During the last 5 years, Macedonia has been experiencing a severe setback when it comes to press freedoms. Reporters without Borders ranked Macedonia 123rd according to its World Press Freedom Index 2014, behind Nigeria and only 4 places before Ukraine. This wouldn’t be such a disaster (there are 180 countries on the list) if only 5 years ago the country wasn’t ranked 34th. Ever since, it has been a steep downhill ride with no stop sign in sight.

What happened in the last 5 years? Well, a lot. The A1 TV station with the largest number of viewers in the country was shut down together with the 3 associated newspapers after the owner was convicted on trumped up charges and sentenced to long 14 years in prison for tax evasion. More than 400 journalists and additional staff ended up on the streets, but they wouldn’t give up. They moved on the Internet as a last free territory for freedom of expression in the country. Nevertheless, it was not the same. TV is the most powerful medium watched by almost everyone — 84 percent of Macedonians say they would feel very bad if somebody took their TV set away, rather than missing out on any other media, and when it comes to the Internet only 60 percent of the households have a connection. Because of the Internet versatility there is no way to know how many household members actually use the home Internet connection and if they are reading the news at all, once they start surfing the web.

A1 TV closing down was not the only problem. The Government, even before the A1 TV shutdown, started a dubious practice of corrupting the media with public money, intending to buy their loyalty. Back in the “good old days” of 2009, when everything was “great” and there was no quarrel, the Government gave 10,5 million euro to A1TV, 9,5 million to Sitel TV, and 8 million to Kanal 5 TV during a period of 18 months. That is 28 million euro or 1,3 percent of the annual national budget spent to buy media loyalty. And this practice goes on. The opposition Social Democratic Union of Macedonia recently published invoices worth hundreds of thousands of euro paid to the pro-government Sitel TV at the beginning of 2013, just a month and a half before last year’s local elections. Not to mention the scandal when a company owned by the mother of a TV Sitel news editor won a bid to sell medical equipment worth 1 million euro to the Government.

The media corruption goes on, but giving money to some of them caught the watchful eye of the international organizations and countries, so the Macedonian Government simply invented another way. New media law was adopted on January 23 this year, stating that from now on funds will be provided under the pretense of developing Macedonian language TV series and other original TV content, so the habit of purchasing the loyalty of the most powerful media in the country will go on unhindered.

LAW INTENDED FOR FURTHER SUBMISSION

The critical media and the opposition fought tooth and nail against this law. The first instinct was that this law is not needed at all and that the Government will use it to restrain the critical media. But, the Government, having the support of the powerful national TV stations, would not budge. Then the fight was to stop the articles of the law requiring registration at the new Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Services (former Broadcasting Council) of the news portals. This battle was won, but the costs were still too high. The law was adopted in a way that it strengthens the positions of the pro-Government commercial TV stations, the position of the public TV and radio broadcaster, which is heavily biased toward the Government and there are no provisions at all about fair division of the money spent for Government advertising or at least a ban on Government advertising in a sense of US Smith-Mundt Act of 1948.

When it comes to the issue of human rights and journalism, the situation is also deteriorating. Tomislav Kezarovski, a journalist at Nova Makedonija newspaper was convicted and sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for allegedly revealing the name of a protected witness — even though only the first name of the witness was published (being very generic and widespread in the country) and the witness decided to stop being a witness and gave statements against the police of being pressured in that position. Kezarovski is now in house arrest, but another journalist , Zoran Bozinovski, is on trial on counts of blackmail and cooperation with an espionage ring. He was arrested in Serbia and has been imprisoned there for more than two months now, awaiting extradition. Since there are national security concerns in this case, the trial will be behind closed doors and it is unknown how much the public will ultimately find out.

Even if you are not arrested as a journalist, you can still have a pretty hard time. In such a small country as Macedonia there are 150 court cases against journalists for alleged libel or slander and the courts cheerfully pronounce verdicts where journalists and editors are forced to pay 10.000 euro to some politician for “emotional pain.” Sadly, some of these 150 cases are journalists suing other journalists. This is the result of the decriminalization of the libel and slander offences, brought by a new law adopted in November 2011. They were removed from the Criminal Law and now they constitute a civil offense. This means that everybody now feels much more free to sue without prejudice, especially since there are no laws against frivolous litigation. The fines are story upon themselves. They go up to 27.000 euro and they can be applied to the owner of the medium, the editor and the journalist. This had a strong chilling and self censorship effect that stopped the media in their tracks. Up until now, the media owners were not legally liable for the writings of their journalists and editors, but from now on they will have to weigh heavily on them to avoid being sued.

CORRUPTING THE MEDIA WITH TAXPAYER MONEY

In the meantime, the Government, with its large national budget coffers is starting to corrupt the internet. If a critical website is being established, 5 more pro-Government websites will appear in a period of couple of months. There is no rational need for this, of course, but the idea is to overwhelm the internet channel, so that the critical thought would have a hard time reaching a large audience.

On the other hand, the pro-Government journalism hot-shots in the national TV stations are becoming expensive even for the Government, because they are asking for winning bids for their companies, whenever products and services are bought with people’s money. So, the Government ministers lately tend to find somebody in the lower echelons of the media who would be willing to report favorably for amounts of 1-2.000 euro, his or her own website and a gig in some Government project.

On the other side of the spectrum, the journalists working in the internet new portals are not even considered as journalists anymore by some politicians. The head of the new Agency for Audio and Audiovisual Services, Zoran Trajcevski, freely tells these journalists that they are not actually journalists and even calls them “former journalists”, because his agency is not in charge of the internet media under the new law and they don’t have to register as such. This can turn into something much more dangerous and sinister. The critical media are barely holding by a thread, and the government needs just another push to break them. What would be the next step? Well, since people working in the news portals are “not journalists”, they can easily be denied accreditations in the Government ministries and the Parliament, not being invited or even allowed to attend press conferences and Government events, the ruling party ministers, MP’s and lower level functionaries might start to avoid the journalists from the critical media completely (something that they already do a lot), etc. You think this would be impossible? Well, think again. There were already instances of “public events”, but also real public events where only the pro-Government media were invited to attend. And, since there is no strong critical national TV station in existence, the Government can afford not pay attention and/or to increase the pressure on the critical media.

LET EVERYTHING TO COME CRUSHING DOWN

Even if the situation stays as it is, the sad thing is that most of the existing news websites, regardless of whether they are pro-Governmental or critical, are simply unsustainable. The Grid news aggregator collects news from 120 websites, serving a native Macedonian speaking population not larger than 2 million, out of which more than 600 thousand are living abroad. There are more than 40 websites publishing 50-150 articles every day — 80 percent of them being the same rehashed and reworked stories stolen by one media from another in an endless cycle of intellectual property theft, which is practically legalized in the country, but nobody spares a thought. Sustainability is something nobody thinks about, too, and it is not a very popular word these days as long as the Government provides cash for the websites supporting it, and the local Soros Foundation provides some support to the couple of critical websites still in existence. The sad thing is that when the paradigm shifts, all of that will come crashing down. Wait, would that be such a bad thing?