Reform aimed at limiting political interference over RTV SLO faces upcoming referendum challenge

The undersigned international media freedom and journalists’ organisations today outline their tentative support for reform of the law on Radiotelevizija Slovenija (RTV SLO) and the urgent need to depoliticise the public service media and their oversight bodies amidst continued threats to their independence.

Our organisations welcome the initiative of the new coalition government to reduce the influence of politics on the broadcaster’s operations and foster an enabling climate for its public service mission.

Events of the last few years at RTV SLO have provided a clear illustration of why such changes are urgently needed. Under the previous government, leading politicians created an atmosphere of hostility towards public service media, including smears against journalists and aggressive accusations of political bias, as reflected by the 2021 mission report of the undersigned organizations and Slovenia’s fall to 54th place in Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 World Press Freedom Index. This was accompanied by politicised appointments to RTV SLO’s programming council and supervisory board, on occasion through legal yet questionable practices. Politically-affiliated appointees to these two bodies then utilised voting majorities to approve controversial decisions on staffing and programming favourable to the ruling SDS party, particularly at the public television. These appointments of often unqualified candidates or individuals with links to the former government were pushed through despite the widespread criticism.

Since then, directors and management have been accused by staff of axing shows, removing editors, pressuring or reassigning journalists, and attempting to engineer a political shift in news and current affairs programming. Unions representing RTV SLO have repeatedly undertaken strike action to protest what they claim are unjustified infringements on editorial freedom, while repeated calls have been made by the largest journalist unions for the director general and director of television to step down. These near daily internal clashes, which have intensified in recent months, have led to more than 30 staff quitting and resulted in a damaging drop in viewership and a loss of public trust. Recently, 38 members of staff received warnings about the potential termination of their employment due to their public support for colleagues in the studio. Negotiations to resolve the situation remain unsuccessful. This situation jeopardises RTV SLO’s journalistic mission and undermines the public’s right to information.

It is clear to our organisations that efforts are urgently needed to address the root cause of these issues: the disproportionate influence of all forms of politics on RTV SLO’s governance structures. While previous governments have pledged to amend the 2006 law on RTV Slovenija to reduce political representation on the councils, proposals have always fallen away when reality of governing set in. This lack of political will to address the situation has left the RTV SLO at the mercy of political forces and open to successive periods of instability after election cycles. While concerns over independence in management are nothing new, the changes enacted under the previous government have left the broadcaster in the most challenging situation in decades. We therefore welcome the legislative initiative by the new coalition government led by Prime Minister Robert Golob to address this extraordinary situation.

The draft proposals would restructure the two current governing councils into a single, 17-member decision-making body. Appointments to this new Council of RTV would be made by representatives of civil society and RTV SLO employees. The National Assembly, which currently appoints the majority of members, would play no role. Under the reorganised system, the council would be led by a four-member management board, headed by a president, which would oversee financing and programming. Appointments would be made in a staggered manner. If the changes are approved, the mandate of the current members of the current program and supervisory councils, director general director, director of television, and director of the radio would end, though they would continue in their position until the new council is established. Current editors would remain in their posts, except in cases where it is determined that they do not enjoy the confidence of the majority of employees in their editorial team.

Our shared assessment is that overall these draft amendments represent a justified and principled attempt to revise an outdated legislative framework, depoliticise the broadcaster and foster a more enabling environment for the free exercise of RTV SLO’s journalistic mission. If approved, the new system of governance would significantly limit the ability of any government, current or future, to use its parliamentary majority to fill the councils with allies and interfere in the work of public media. The management model outlined is representative and would reflect a broad range of civil society groups.

However, we note that it is regrettable that the Parliamentary Committee for Culture did not first hold a public consultation on the bill or seek review of the draft from the Council of Europe or international media organisations and journalists’ organisations/unions. While we recognise the need to urgently address the situation at RTV SLO, such changes to the legal framework should have been developed in an open and transparent manner and with the full involvement of civil society and journalist organisations. To ensure full functional independence of this new council, it is vital that all candidates meet strict professional criteria, be selected under clear and transparent rules and be committed to ensuring pluralistic and professional programming. Candidates from civil society should not have any direct or indirect links to political parties. It is vital also that the new financial committee will fully operate in the public interest. Questions also remain about the management of the RTV SLO during the transition period. Nonetheless, in our assessment the draft amendments align with European standards on public service media governance and should have an overall positive impact.

