The price for advertising shouldn’t be limited, but the financing of political advertising with public funds is completely unacceptable, said Dejan Georgievski, the President of the Media Development Center.
The past two days, the national TV stations have reacted to State Election Committee’s (SEC) decision regarding the process for adverts for paid political informing about the snap parliamentary elections.
– I think that by financing the purchase of adverts on part of the organizers of election campaigns (political advertising) with public funds is completely unacceptable and cannot be justified in any way – said Georgievski, who also said that the Media Development Center has been striving for a while to abolish the advertising int he broadcasting sector and these occurrences only strengthen this stance.
The television stations consider that SEC has been misinterpreting the Election Code when it tries to determine the prices i.e. SEC mustn’t determine the prices at all.
Even Georgievski shares the opinion that the SEC mustn’t set the prices in the advertising area.
The law average prices, according to Georgievski are a consequence of the behavior on part of the media that consciously put down the prices on the market and they were offering enormous discounts to political parties in previous election cycles (in a situation when public funds from the budget, on various basis represented a significant percentage of the value of the total media market”.
