A map of Greece’s media corrupt relationships (part 1)

Edited by @galaxyarchis and translated by @inflammatory_

If we wish to keep track of Greece’s media corrupt relationships and especially those between media owners and the state’s political power, we’d need to write a book. Add their historical background on top of this and we have managed to fill a whole bookcase. Although it’s not considered to be solely a Greek phenomenon, what is most interesting is that the media-politics relationship within Greek borders, boasts a unique past, present (and future) as well as drama.

We won’t engage with historical flashbacks, although they could fully explain the media’s role in the current political landscape.  Instead we may use a “map” designed by Nikos Smyrnaios last April. This is his third chart in a  row (1,2) that illustrates the relationship between dominant media and the business elite, the transformations imposed on media-ownership and the emerging dynamics among publishers and businessmen in the last years. 

Click to enlarge.

The conclusions drawn from the chart on how media landscape has been shaped since 2008 are the following:

In focus: Why is the Greek government trying to shut down ERT? - The role of digital network provider DIGEA

On Tuesday 11 June 2013, the Greek government announced its decision to shut down the country's public broadcaster ERT and proceeded with taking all ERT television and radio channels off the air.

This came as a public consultation is under way to determine the terms under which a network provider will be selected to complete the country's transition to digital television.

Radiobubble interviewed on Friday 14 June 2013 ERT senior technician Nikos Michalitsis, whose analysis of the call for expressions of interest for digital network providers bears ominous signs for the future of press freedom in Greece. We are posting the interview below.

You can listen to this week's full #rbnews international show here.

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Greece: The government wants to shut down public radio and television

Reports started coming in early this afternoon that the government was intending either to shut down or to downsize the National Radio and Television corporation (ERT), with a purpose to sack its employees and reach the targets it agreed with Greece's troika of lenders (the EU, ECB and IMF) to sack 15,000 civil servants by the end of 2014. By late afternoon, the reports had become that ERT would be shut down by midnight. ERT currently employs 2,656 civil servants with tenure and 246 fixed-term staff, who all stand now to lose their jobs.

Sackings on such a scale are unlikely to improve the situation of press freedom in Greece. Dimitris Trimis, the chairman of the Athens Daily Newspaper Editors' Union, told is last week on the #rbnews international show:

The thousands of sackings in media, the pay cuts, the fear that media will collapse and shut down, together with the parameter I just mentioned [the unhealthy links between media, big business and politics], creates a climate of violent censorship and self-censorship among people who work in the media. Therefore, we cannot talk of freedom of expression, and this is why international researchers keep demoting Greece in indexes where countries are ranked according to freedom of speech and objectivity, or at least honesty, in information.  

The Vaxevanis trial: no lawyers, no witnesses? Apparently no problem.

Posted by @IrateGreek

As we posted earlier today, the re-trial of Kostas Vaxevanis for publishing, back in October 2012, a list of 2000+ names of Greek bank account holders in Switzerland, known as the Lagarde list, was due to take place this morning in the Athens courthouse. It took the court a full hour and a half, from 9:00 until 10:30am, and three private conversations in recess, to determine that, in the absence of two of three defense lawyers and of three of four defense witnesses, the trial should be postponed.

#rbnews international show 08 June 2013: Freedom of the press in Greece (or lack thereof)

This week, on the occasion of the upcoming appeals trial of Kostas Vaxevanis, the journalist who was arrested and tried once already in November 2012 for publishing the Lagarde list in his magazine HOT DOC, the #rbnews international show focused on the issue of freedom of the press in Greece. We were able to interview Kostas Vaxevanis himself, but also Dimitris Trimis, chairman of the Athens Daily Newspaper Editors’ Union, Marios Lolos,  chairman of the Greek Photojournalists’ Union, and his colleague Tatiana Bolari, and Angélique Kourounis, a correspondent for various French-speaking media in Athens, who also acts as the local representative of Reporters Without Borders. This show is part of a series prepared by the radiobubblenews team, which will carry on across the coming week and will seek to discuss the various impediments to the realization of this essential democratic liberty.

You can listen to the podcast, as usual, after the jump.

Naomi Klein @ Radiobubble: Climate change is our best argument against free trade

Naomi Klein spoke today to Radiobubble's @JaquoUtopie about the economic and environmental crisis and how climate change affects economic and political transformation, but also about her upcoming work, gold mining and the movement opposing it in Skouries, the tar sands and the Idle No More movement in Canada. 