The law was adopted by the National Assembly on 14 July 2022. Before any changes are made, the amendment will face a referendum initiated by the opposition on November 27. If passed, this should ensure the stability of RTV SLO in the short term. Even then, it must not be seen as an antidote to all the challenges currently facing public service media. The process of depoliticisation will be long and challenging. It is crucial also that this legislation be accompanied by a secondary bill which provides for long-term sustainable financing and establishes a solid economic foundation for RTV SLO to hire and train a new generation of professional journalists, re-establish public trust and meet the challenges of the future. This accompanying bill must follow quickly and should establish autonomy in editorial decision-making and modernise the organisation of the institution.

This reform is an important first step forward. If passed, this legislative amendment would move towards fulfilling a key recommendation of the European Commission’s Rule of Law report 2022 on Slovenia, which called for stronger mechanisms to enhance independent governance at public service media. Applying these standards would likewise represent a boost for the media freedom credentials of the new government, which made reform of public service media a priority during its election campaign. Our organisations will continue to closely monitor the situation and call for an end to all politically-motivated pressure on the editorial autonomy of the country’s public service media.

Signed:

Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI)

European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)

European Federation of Journalists

Free Press Unlimited (FPU)

International Press Institute (IPI)

Public Media Alliance (PMA)

Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

OBC Transeuropa (OBCT)

To mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November, the International Federation of journalists (IFJ) and its Gender Council are urging media organisations to make tackling online abuse a priority and develop concrete steps to eradicate this threat and are calling on governments across the world to ratify ILO Convention 190 on harassment and violence in the world of work.

There is an urgent need to stand with women facing online abuse. There are direct connections between online threats and offline violence and this is something women should not be facing on their own. 

These were among the key points made during the IFJ Gender Council’s conference on Women in Unions: Building power, Fighting for safety which was held online on 22 November and gathered journalists and unions’ activists from around the world. The conference was part of IFJ’s global campaign Online abuse: we need to talk, launchedto mark International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which also includes the sharing of stories on fighting online abuse and 16-days of activism.

Over 60% of women journalists have faced online abuse during their career, according to IFJ statistics. 

Online abuse  targets women from all political, religious and ethnic backgrounds. One of the main aspects of these attacks is that they are gendered and sexualized.

These acts of violence are not only aimed at intimidating and silencing women in the media, but their chilling effects contribute to killing stories and depriving the public of information, thereby undermining pluralism and the right to access information. 

The IFJ has highlighted the lack of support from newsrooms and media colleagues when a female journalist faces online abuse. Few report the attacks and, if they are reported, very little action is taken. AnIFJ survey conducted in 2018 showed that only half of the victims of online abuse (53%) reported the attacks to their media management, union or the police, and in two-thirds of the cases nothing was done. 

“Less journalists tend to report online abuse because it happens all the time,” said belgian laywer Charlotte Michils to the IFJ. 

” We hear again and again female colleagues’ frightening stories about online abuse. We hear about colleagues leaving the profession, suffering traumatic stress disorders. It is high time for media organisations to adopt concrete policies to counter this phenomenon and stand by their female staff, whether employed or freelance. This is not a situation any woman should be facing on her own. Online abuse is not part of the job“, says Maria Angeles Samperio, IFJ Gender Council Chair.

The IFJ has published a set of recommendations for media and unions to take action, including the setting up of workplace procedures, training on digital security or lobbying online platforms for enhanced notice and take down measures.

One other key aspect is to ensure national legislations be amended to outlaw harassment and violence in the world of work, including online.

This can be done by ratifying ILO Convention 190 on harassment and violence at work as well as recommendation 206, which the IFJ is lobbying for. 

“Twenty-one countries in the world have ratified this Convention and many countries that call themselves democracies have failed to do so. We urge governments to ratify Convention 190 and its recommendation 206 as unique instruments to tackle violece against women in the world of work. We cannot sit in silence when so many of our female colleagues receive abuse online and offline for doing their job. It is a matter of public interest to ensure solid laws eradicate violence at work. And journalists badly need them“, said IFJ President Dominique Pradalie.

From automating content production to assisting fact-checking efforts, artificial intelligence (AI) has become more widely used in journalism in recent years. The opportunities that algorithms offer media organizations have become clearer along the way.

Among them, AI technologies can play a role in improving women’s representation in the news. The Financial Times’ bot, She said He said, was one of the first examples of this. Introduced in 2018, it helped the London-based newsroom identify the diversity of sources within its reporting.

News organizations around the world have similarly leveraged AI technologies in a variety of ways to help them analyze and identify biases in their reporting, detect hate speech against women, and more.

Here are some examples.

Analyzing biases in media

Sahiti Sarva, an engineer specializing in using data science to understand policy, co-authored a visual essay with Leonardo Nicoletti in 2021 examining the nature of women’s representation in news reporting, titled When Women Make Headlines. Sarva and Nicoletti’s team analyzed more than 10 years worth of headlines from the top 50 publications in India, the U.S., the U.K. and South Africa for the project.

