learn many good things from them. At the same time, by reading these media, we also support our journalists, who write very well and are therefore very important to us. And all this was made possible by the new law of our minister, Asta Vrečko,” explained the grateful pensioner Vladimir.
The message is clear: the new media law was not written to enable the friendly distribution of money from left‑wing politicians to loyal media tycoons like Martin Odlazek and Stojan Petrič and their media empires, but so that people like Mr. Vladimir can “spend Saturdays reading newspapers with friends and acquaintances and supporting ‘our’ journalists.”
Vladimir is holding Večer, which is controlled through various channels by Odlazek.
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Many will find it problematic that in a country where we collect donations for children with rare genetic diseases, the government allocates millions to private media owned by domestic tycoons – who in turn use these media as leverage over left‑wing politics and, indirectly, over our taxpayers’ wallets. But Levica and its voters live in a different world – a world of absolute collectivism, where society is obliged to finance everything: culture, sports, education, even tourism. Slovenians know this system well. At least those retirees who spend their Saturdays enjoying the contributions of “good journalists” in selected media. They remember it from the former state – at least until the West forced us, after bankruptcy, to adopt free‑market reforms if we wanted them to keep lending us marks and dollars.
This mindset was internalised even by constitutional judges more than two decades ago, when they creatively interpreted the second paragraph of Article 39 of the Constitution (“Everyone has the right to obtain information of a public nature, for which they have a legally grounded interest…”) to mean that every government must ensure that the public (state) broadcaster RTV Slovenia is adequately funded, regardless of whether the funding comes from a mandatory fee or the state budget. In their own way, they thus “cemented” the RTV fee for eternity.
The judges reasoned much like pensioner Vladimir. The only way citizens could obtain information of public importance, they claimed, was through a state‑controlled medium. Even in 2001, when the ruling was written, such an interpretation of the Constitution was questionable and partly insulting to citizens, treating them like nine‑year‑olds who cannot access information without the guiding hand of the “good journalists” of the state broadcaster. Today, in the information age, when information from around the world is a single click away, a constitutional ruling that forces taxpayers to finance state media is downright bizarre.
Left‑wing politics then spent the next two decades extending this “obligation” to fund state media into an indirect obligation to fund tycoon‑owned private media, which in reality function as PR arms of left‑wing parties. The rest is history.
Today, pensioner Vladimir is pleased that things are this way, while others feel sick to their stomachs. But we should not mock him. There are many Vladimirs, and their way of thinking is typical of people who grew up in a system where everything private was stamped as a form of Western imperialism.
Let us be teachers. Everyone knows a retiree who goes to a café in the morning to read Delo, Večer, and Dnevnik, and in the evening eagerly waits to be informed by Marcel, Igor Bergant, and Tanja Gobec. At the same time, many such retirees complain that their pension is low. Our task is to show them another world – a world in which public financing of state and para‑state media looks like madness, yet people are still informed, and they even have more money left at the end of the month. Vladimir must understand that Levica is felt above all in people’s wallets.
