Monitoring of television news coverage conducted from September 2017-February 2017, showed that in the media there are four commercial television stations who could be called propagandistic, this was the conclusion from today’s conference organized by the Institute for Communication Studies (IKS).
“The television stations we are discussing are “Sitel”, “Kanal 5”, “Alfa” and “TV Nova”, who during the monitoring period were found to be more or less favourable towards VMRO-DPMNE, and they were negative or continuously demonising towards the opposition party, SDSM”, said Igor Micevski while presenting the findings from the monitoring conducted under the Modem project, which is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
On the other hand, news coverage from television stations “24 News”, “Telma”, “Alsat M”. And “TV 21”, from which the last two broadcast in two languages, the monitoring found there was an imbalance, no taking of sides, respect of public interest, a critical opinion towards all parties, and broadcasted the news from different sides.
Ambassador of the Netherlands to Macedonia, Wouter Plomp expressed his satisfaction with the project and stated that the public must be aware of the huge impact the media has, including social media, especially when it comes to spreading hate speech and offensive speech.
According to Plomp, that type of speech is not what is called pluralism in the media and freedom of expression.
At the conference, presentations were held by Marina Tuneva from the Council of Ethics in the Media in Macedonia, Zoran Trajchevski, director of the Agency for the Media, Jean-François Furnémont , an expert in media policy and journalists Santa Argirova and Shkelzen Akifi. The debate was led by Snezana Trpevska, a researcher at IKS.