The way that in a moment of economic desperation governments and corporations use the crisis as a pretext to destroy the environment by convincing people that this is the easier way to “get money”, the scare tactics, the lack of a clear and inspiring articulation of a radically different vision are some of the issues they discussed, as well as the cost that people will have to pay if capitalism continues down that destructive road. 

But also about emerging peoples’ movements, the turning point in history when it’s time to create our own alternative, the failure of the media and the time for new models to develop and change the landscape, the hope, the future and her very young, beautiful son Tom.

You can listen to the interview above and/or read the transcript after the jump.  

Greek Helsinki Monitor: "Some people support freedom of speech... only for racist speech"

The Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) issued today a press release ahead of a trial tomorrow involving three of its officials as well as three officials from the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (CBJCG), who are accused of false accusations, witness perjury and libel by Kostas Plevris. Plevris is widely considered as the theoretician of neo-Nazism in Greece and was sued by the GHM and the CBJCG for his book Jews: The Whole Truth. A first tribunal had found him guilty of antisemitism  in 2007, but the sentence was overturned on appeal in 2009 in a decision that was ratified by the Supreme Court in 2010. The Supreme Court decision was deemed scandalous by many, given the contents of the book, which includes for instance chapters titled "The religion of the Jews: crime and misanthropy" or "The Holocaust: evidence of a lie" (you can listen to last Saturday's #rbnews international show on laws against racism in Greece for context on this matter).

Arbitrary detention of a professional photojournalist in Thessaloniki

Posted by @IrateGreek

A photojournalist denounces the police for detaining him while he was doing his job

Dear colleagues,

With this letter I wish to report an incident that happened to me on May 17th, around 2:20pm on Tsimiski street, near Aristotelous square (Thessaloniki).

As an Associated Press photojournalist in Thessaloniki, I was informed by a colleague that a homeless man was sleeping on a bench in Tsimiski street with a guitar  by his side (just outside the "Folli Follie" shop). Luckily I was at a nearby cafe so I got there in a few minutes.

#rbnews weekly bulletin 04-10 May 2013

Prepared by the #rbnews international team, translated by @IrateGreek

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

The #MAT1236 photo exhibition in Finland (videos)

Posted by @IrateGreek

The photo exhibition #MAT1236 about the brutality of the Greek police opened on 02 May 2013 in Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Greek activist Anna Gartagani sent to us videos from the inauguration and the panel discussion that took place after the opening. You can watch them after the jump.

The Kallipoli police station: A little Guantanamo and its little people

Posted by @csyllas, translated/adapted from Greek by @IrateGreek


The following is an eyewitness account from Giorgos Karystinos after a visit to the Kallipoli police station in Piraeus on 03 May 2013

The #MAT1236 photo exhibition in Finland

Source

By @Polyfimos, translated from Greek by @IrateGreek


Angela Merkel's visit to Athens in October 2012 went down in social media history under the code name #ΜΑΤ1236, after the registration number of the riot policeman [MAT in Greek] who, during clashes with protesters, used a young woman as a human shield. This action by the policeman, whose identity details are unknown, was the inspiration for an original, timely photo exhibition in the Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.

Freedom of the press in Greece: an interview with Leon Willems

The following post is a transcript of this interview with Leon Willems, the director of Free Press Unlimited. It was translated by @iptamenos33. 


- Mister Willems, good morning!
- Good morning?
- In which European holiday-countries are journalists facing difficulties?
- Ah, well, it's very interesting to see that in a couple of Southern European countries, things are getting worse constantly, for instance in Greece.

#rbnews "weekly" bulletin 6-19 April 2013

Prepared by the #rbnews international team, translated by @IrateGreek

The text companion to this week's and last week's #rbnews international show is now online. You can read it after the jump.

HotDoc Magazine Issue #26 - Maria, the banks and guns-for-hire: the contract on Vaxevanis

The following is a summary of pages 14-41 of the 26th issue of the magazine HotDoc, whose editor is journalist Kostas Vaxevanis. 


The 3rd issue of the magazine HotDoc, dated 24 May 2012, revealed sensitive information about scandals involving Greek banks. Advance copies had been sent to other news outlets. On 23 May, Fimotro, a blog often denounced for engaging in defamation and blackmail, published a picture of a receipt allegedly issued by the Greek Intelligence Service (EYP) in the name of HotDoc’s editor, Kostas Vaxevanis. The receipt was dated 15 June 2011 and said he was paid €50,000 for services to EYP for the 1st semester of 2011. Fimotro, as well as other blogs which circulated this picture of the receipt, also played a role in portraying Reuters’ Steven Grey, who was researching a similar story on Greek banks, as an “agent” of unknown forces who sought to ruin the Greek economy (Reuters published at the time a long piece on the surveillance Grey was subjected to).

