The RTV article has long been a stumbling block to public discourse in Slovenia. The latest public opinion polls conducted for Nova24TV by the Parsifal Agency showed that the largest share of respondents, 39.4 percent of respondents, believe that the RTV contribution should remain as it is. However, as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Democracy Jože Biščak pointed out for Nova24TV, the sum of those who want to abolish the RTV contribution and those who want the contribution to be paid only by those who want it exceeds the share of those who want to keep the RTV contribution. There are 54.8 percent of those who oppose the contribution or want it to be voluntary.
When asked what they think about paying the RTV fee, the majority, i.e. 39.4 percent of respondents, answered that they want the contribution to remain as it is now. According to 29.1 percent of respondents, only those who want it should pay the contribution. 25.7 percent of respondents are in favour of abolishing the RTV contribution, while 2.4 percent are in favour of increasing the RTV contribution. 3.4 percent of respondents do not know what to choose.
Compared to Parsifal’s opinion poll in October, the number of those advocating that the contribution should remain the same has shrunk in November, as has the number of those who believe the contribution should be abolished. The share of those who are convinced that the contribution should increase enlarged, while the share of those who believe that only those who want to pay the contribution jumped by 3.8 percent. Also, the share of those who do not know what to do about the RTV contribution has almost doubled.
Assuming that there were no radical changes in personal attitudes among the respondents, we can conclude that the share of those who advocated that the contribution remains as it was poured into the advocates of increasing the contribution. The share of those who want the contribution to be paid only by those who want it has increased at the expense of those who demand the abolition of the RTV contribution. At the expense of the latter group, we can guess, the group that does not know what to do with the RTV contribution also gained.
Jože Biščak, editor-in-chief of the magazine Democracy, commented for Nova24TV on the results of the survey on the payment of the RTV Slovenia contribution:
Although it seems that the majority of respondents (39.4 percent) are in favour of the forced RTV contribution remaining as it is, two points should be noticed. Firstly, the share of “supporters” is far below what the public institution represents to the public, and secondly, we should also look at the total share of those who would cancel the contribution (25.7 percent) or pay it if they wanted to (29.1 percent). Therefore, how many of them love their wallets and would like to decide for themselves what they will watch on television and are therefore willing to deduct their money. This is almost 55 percent, which is a number that should be considered by those in power (and consider abolishing the RTV contribution or find another form of temporary funding) and those from Kolodvorska Street. In other words, those who do not want to pay for the extreme left-wing propaganda of public servants predominate, while masochists are in the minority, who obviously enjoy watching alchemical socio-political workers.
The latest example of depravity is the show, which was produced by VSO and talked about the decision for a plebiscite on Slovenia’s independence 30 years ago. I do not know whether due to political correctness or due to hatred towards Slovenia, TV Slovenia equipped the show with an inscription that it does not express the opinion of Television Slovenia. The claim that independent television was not an “intimate option” for television (like Milan Kučan) is probably not far from the truth.
By doing so and by double standards, which are becoming a kind of trademark of RTV Slovenia, they are losing legitimacy, they have set the scale of journalistic integrity and professionalism so low that it can hardly be lower. Therefore, I expect that the resistance of citizens to armed robbery (which is forced payment, since you have to pay the contribution under threat of force) will only increase. Hopefully, in the future the share of those who would either abolish the RTV contribution or have the opportunity to decide whether they want to pay, their brains will change from normally developed to lizards’ brains, or what scientists call “reptilian brains.”
Jože Biščak. (Photo: Nova24TV)