site.btaBTA Director General Invites Bulgarian Media to Force Political Parties to Restore Public Election Debates

An agreement is needed between the media in Bulgaria to force the leaders of the main political parties to return to the public election debate, said Director General of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) Kiril Valchev during Tuesday's discussion on the freedom of speech of the media in Bulgaria. According to him, this means an agreement to organize such debates together. The event is held at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE).

"Forums like this one are an opportunity for cooperation between the media in Bulgaria. Because it is in the public interest to have cooperation before competition among them. The fruits of such cooperation should lead to some practical results of great public interest," Valchev noted.

According to him, the first of these practical results would be the restoration of debates between political leaders. "In Bulgaria, they have disappeared for many years, unlike in democratic countries, where they continue to be of great importance - the latest example being the presidential candidate debates in the United States, the first of which even led to the replacement of one of the two main candidates," the BTA Director General said.

He pointed out that during election campaigns in this country, political leaders tend to avoid such debates with the explanation that too many media insist on organizing them independently, and since no single outlet has the exclusive right to do it, no debate has been held for years. According to Valchev, the lack of a normal democratic political debate has produced the deplorable result of Bulgarians being disinterested in voting.

“Without insisting on assuming such a role, the BTA is a possible platform for such a debate - not as an equidistant, but as an equally close institution, without being in competition with other media,” Kiril Valchev added.

Media cooperation, according to Valchev, would lead to the restoration of classic interviews with political leaders. "Their unilateral communication with written declarations on social networks or short statements in front of cameras and microphones cannot replace communication with answers to journalists' questions in an interview. That is why there needs to be an agreement among the media in Bulgaria to refuse that major political leaders are virtually always replaced in interviews by other representatives of major parties or even by spokespersons who are not part of political life but only its analysts. This means agreeing together to refuse such appearances," the BTA Director General said.

The restoration of press conferences would be another result of cooperation between the country's media, he said. “Together, we need to end the practice of political leaders making statements to reporters clustered on top of each other, shouting at each other in an attempt to ask a question, which routinely allows politicians to say whatever they have in mind, often without answering questions,” Valchev noted.

In his view, political leaders themselves need to reestablish their more authoritative presence in society, which cannot happen when the most important messages are almost always delivered in passing, most often in a place where they are, in fact, on a different occasion from the topic under discussion. "That is why we need an agreement among the media in Bulgaria to restore the dialogue with the leaders of the country from the respectful distance that we see in the institutions of the European Union, where press conference rooms or podiums for shorter briefings continue to function. This means agreeing to give up clustering around politicians, which also gives them grounds for unflattering definitions of journalists," Valchev explained.

In his words, restoring the distance between journalists and politicians would be another practical result of the cooperation between Bulgarian media. Kiril Valchev noted that journalists are not PR officers and should not help politicians prepare for interviews. "Let's remember how the BBC cancelled an interview with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson after one of their most prominent presenters inadvertently sent him the notes with the prepared questions to him. That is why there needs to be agreement among the media in Bulgaria that such practices are unacceptable," he said.

The Director General of the BTA also talked about restoring the citation of sources. “The "well-informed source wishing anonymity" is not admissible when it is actually a source of authority and habitually uses the media to check the public reaction to some supposedly anonymous information. Let us recall that the Associated Press (AP) news agency fired the journalist who reported, citing a US intelligence source who wished anonymity, that two Russian missiles had hit Poland on November 15, 2023. This information turned out to be wrong and initially caused shock at a possible conflict between Russia and NATO," said Kiril Valchev. He added that there needs to be an agreement among the media in Bulgaria that the anonymity of a source should be protected only in exceptional cases. “A particular case where we should always point to a source is artificial intelligence, which the audience should always know is being used by the media,” he added.

Another result of collaboration between media is the restoration of citation between media, Valchev believes. "There needs to be an agreement among the media in Bulgaria that by citing each other, we are actually increasing the credibility of the media in general as sources of information for which they are editorially responsible," he explained.

The opening of the discussion at the UNWE was also attended by Anna Tanova-Atanasova, Executive Director of the Association of Bulgarian Broadcasters (ABBRO) and Chair of the Board of the National Council for Self-Regulation, Rector of the UNWE Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov, Director General of the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) Emil Koshlukov, Director General of the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) Milen Mitev, and acting chair of the Council for Electronic Media (CEM) Dr. Simona Veleva.