By: Jože Biščak
It was in the autumn a few years ago, when I was still the director of Nova Obzorja, the company that publishes the magazine Demokracija, that I requested a meeting with the CEO of Gen‑I, Robert Golob. He replied quickly, and a few days later I walked into the building on Dunajska cesta 119 in Ljubljana. A few polite introductory words, then a brief exchange of views on energy, and finally my question about whether Gen‑I would extend its advertising contract. His answer was clear: “Biščak, I have to sell electricity to both the left and the right, so we will not just extend the contract, we will increase the advertising.” I am still grateful to Golob for that, although I still do not understand what happened to him once he strapped on the prime‑ministerial holster.
These events, which I also recounted at the session of the parliamentary inquiry commission initially led by Mojca Šetinc Pašek, will (most likely) not be found in the report, because it would undermine the construct of the current chair, Tamara Vonta. It would mean that the current prime minister, back when he was still heading a state‑owned company, “financed” Demokracija. I put “financed” in quotation marks because “financing” a business entity, which Nova Obzorja is, means something entirely different from a state‑owned company placing advertisements in a media outlet. When I asked the commission what exactly they understood by the phrase “financing a business entity,” so that I would even know how to answer, I received no reply. If that really counted as financing, then anyone who buys a bread roll at Mercator is “financing” the owner of the retail chain. But that is not “financing.”
This is a textbook example of language abuse, where the left assigns completely new and different meanings to words and concepts. The same thing happened during my second hearing, when the commission was already chaired by Vonta. She kept insisting that Demokracija is a “party media outlet.” I objected, but she parroted the phrase over and over. And now the media write about Demokracija as a party outlet. Let’s be clear: SDS occasionally publishes a magazine intended for its membership, which members receive for free. That is what is called a “party media outlet.” Demokracija, however, operates on the market; its survival depends on magazine sales and advertising revenue. And the fact that SDS holds a co‑ownership stake in Demokracija (which we have never hidden) does not make the magazine a party outlet.
Because of the attacks on me personally, on my colleagues, and on the media I work for, I refuse to be depressed, but a month and a half before the elections it is clear that the demonisation and criminalisation of dissenters has been fully exposed as a matter of selective use of confidential information from the inquiry commission. And for several years now, it has been the same before every election, through abuse of position and power, attacks on the right have become almost a mathematical constant. Slandering private individuals (and all of us working at Nova24TV and Demokracija are private individuals) has become, under Golob’s government, a new spear for consolidating their power and a way to perhaps avoid an inevitable electoral defeat. When the commission was established, I wrote that its purpose was to destroy conservative media (we have never hidden our clear orientation), but the main target is the largest opposition party. Everything else is collateral damage of the left‑wing “Anything but Janša” campaign.
The conduct of Tamara Vonta and her whisperers is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The American activist was very clear: power is not deserved, it is seized, therefore the ends always justify the means. In recent years, his work has become the operational manual of the Slovenian left, whose aim is to spew sulphur at anyone who does not suit them (or anything that does not suit them). First, through media outlets sympathetic to them, they smeared Nova24TV and Demokracija with obvious lies. They provoked a conflict, which was followed by the establishment of the inquiry commission. The commission, full of leftists who built themselves a castle of medieval privileges, then isolated and, by stoking envy (an old and proven communist tactic), personalised the targets. It directed its activities where it could cause the most damage: at individuals from Nova24TV and Demokracija.
What will follow, I can only imagine: an escalation of attacks until the elections, when, I am convinced, Golob’s people will finally be removed by the voters.
