By: Miro Petek
In all the years of independent Slovenia, we should have already realised that a full‑blooded democracy will not exist until the media landscape becomes balanced, plural, and freed from excessive ownership concentration. Democratic elections alone are not enough if public opinion is shaped by a few media power centres that control a large part of the information space. Slovenia has too few diverse and mutually independent voices, because a disproportionate share of media power has been subordinated to a narrow circle of owners.
The state has had, and still has, laws, regulators, ministries, agencies, and various councils. Yet for decades they watched, and at times even assisted, as the local radio space merged into large networks, as media houses passed from hand to hand, and as the same management, programming, and advertising centres emerged behind different names and brands. This is why radical interventions are needed today. These will clash with strong interests and provoke fierce resistance, but they are essential for the future of democracy. The state can, and must (!), re‑establish pluralism in the media space within the framework of the constitution, laws, and European law.
That this is possible has already been proven in the past. When Delo gained control over Večer, the then Competition Protection Office prohibited the concentration and demanded its reversal. Delo had to sell Večer. If it was possible to require the separation of two newspapers, why would similar structural deconcentration be unacceptable in principle for radio, television, or other media?
In radio, the state’s responsibility is even greater. In the early 1990s, it allocated a large part of the FM spectrum to numerous local and regional broadcasters. This could have produced an exceptionally plural radio space. But the state did not know how, or did not want, to protect this pluralism. It allowed the originally dispersed structure to gradually concentrate through acquisitions, ownership ties, and programme networks. Frequencies once intended for various local programmes and environments ended up in increasingly larger systems.
The radio‑frequency spectrum is a limited public good, not private property of media companies. The state can, under clearly defined legal conditions, prevent further concentration, re‑tender frequencies when rights expire, and demand the elimination of unlawful concentration.
But today even that is no longer enough. Internet television does not need a classic TV frequency, internet radio does not need an FM transmitter, a portal does not need an antenna tower, and a podcast does not need FM or DAB licensing. Yet all of them can massively influence public opinion. Therefore, media power can no longer be measured only by the number of frequencies. The criteria must be reach, audience, editorial control, ownership links, and advertising power.
The real question is: how much public space does each actor actually control? If the same group controls FM and internet radio, a TV programme and IPTV, video‑on‑demand, news portals, podcasts, and other digital content, then counting frequencies says very little about its actual power. European law increasingly highlights the core of the problem: excessive media concentration reduces the number of independent voices and increases the power of individual centres in shaping public opinion.
modern media law should be ideologically neutral. This cannot be said for the law adopted in the previous term under the guidance of Levica, which will first need to be freed of its ideological ballast. But that is the easier part of the Ministry of Culture’s task. The real test will be whether it, together with regulatory bodies, dares to intervene in the decades‑long tolerated concentration of media power and dismantle structures that the state has tolerated for too long, and in some cases even helped create. The result is today’s distorted media landscape, tailored to a few centres of power.