28 journalists have been put in prison, 15 others and 2 media outlets attacked, 49 taken into custody, action taken against 86 persons including 53 journalists on charges of defaming the President.
An expert commission has been established to prepare a Media strategy for the Ministry of Culture. To attain this objective, the expert commission organized a series of public discussions and a survey of the public opinion in this field. This program presents a report from the final public discussion which took place in the Ministry of Culture headquarters, focused largely on the autonomy of journalists, their social position, transparency of media ownership, insufficient role of regional and local media and the political independence of public media. The results of these discussions will be included in the forthcoming media strategy.
Curated by the foreign affairs editorial staff at Radio Popolare, the ninth episode within the ECPMF project features Francesca Rolandi, OBC, giving an overview of the situation in Croatia.
The only daily newspaper in Italian language La voce del popolo for the Italian minority in Croatia and Slovenia is facing great financial difficulties. Croatia's minister of culture Zlatko Hasanbegović has made public the list of media institutions that are to be funded by the ministry in the future. Among the listed, most of the left or liberal oriented media will receive fewer or no funds at all compared to past years. One of the newspapers that will suffer the most is La voce del popolo. Its importance goes beyond the content. Established by the Italian antifascists and partisans in 1944 in Rijeka, for more than 70 years it has been an essential element marking the existence of the Italian minority in Croatia as well as in Slovenia. Ministry of culture decided to slash the funding of Edit, publishing house responsible for publishing La voce del popolo. For the next year, it will receive half as much funds as it was receiving until now. The year after that, its funding from the Croatian state will be completely abolished. Underfunding of politically unfavorable media outlets is just the latest blatant attack on media freedom in Croatia.
Serbia is among 19 countries with the biggest drop in press freedom in 2015. According to a report published today by the international organization Freedom House, Serbia registered a decline of five points compared to the previous year. Freedom House this year ranked Serbia in the list of partly free country taking into consideration the situation of media in the country.
The new draft law on on-line media is seen by online media operators as an effort to limit media freedom. Moreover they are criticizing the lack of transparency of the whole process.
The Press Council warned today that in Serbia the number of articles and news which is a violation of the press code is growing, adding that this behavior is culminated after the assassination of the singer Jelena Marjanović.
Following the initiative of the Slovenian Union of Journalists and last year's widespread investigation in Slovene media companies, the parliamentary party Združena levica filed a legislative procedure for amending the Labour Inspection Act. Since the financial crisis in 2008 regular employment among journalists has fallen by 16%, while contract works have risen by 64%. Contract workers do not enjoy equal legal rights and protection (e.g. most media houses do not cover legal expanses for contract workers in case of their prosecution due to their reporting). The new law would allow Labour Inspectorate to have more power in punishing those media outlets employing contract workers to carry out full employment tasks, and allow for greater legal protection of contract workers.
In Romania, main stream media is in a deep slump. Not only financially, but also as a credible instrument of information. In this landscape, ECPMF project has provoked a real debate regarding the media situation in Romania.