The HotDoc team denounced the receipt as a forgery and Vaxevanis tried to sue Giannis Papagiannis, the administrator of Fimotro, whose name is known to the public following a previous court case in which he was accused of blackmail. Strangely, the prosecutor office refused the documents of the previous case file as proof of his identity, and, because Papagiannis could not be charged with a felony in the HotDoc case, Google refused to provide his personal data. The case against Papagiannis was thus dropped, despite abundant online evidence of his identity, including, recently, blog posts signed with his full name.

Skouries: from intimidation to terror

For background on the issue of ore mining in Halkidiki, see here and here.  

The human rights situation in north-eastern Halkidiki (also spelled Chalkidiki) is still deteriorating since the arson attack on the work site of mining company Hellas Gold in Skouries on 17 February 2013. There have been dozens of random detentions of local residents by the police, without any result so far and most importantly without any charges being pressed against any of the detainees.

The latest - and most shocking - case of detention is a 15-year-old female student from the Ierissos high school, who was summoned today to the regional police HQ in Polygyros for interrogation. The entire village of Ierissos went in an uproar, with church bells ringing and schoolchildren staging a protest in front of the local police station together with their families. The police decision was condemned by the Coordination Committee of Associations in Stagira-Akanthos as well as local attorneys, who specifically denounced the fact that "witnesses" or "detainees" summoned by the police have no access to legal assistance during their interrogation and that the police essentially force them to give a DNA sample, which is illegal as no charges have been pressed against them.

#rbnews international show 02 March 2013: Skouries, Aegean Oil and the need for alternative media in Greece

On #rbnews international this week, our guest was Greek journalist Augustine Zenakos from Unfollow Magazine, who also runs the English-language site Borderline Reports. We discussed the case of gold mining in the Skouries forest of Halkidiki and the fuel smuggling scandal involving Aegean Oil as examples of the need for alternative, independent, quality media in Greece.

You can follow Augustine on Twitter @auzenakos and Borderline Reports @BorderlineRpts.

You can read more about the Skouries story here on radiobubble international and here on Borderline Reports. The analysis of coverage of the Skouries story on Twitter by Nikos Smyrnaios (@smykos), which we discuss at the beginning of the 2nd part of the show, is available here (in Greek).
You can also read more about the threats Unfollow Magazine received after publishing a detailed story on the fuel smuggling scandal here. The article about the fuel smuggling scandal was published in the print edition of Unfollow in January 2013 and will hopefully soon be translated to English on Borderline Reports.

The podcast is available, as usual, after the jump.

rbnews international show 16 February 2013: HIV/AIDS as an electoral argument in Greece

This week on #rbnews international, we interviewed at length radiobubble contributor Zoe Mavroudi, who is leading an effort to produce and direct a video documentary on the story of the 26 HIV positive women who were arrested shortly before the May 2012 elections, labeled as prostitutes and paraded on TV channels with claims from the Greek authorities that they were a threat to public health.
This documentary project is supported by the British union Unite as well as the organization Union Solidarity International. You can make a donation to support this project through the Greek Solidarity Campaign on the USI website. You can also read some of Zoe's writing about this topic here, here and here. Finally, if you want to support other radiobubble projects, you can make a donation here.

The podcast is available, as usual, after the jump.

#rbnews international weekly bulletin 26 January - 01 February 2013

The text companion to this week's #rbnews international show is online. You can read it after the jump.

Government twists Syriza MP statement smearing him as an advocate of terrorism

Syriza MP Vangelis Diamantopoulos is expected to file a lawsuit against those responsible for twisting his words around on a statement he made last Wednesday during a public event in Kastoria. Government's spokesman Simos Kedikoglou accused the MP for putting "The Mall" on spot four days before the blast, calling people "to take up arms" and released a video from the MP's press conference as an evidence.

The anarchist -as presented- and advocate of terrorism Vangelis Diamantopoulos, who is still a Syriza MP even now, put "The Mall" on spot in his speech four days before the terrorist act, calling openly his comrades to take up arms. Following that, we are expecting immediate juridical intervention (...) Diamantopoulos should make clear his affiliation with lawlessness and terrorism.

Syriza condemned New Democracy for deliberately releasing a video with selected bits from Diamantopoulos speech aiming to distort the broader sense made out of his statement. The party's spokesman Panos Skourletis, sent a letter to the National Radio & TV Council asking for investigation upon the broadcasting of the edited video by some mainstream media outlets, although the raw footagewas also available to them.

Check below for the full statement of Vangelis Diamantopoulos