Sarva explained their approach at a virtual workshop hosted by London School of Economics’ JournalismAI initiative earlier this year: “We scraped all of the headlines tagged with 20 keywords synonymous with women, girl, female, and so on, and that gave us about 382,139 English news headlines.”

[Read more: New initiative pushes for artificial intelligence innovation in newsrooms]

This was, of course, a lot of data. “You think AI is going to make it easier,” Sarva said in an interview for this article. But before one can start applying any algorithm, there’s much work to do. Namely, cleaning, removing useless words, and finding the right code packages to use. Oftentimes, she said, “you need to be creative on what data you are going to use.”

“We went ahead and created our own dictionaries that calculate something called gender bias in headlines,” Sarva explained at the JournalismAI workshop. “[This included] a combination of gendered language like actress, daughter, wife, along with behavioral and social stereotypes around gender, like emotional support and care.”

Once the team had these dictionaries, they used a machine learning method called “sentiment analysis” to understand what it looks like when women make headlines. “We found that the story — when women make headlines — is often very sensational. A lot more sensational than regular headlines that we read and, over time, the number has only gone up. This could probably be because when women make headlines the story is twice as likely to be violent than empowering,” Sarva said.

Monitoring misogynistic discourse

As public figures, women are frequently the target of attacks on social media. Who are the perpetrators? Journalists from Brazil’s AzMina, Argentina’s La Nación, and Latin America’s CLIP and DataCrítica turned to AI to find out. 

Together, they developed a web application to uncover hate speech against women on Twitter. “Aware of the escalation of hate speech, particularly against women, our project wants to be able to quickly and assertively monitor when any of these misogynistic attacks is initiated by a politician,” said AzMina’s Bárbara Libório at the same JournalismAI workshop.

The attacks, the app found, came from politicians in particular, among other public figures. “[This] initiated the real waves of hate speech,” Libório explained, “because their supporters decided to attack these women at a higher rate.”

[Read more: How to improve your coverage of working-class women]

If you want a model to detect misogynistic messages, she continued, the AI technology must learn what hate speech against women is. As the first step in the process, Libório’s team created a database of examples, marking tweets as misogynistic or not. 

Once the AI learned this process, her team evaluated how effective it was at identifying hate speech against women. They created a scoring system, testing it in Portuguese and Spanish.

With their model ready, they created a web application to help users analyze text and files. Libório hopes they can share their prototype with other initiatives that want to map gender violence on social media.

A starting point

“AI technologies can be of great help to support journalists to do their jobs better,” said Sabrina Argoub, program manager at JournalismAI. When it comes to women’s representation in news, she said, AI can be used to enhance transparency and accountability, while raising awareness. The AIJO project, which compares the rate at which men and women, respectively, are quoted in articles or depicted in visual news, is one example.

AI isn’t a cure-all, however, Argoub noted. Buy-in from newsrooms and journalists alike is necessary to realize true progress on the matter. 

“It’s good to keep in mind that the machine can provide the data and help review how well or not we’re doing,” she said. “To take action, the starting point and the intention to tackle women’s underrepresentation in news need to come from newsrooms and journalists themselves.”

Capture of media by vested business and political interests suffocates journalism

Following a two-day fact-finding mission to Tirana on 17-18 November 2022, the partners of the Council of Europe’s Platform on Safety of Journalists today publish their findings on press freedom, media pluralism and the safety of journalists in Albania.

During the visit the organisations met with the journalists association, editors and journalists, government officials, members of parliament, the prime minister, judicial authorities, police, the privacy and information agency, the media regulator, the press council, NGOs and the public broadcaster.

Our assessment is that overall Albania continues to experience a deterioration in media freedom. While the legal framework remains generally adequate, no progress has been made in recent years in improving the environment for independent and watchdog journalism or media pluralism.

Some positive developments can be noted. The delegation was informed during a meeting that the Conference of Chairpersons of the parliament voted to officially withdraw the so-called anti-defamation package from the parliament’s agenda on 15 November 2022. A parliamentary vote is due to take place in a matter of weeks. This legislative proposal to register and regulate online media hung like a sword of Damocles over the media market for nearly three years and would have had damaging consequences if passed.

We applaud the willingness of the government to heed the concerns of international institutions, organisations and the journalistic community who opposed the law, as well as the broader willingness to implement international standards on media freedom and freedom of expression, in particular of Council of Europe, including the Venice Commission, and the European Union on other matters related to media freedom.

