site.btaJournalists Protest Sensorship at Bulgarian National Radio

108 - POLITICS - MEDIA FREEDOM - PROTEST

Journalists Protest
Sensorship at
Bulgarian National Radio


Sofia, September 26 (BTA) - Thursday noon, journalists will be protesting sensorship in the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) and widespread pressure on their work in Bulgaria on Thursday. Organized by the Association of European Journalists - Bulgaria, the protest will form a human chain from the BNR building to the Sofia TV Tower "to transmit a signal of what is happening to the rest of Bulgaria and farther in Europe", said the organizers.

They explain in their call to protest that it is a reaction to the failure of the authorities to take action in an ongoing crisis at BNR which started with the removal of a popular political show host Silvia Velikova and an unprecedented stoppage of the terrestrial transmission of BNR's Horizont Programme for five hours on September 13 in violation of BNR's obligation to broadcast round the clock. At a hearing by the Council for Electronic Media (CEM), Velikova discloses details of the pressure she has been put to by the BNR management, presumably over the way she covered the work of the judiciary (which is her beat) and the only candidate for Prosecutor General (Ivan Geshev). BNR journalists urged the stations's Director General Svetoslav Kostov to step down, but he declined and threatened to sue his critics.

"The prosecution service is only probing the technical aspect of the situation and has established clearly that there was no technical cause for the BNR broadcast suspension. Apparently the cause was of a different nature - not technical. The prosecution service refuses to find out. CEM looks helpless and confused, and lacks the courage to enforce a law which allows it to fire the BNR director. The MPs are arrogant and shun responsibility as if it was somebody else who put in CEM people who have nothing to do with journalism," the Association of European Journalists wrote in their call to protest action.

In the human chain action, they will position 111 people over the 1,100 m distance between BNR and the TV Tower as the number people is meant to match Bulgaria's position in the Reporters Without Border ranking of media freedom.

The Association insists that an international probe should look into the BNR scandal because the Bulgarian institutions are incapable of doing that: the BNR broadcast disruption is probed by Deputy Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev and it was the BNR coverage of his campaign to become the next Prosecutor General, which started the crisis. The Association is adamant that the probe should reach the people who pressured the BNR director. LN/