7. Tolerance/Portrayal
Од Wikibooks
Mainstream media, with rare exceptions, at best ignore minorities, if they do not cover the related issues in a way extremely hostile to them. After all, a written statement, the “Journalists’ Union of the Athens Daily Newspapers” (ESIEA) delivered in June 1999 in an international conference organized by the International Federation of Journalists in Ohrid (Macedonia), included no less than the following passage: “In Greece no different ethnic Media exist since the Greek nation is single. Moreover it is unique in Europe reaching 100% homogeneity according, to findings by international organisations and other official forums dealing with such issues”.
Even when formal rules and regulations are broken, the competent authorities refrain from applying the law, as two recent example will show. On 11 June 1999, the private “Mega Channel” censored its mandatory pre-electoral program devoted to presentations by small parties, by removing the presentation of “Rainbow,” the Macedonian minority party, while keeping all other presentations including the one made by the extreme-right “National Front”. The National Radio and Television Council did not impose the prescribed by law sanction, while no one condemned this act of censorship. On 21 October 1999, two journalists from Halkidiki’s “Super Channel” were beaten by a mob led by Mayor Costas Papayannis, in Kasandra, Halkidiki (Northern Greece). Costas Glykos and Michalis Katsamiras were covering the mob’s attempt to prevent the local Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) from starting the construction of their house of worship, construction that had been authorized by the authorities. During the violent incident, JWs as well as two representatives of the Ombudsman’s office were harassed by the mob. The two journalists and the JWs pressed charges against the mayor and some alleged accomplices. On 22 October, the prosecutor formally indicted the mayor and his accomplices for crimes that included inciting to religious hatred. Nevertheless, neither during the incident, nor in the ensuing forty-eight hours, did the police arrest the alleged perpetrators of the crimes as called for by the code of criminal procedure.
Another example of biased journalism were recent stories on the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), on the 50th anniversary of the respective Convention. Useful description of the Court was certainly given, as well as statistics about the caseload, but the illustrative examples tended to come mostly from Turkey. The reader of the four-page dossier on the ECHR in the glossy magazine Tachydromos, an insert in the highest circulation daily Ta Nea (6 May), for example, would not find there any information on even one case in which the European Court convicted Greece. A regular reader of Greek newspaper was of course hardly surprised. A month earlier, after all, on 6 April, the Court published its latest conviction on Greece, in the case of the Jehovah’s Witness Iakovos Thlimmenos. The latter was a certified accountant who was denied civil service employment because of his prior conviction for conscientious objection: naturally, the Court found discrimination based on religious affiliation. With the usual few exceptions, Greek newspapers ignored the news. However, all newspapers exhaustively covered Turkey’s convictions by the same Court in about the same time.
On 20 April, Greek neo-Nazis “celebrated” in their own way Jewish Passover: they painted anti-Semitic slogans on the Holocaust memorial and the Synagogue in Salonica, some in German: Juden Raus! (Jews Out!). A shocked Jewish community issued an emotionally strong statement. With the exception of Avghi, the Greek press kept silent. So did almost all others, with the exception of a couple of very belated statements by the Greek foreign ministry and the small leftist Coalition party, themselves sent only to Avghi on 25 April and not even made available in the respective websites.
On 26 April, the state-appointed mufti of Komotini was issuing a statement denouncing a state agency’s refusal to issue a necessary certificate to some vakif property the Muslims in Thrace had been owning since the 15th century. Here, there was not one newspaper to report the problem. Just as, years ago, there was not even one newspaper to report that a Cretan court had denied that the Catholic Church, with a half-millenary presence, had a legal personality allowing it to own a church in that island. A few years later Greece was to be convicted by the ECHR on that issue: only then a few newspapers devoted a couple of articles…
So, when it comes to minority issues, the Greek press is reminiscent of that of authoritarian regimes where “nationally sensitive issues” are reported only in a “nationally correct” way, if at all. One can list an endless series of additional examples of what is often outright “hate speech” against the minorities (see Lenkova 1998 and Balkan Neighbours 1996-1998). Especially when it concerns the “non-existent” Macedonians. The few times they are mentioned, they are usually referred to as “autonomists” which in Balkan jargon means separatists, or as Skopjans or Skopjanophiles, which is understood as manipulated by Skopje [the way the Greek press calls the [Republic of Macedonia]. While raising the issue of the existence of that minority, let alone of related human rights violations is considered “provocative” (“provocative allegations on the existence of a ‘Macedonian minority’” [state-owned] Macedonian Press Agency, 21 April).
