site.btaE-Media Watchdog Alerts Central Election Commission about 36 Violations During Election Campaign

The Council for Electronic Media (CEM) has sent 27 letters to the Central Election Commission (CEC) about 36 cases of violations of the Election Code during the election campaign. A report on the monitoring was adopted at a meeting of the media regulator here on Thursday.

The document states that ten alerts were sent to the CEC about the publication of exit poll results before 20:00, five alerts about the lack of information on contracts between media and parties, five about the use of the Bulgarian flag and the flag of another country in campaign forms, five about a missing message that vote-buying and vote-selling is a crime. Two alerts were submitted about non-observance of good morals, one for a missing message that the campaign was paid and one for participation of an employee of a religious denomination in canvassing. Seven external alerts have been forwarded CEC, together with audio and audiovisual recordings from the CEM monitoring system.

The presented report also states that the public media programmes - Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) and Bulgarian National Television (BNT) - are dominated by the voices of non-parliamentary, non-systemic parties, at the expense of debates with parties of greater public influence and weight.

"It seems that for the first time in this campaign we did not see significant journalistic investigations related to proactive actions to search for and identify people who buy votes and their sponsors," said CEM member Gabriela Naplatanova during the meeting. "This is something I seriously miss as a viewer. Of course, the regulator has no right to influence the content and give an assessment," she explained. Naplatanova said that unlike other times, media outlets have shown a very active role in analyzing the CCTV footage.

According to CEC member Prolet Velkova, among the problems faced by the messiahs in the election campaign are the absence of leadership debates, avoidance of interviews in their classic form, communication by politicians through platforms, posts, declarations, but not face-to-face with live journalism. The article in the Election Code which ensures equality of all political subjects in the election campaign, engages the public media to such an extent that they are actually in a situation of not being able to inform, but rather to be misinformed, because in these formats fall political subjects who are non-systemic players, often use hostile speech and do not actually help voters to make their civic choice, Velkova said.

Kadrinka Kadrinova, who is a member of the media regulator, pointed out that she felt a lack of active, critical and more analytical journalism in the last election campaign. She said leadership debate could be replaced, where it is missing, with sharper positions by journalists. "We did not hear such [positions] in this campaign," Kadrinova noted. "What I miss, to begin with, are the commentary, journalistic programmes where the role of the journalist is a leading one, not just a mirror that reflects, be it good or bad, the reality in which we all have to live," she added.

CEM member Galina Georgieva pointed out that BNR presented three times more editorial journalistic content compared to BNT, which "enables the listeners, the Bulgarian citizen to be informed and make their informed decision".

"Any type of aggression, especially physical, related to the attack in Haskovo [where bTV journalists were assaulted while covering the elections in the southeastern town], is absolutely unacceptable and should not be tolerated in any form because it is the first step towards the destruction of any democratic process," said Simona Veleva, acting chairwoman of the Council for Electronic Media. She pointed out that the number of women participating in the campaign and having access to the airwaves has dramatically decreased.