Abstract
Almost 50 years after the fall of the colonels, journalists are being forced to be careful about what they say.
PRESS FREEDOM IS in peril again in Greece, the cradle of democracy, nearly half a century after the repressive days of the colonels’ dictatorship came to an end.
Since coming to power in 2019, the liberal-conservative New Democracy administration, under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has moved gradually to silence its critics – setting off alarm bells among press watchdogs across Europe.
The public broadcaster ERT and the state news agency ANA have been put under the prime minister’s supervision and, last year, the state passed a law criminalising the dissemination of false information that could “undermine public confidence in the national economy, the country’s defence capacity or public health”.
The daily paper Efimerida ton Syntakton (EfSyn) revealed last year that an independent journalist covering the refugee crisis had been put under surveillance by the National Information Service.
The murder of veteran TV crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz, close to his home, shocked journalists across the country last April. The case remains unsolved.
TV stations, newspapers and several websites belong to a handful of entrepreneurs with interests linked to the ruling party – thus limiting press freedom and reducing pluralism. One of them, Evangelos Marinakis, a shipowner who also owns football clubs Olympiakos in Greece and Nottingham Forest in the UK, has evolved into a media tycoon who controls a major TV station, newspapers, websites and the country’s only press distribution agency.
Since ND took power, reporters and photographers have been subjected to bullying and harassment. In November 2020, while covering a demonstration to commemorate the student uprising in 1973, I was detained by police, manhandled and verbally abused.
According to a Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom report, in 2007 Greece ranked 30th among 180 countries but plummeted to 70th place in only three years and fell to 99th in 2014. Under the left-wing Syriza government (2015-19), the ranking remained low, but the country slowly climbed to 65th place in 2019, only to roll back to number 70 in 2021.
Since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, Greece has gone through a painful process of democratisation. The 1990s were marked by the creation of private TV and radio broadcasters mimicking European and US channels. TV stations were relatively pluralistic, despite being owned by entrepreneurs with interests often linked to the ruling political parties – New Democracy and PASOK. Press freedom was considered a cornerstone of the Greek republic, but things started to shift rapidly after the debt crisis broke out in 2010. Since then, Greece has been struggling with “ghosts from the past”.
Publisher Kostas Vaxevanis has been targeted by the Greek government for his investigative journalism. And his newspaper is facing a blizzard of lawsuits from the state
CREDIT: Nikolas Georgiou/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
So if the question is whether or not media freedom in Greece has improved since the dictatorship, the answer is obviously “yes”. But a modern liberal country setting the bar of media freedom just above the level of a violent military dictatorship that ended 48 years ago, and only slightly surpassing it, cannot be considered a democratic conquest. It sounds more like an embarrassing defeat.
Journalist labelled ‘gangster’ by PM
KOSTAS VAXEVANIS, 55, its publisher – who was given a freedom of expression award by Index in 2013 for revealing the “Lagarde list” of wealthy Greeks with undeclared accounts in Switzerland – has been publicly denounced by the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as “a gangster” and a “member of the underworld”.
Vaxevanis told Index that the attack came after his newspaper’s revelations about offshore companies belonging to the PM’s family, irregularities in his tax return documents and the participation of his close friend and adviser Nikos Georgiadis in a paedophile ring in Moldova.
In January this year, Vaxevanis, who had revealed crucial aspects of the Novartis pharmaceutical scandal in Greece, was accused by a special court of “collusion to abuse power” and being a “member of a criminal organisation”.
At the same time, Documento and its journalists are facing more than 80 lawsuits, most filed by powerful state officials.
“The prime minister, representing a Balkan Trumpism and eliminating my presumption of innocence, called me and other journalists ‘members of the underworld’ and ‘gangsters’,” he said, “revealing who is behind my persecution and dictating to the justice system that it must eliminate me.”
Since Mitsotakis came to power, Documento has suffered big cuts in private advertising and was deliberately excluded from a state advertising campaign about Covid-19 measures.
After the murder of TV crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz in April last year, the paper reported that a contract had been taken out on Vaxevanis in the Greek underworld. As a result, three suspects were arrested and Vaxevanis given police protection.