We also welcome the increase in the number of press conferences organised by the Prime Minister since the COVID-19 pandemic, which have provided journalists with more opportunities to directly ask questions on matters of public interest. In the area of transparency, our organisations also welcome the recent ratification and entry into force ratification of the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents.

The work of police in swiftly investigating attacks on journalists and applying disciplinary measures for cases involving law enforcement officers is also welcome. Information the delegation received about initiatives for the training of police officers on the role and rights of journalists is also encouraging. Our organisations also welcome the increase in both the number and quality of state responses to alerts involving threats to media freedom on the Council of Europe’s Platform for the Safety of Journalists.

Despite these encouraging steps, the overwhelming perception of media representatives the delegation met with was that the climate for free and independent reporting was worsening in Albania. This perception is reflected by the increase in the number of media freedom alerts posted to the Platform, including attacks on journalists, discrediting rhetoric by politicians and concerns over the restrictive climate for access to information.

However, the root cause of many of the threats to independent journalism in Albania continues to be the capture of significant parts of the media environment by vested business interests. These media owners, many of whom have cross ownership in key state-regulated industries reliant on public tenders, systematically use their media assets to serve their own private or political agendas rather than the public interest. Concentration of media under the control of such business groups has intensified in recent years.

The result is that direct interference of media owners in editorial independence is high and certain sensitive issues or topics are considered off limits for journalists. These ownership practices have long undermined public trust in media integrity and lead to chronic self-censorship within the journalistic community and a lack of quality investigative reporting.

In the field of media regulation, politicised appointments to the Audio-visual Media Authority (AMA) continue to pose serious questions over the body’s independence. Major concerns also persist over the underfunding of the public broadcaster Radio Televizioni Shqiptar (RTSH).

One of the most pressing issues for daily journalistic work continues to be the lack of transparency and access to information. Reporters are regularly ignored when seeking information or comment from public authorities and officials. Across all levels of government, journalists still face barriers in posing questions or properly scrutinising those in power.

Journalists said that while the new Media and Information Agency (MIA) has resulted in some increase in public comment from ministers and public officials on some issues, overall the authority has overseen a tightening of control over information in what was an already a highly challenging environment. The delegation also heard from journalists that decisions by the Data and Information Commissioner on requests for public interest documents via Freedom of Information (FOI) complaints are not dealt with as efficiently as before.

Meanwhile, the office of the Prime Minister continues to use its own communication apparatus to distribute pre-packaged written and audio-visual content to the media. The Prime Minister’s own communication channel, Edi Rama Television (ERTV), continues to broadcast conversations featuring soft-ball questions to the PM and other politicians. This communication strategy bypasses journalists and shields authorities from challenging questions. The same practice is employed by the mayor of Tirana, whose closely curated content dominates television screens, shapes news coverage and bypasses journalistic scrutiny.

The safety of journalists continues to be an issue. While serious physical assaults remain rare, recent cases of violence against journalists underscore the threats media professionals face due to their work. Delays in efforts to bring those responsible for attacks to justice results in impunity.

Efforts by high-profile political figures to discredit and denigrate critical journalists continue. While the use of aggressive and insulting language by the Prime Minister against the media has decreased, the act of telling some journalists who ask challenging questions that they need to undergo so-called “re-education”, accompanied by unilateral bans from attending press conferences, have proven even more damaging. While the PM described these comments as humour during a meeting, the professional consequences for journalists given the label have been serious.

While prison sentences for defamation were repealed in 2012, defamation and insult remain criminal offences punishable by a fine. A case on the Platform involving a defamation lawsuit filed against a journalist by the former chief prosecutor of Tirana over his reporting on her vetting process is a worrying example of how these laws continue to be abused by powerful figures aiming to silence watchdog journalism.

Self-censorship among journalists is a systemic challenge exacerbated by poor working conditions and labour rights for media professionals. Low pay and professional instability leave journalists vulnerable to pressure from media owners.

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The delegation was composed of representatives from ARTICLE 19, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the European Broadcasting Union, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, the European Federation of Journalists, the International Press Institute and Reporters Without Borders.

The cameraman of “Insajderi” portal, Jetmir Muji, was physically assaulted this morning in northern Mitrovica by a group of local Serbs, while he was filming for a TV story.

According to this media, Muji together with the journalist, Visar Duriqi, were in the north to conduct a story, when they saw a young man being put into a car by several people. When Muji filmed this event, he was attacked by these people and ended up in the Emergency Hospital in the south of Mitrovica.

AJK expresses its concerns and is shocked by this attack and at the same time invites the Kosovo Police to urgently investigate the case and identify the persons responsible for this attack.