By NIKI KITSANTONISAUG. 29, 2016
The New York Times
ATHENS — Since Greece opened its media to private broadcasting in the 1980s, the market has been an almost unregulated scrum. Licenses are given out on an ad hoc basis. Media outlets have proliferated. The chaos ushered in hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and invited the undue influence of banks, media barons and successive governments.
Now, the government led by the leftist Syriza party under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says it wants to crack down on what it characterizes as a “triangle of corruption,” by auctioning off a limited number of licenses on Tuesday.
But whether that effort is actually aimed at bringing order to the market or is yet another attempt by a Greek government to shape the media to its advantage has set off a hot debate and an intense wrangle for power here.
Syriza opponents accuse it of a power grab under a different guise. The conservative New Democracy party said the government was seeking “absolute control” of the media. The once-mighty Socialist party, Pasok, has charged Syriza with disrespecting democracy and freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, the European Commission, though not objecting to the auction per se, has signaled that media independence could be at risk.
The auction will limit the number of nationwide TV licenses to four, meaning half of Greece’s stations will be forced to close.
The government argues that eight channels are too many for a small country like Greece, citing the dwindling size of the TV advertising market, whose annual revenue has been slashed by two-thirds since the crisis erupted in 2009, to under 200 million euros ($224 million).
Television channels, which will have to pay for their licenses for the first time, with bidding starting at €3 million ($3.4 million), have appealed to a top court, claiming that the government is violating the Constitution by overseeing the auction instead of the state media regulator.
The minister in charge of the auction, Nikos Pappas, a close aide to Mr. Tsipras, has said the government is trying to regulate an anarchic sector.
In a written statement, Mr. Pappas said that the Greek government had agreed with its European partners to hold the auction, and that “like all Greeks, media owners should finally pay their share.”
“For 27 years, television channels operated without licenses,” he said. “The result was the creation of a closed oligopoly of established interests in a market that should have opened from the beginning. Taxes weren’t paid, borrowing was excessive (nearly €1.5 billion in debts) and there was a lack of transparency.”
But it is not the first time a Greek government has been accused of trying to control the media. The Greek political class has always used the public sector for its own ends and has always had “interplay” with the private sector, as in many other European countries, said Stelios Papathanassopoulos, a professor of communication and media studies at Athens University.
“All this upheaval is because the government wants to gain a tactical advantage,” he said. “It wants to crush corruption, but it could end up creating a new corruption.”
Still, he said he was surprised that debate about the TV auction was entirely politicized with no discussion about content or the future of the media.
The Greek media is in the worst state in its history, with advertising revenue plummeting and consumers turning in droves to the internet, he said. “Yet all we are talking about is who is going to get the licenses,” he said. As for what will be on Greek TV after the auction, “I have no idea.”
As controversial as the TV license auction is the government’s plan to set up a state agency for selling television advertising, which would increase to 30 percent, from 10, the commission paid to the strapped state from all deals between broadcasters and advertisers.
The government says the goal of the agency would be to lift transparency in the advertising industry and curb tax evasion. Broadcasters argue that the law will strangle an already struggling industry, as well as breaching confidentiality with advertising agencies and European Union laws.
The European Commission has expressed concern about the independence of the Greek regulator that was supposed to conduct the auction and about the extent of government control over media owners. The media owners say they are being unfairly targeted, and deny exerting any improper influence or seeking political favors.
In comments to a parliamentary panel investigating funding given by Greek banks to media organizations and political parties this month, Dimitris Kontominas, the owner of Alpha Channel, who also owns a Greek insurance firm, said that he was not corrupt and that his “only connection to the state is when I buy stamps for my letters.”
Yiannis Alafouzos, who owns the center-right Skai channel, claimed that the main concern of the government was not to tackle entangled interests but to install new candidates and “establish a status quo in Greece.” Describing the government’s stance as “totalitarian,” he said, “They’re taking us 15, 20 years back.”
Stratis Liarelis, the managing director of ANT1, whose holding company has a presence in 14 countries and whose major shareholder is the shipowner Minos Kyriakou, said the government was tarring all channels with the same brush.
“Everyone is included in the same ‘triangle’ when we haven’t taken one public contract,” he said, adding that if there are illegal loans or public contracts given because of interplay with politicians, the authorities “should go to a prosecutor, not demolish the entire media industry in Greece.”
Correction: August 29, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a caption with this article misstated the date of a photograph of Greeks in a cafe in Athens watching television coverage of a rally. It was July 2015, not July this year.
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