Protests over the death of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, credit Peter Tkac
Over the past few weeks, VideoWeek has been looking at media capture in Europe, the process by which governments or private interests either directly or indirectly exert control over a country’s media, compromising media independence.
The first two cases, Hungary and Poland, followed a very similar playbook. In both markets, the government has slowly eroded press independence through regulations, advertising revenues, and buyouts conducted by political allies.
Slovakia meanwhile has followed a somewhat different model. Laws protecting the press from an overbearing government have held firm, preventing the same kind of political interference we’ve seen in Poland and Hungary.
But in Slovakia, economic factors have let a small number of oligarchs seize control of the majority of the country’s media outlets.
The influence of these oligarchs has often been somewhat hidden. They haven’t conducted the same mass-firings of journalists that we’ve seen in Hungary and Poland. But two major incidents over the past five years have shown the dangers of this style of media capture.
Economic decline
Majka Nemcova, chief operating officer at MDIF, a fund which invests in independent media, says that rather following the Hungarian model of media capture, Slovakia is mirroring the process seen in the neighbouring Czech Republic.
“In the Czech Republic, there’s literally not one single significant media outlet, in terms of reach, which isn’t controlled by one of the major oligarchs – including our Prime Minister,” she said. “And Slovakia is similar, it’s less about the Prime Minister and their allies dividing up the media, and it’s more about oligarchs supporting their private interests through media ownership though in some cases those oligarchs also have political ambitions.”
MDIF says this has happened as a result of deteriorating economic conditions for media companies. Diminishing revenues for newspapers, as well as the global financial crash in 2008, led foreign investors in Slovakian media to pull out of the country. This put a number of media properties on the market, which private interests happily bought up.
Among the buyers were Central European investment group J&T, Slovakia businessman Ivan Kmotrík, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, and Czech business partners Michal Voráček and Ivo Valenta. Between them, these private interests steadily built up controlling stakes in the majority of Slovakia’s independent media outlets.
But perhaps the most high profile, and most controversial, of the private investors was Penta Investments, a central European investment group with stakes in healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and real estate.
Gorilla scandal
In 2011, Penta was caught up in what became known as the ‘Gorilla scandal’, where transcripts based on wiretaps from Slovakia’s secret service were leaked to the public. The transcripts showed illicit conversations between Penta personnel, including CEO Jaroslav Haščák, and senior government officials, in which bribes were paid and sales of public properties were manipulated behind closed doors.
Those named in the transcripts denied their authenticity, but the leaks nonetheless shook Slovakia. Thousands took to the streets of Bratislava in protests, believing the tapes exposed a mafia-like relationship between private interests and the government.
Penta didn’t face any immediate repercussions, but its name had been sullied in the eyes of the public. So when it began ramping up its investment in Slovakian news media a few years later, many saw it as an effort by the investment group to buy itself a good name, and control media narratives.
In 2014, Penta invested in 7 PLUS, which produces tabloid daily Plus Jeden Deň and weekly Plus 7 Dní, and TREND Holdings, which publishes Trend, an economic weekly magazine.
But it’s biggest acquisition, which followed swiftly after these two investments, was a 50 percent stake in publishing house Petit Press, which Penta bought from Germany media group RBVG.
Petit Press owns a number of popular print and digital publications, including daily newspaper SME, one of Slovakia’s most widely read news publications.
SME itself is something of a symbol of press independence. The paper was founded in 1993 after Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar’s government orchestrated the removal of the managers of Slovakian daily Smena. Fifty editors resigned in response, seeing the move as an attempt at media capture, and founded SME. Over time, SME beat Smena in circulation, and went on to absorb Smena in 1995.
Then, when government-owned printing presses refused to print the paper, SME found funding to build its own printing shop and continued to grow.
The capture of a publisher with such a proud history of independence by a shady investment group mired in a corruption scandal drew outrage. Editorial staff at SME tried to stop the sale, with over 60 journalists threatening to leave if Penta’s acquisition went through. Their attempts were unsuccessful, and the journalists resigned.
“Now that it seems almost irreversible that the Penta group will become a shareholder of the SME publisher, we are losing two things that good journalism cannot be done without,” the journalists wrote in an open letter. “We no longer have the security that we will be able to publish freely, and Penta as a co-owner will necessarily diminish the trust of our readers.”
Following this acquisition, and the numerous buyouts by other private investors, commentators pointed to weekly newspaper Týždeň as the last bastion of true independent journalism in Slovakia. But it doon emerged that even Týždeň received direct funding from Penta and its CEO Jaroslav Haščák – though Týždeň maintained that Penta didn’t own any share in its business.
A horrifying murder
The next few years painted quite a mixed picture for press independence in Slovakia.
On the one hand, there were some notable wins. Following the backlash against Penta’s investment in Petit Press, the investment group agreed to reduce its stake in the publisher down to 45 percent. This left a controlling 55 percent stake to PSIS – another investment fund, but one without the same spotted history as Penta.
And the journalists which left SME following Penta’s acquisition quickly founded a new project, Denník N, which has the stated aim of creating “a new medium which no one will suspect of serving anyone other than the readers”. Denník N has proven successful, becoming one of the country’s most popular news publications. It claims to reach 1.5 million individual readers in Slovakia, out of a population of under six million. Sixty-five thousand of these are paying subscribers.
On the flip side, oligarchs have continued their spending spree, buying up the remaining fragments of independent media in Slovakia. Just days after Penta’s investment in Petit Press, reports emerged that J&T, the other major financial group buying up Slovakian media, was interested in buying Axel Springer’s Slovakian arm, which owns the country’s biggest tabloid Nový Čas.
That deal never went through, but Nový Čas was eventually sold in 2018 to Anton Siekel, another Slovakian businessman who himself has connections to Penta.
This has led to a state where “a handful of financial powerhouses with dubious business practices” own the majority of Slovakia’s media, according to Marius Dragomir, director of the Center for Media, Data and Society.
This style of media capture hasn’t resulted in the same sorts of blatant interference in editorial output that we’ve seen in Poland and Hungary. In 2017, Slovakia ranked 17th in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
But the gruesome murder the following year of journalist Ján Kuciak, a reporter for news website Aktuality.sk, and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, hinted at the true extent of business interference in independent journalism.
Kuciak had built a reputation for his investigative journalism, specifically his work on businessman Marian Kočner, who was notorious for his unsuccessful attempt to take over private TV news network TV Markíza in 1998.
In 2017 Kuciak wrote a series of articles detailing suspicious activity in an ongoing tax investigation into Kočner. The articles reported evidence of Kočner’s guilt, and argued that the person in charge of the case was ignoring the facts.
Kočner directly contacted and threatened Kuciak, who filed a complaint with the police, and continued reporting undeterred. Then on February 26rd 2018, Kuciak and his fiance were found shot dead in their home, an apparent assassination.
Businessman Zoltán Andruskó admitted to ordering the murders in 2019, claiming to have passed the orders on from Alena Zsuzsová, a close collaborator of Marian Kočner. The Supreme Court is still debating whether Kočner was involved.
While Kočner himself hadn’t successfully bought any Slovakian media outlets, the case nonetheless demonstrated a sinister relationship between business tycoons, politicians, and the media. When Kočner’s villa was raided during the investigation, police found audio copies of the Gorilla tapes, giving firm proof of Penta’s past corruption and suggesting a link between Penta and Kočner.
A path to independence
Kuciak’s murder sparked public shock and outrage. It was the first murder of a journalist in the country since becoming independent state in 1993.
But since the murder, we’ve seen something of a retreat of private interests in Slovakian media, suggesting the country might be on a path to freeing itself from media capture.
For a start, the assassination brought about renewed focus on the state of media ownership in Slovakia. Investors found it hard to paint their media involvement as innocent, given an oligarch had seemingly ordered a journalist’s murder in order to protect their public image.
But the political ramifications have also had a big impact. The murder, and the widespread horror it generated in the Slovakian public, led to the resignation of long-running Prime Minister Robert Fico.
Fico himself wasn’t directly implicated, but was seen as part of the same corrupt system. And his frequent public bashing of journalists – he once called a group of reporters “dirty, anti-Slovak prostitutes” – was heavily criticised in light of the murder.
Two years later this same public anger helped propel Igor Matovič, a former media boss, into power. Matovič campaigned on an anti-corruption tickets, seeking to eliminate the oligarch influence which had been exposed in the Gorilla scandal and Kuciak’s murder.
Matovič and his Ordinary People and Independent Personalities party have thus created a more hostile environment for media-owning oligarchs. “With the recent changes in government, the oligarchs’ influence in their media properties is diminishing,” said MDIF’s Nemcova. “We think that the picture in Slovakia is actually improving slightly.”
We’re seeing the first fruits of these changes now. Earlier this year Penta Investments finally exited Petit Press, selling their stake in MDIF, seen as a victory for media independence. And the government is working on a new media law, which would guarantee constitutional protection for journalists and their sources.
But with so much of Slovakia’s media still owned by oligarchs, there’s a lot of progress to be made to free Slovakian media from captivity.
