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OPINEWS

Word cancellation

Politiko 2024-05-04 11:36:07

Luciano Boçi
Albania ranks last in terms of media freedom in the region. Nothing is accidental. The alarm sirens have long gone off, but media freedom has nevertheless taken more and more steps back in recent years. Attacks on journalists and media programs critical of the government have been a common refrain in the media-political environment.
Everything has gone in sync with the dismantling of democracy as a whole and the country's ever-increasing descent into a political-criminal autocracy.
Attacks on free speech and free journalists have known several levels. Both the level of legal initiatives, such as the law on defamation, to put handcuffs on speech, as well as the level of dictated censorship commonly applied in the media and among journalists, as well as that of direct threats to the media (especially online) of journalists made by people with administrative and political power, which usually includes the Prime Minister and recently the mayor in question of Tirana.
Without forgetting the system set up as an absurd rivalry of our time between Rama and Veliaj, to buy as many media and journalists as possible.
All this has built in our country the culture of canceling speech, which is considered malignant for the democratic system, but very profitable for the government and its political rule. The cases of Telnisi with life threats, Ambrozias with aggression from Rama, Isait with blackmail emails, Xamas and Hoxha with messages and phone calls from prison funds, are not the only ones.
They join hundreds of other cases accompanied by dismissals, movements, labeling, contempt from superiors, commanding censors or bought owners, cases that have shaped the media, transformed it, and the distance between the word and the truth today is more bigger than ever.
Add here the establishment of censorship institutions that take command from the information directorate near the prime minister's office, which has become omnipotent and dictates many editorial policies in the most visible Albanian media.
Seen in this light, Veliaj's recent reactions to his critical journalists, not yet included in the bag of interests, were not a pure bolt in the sky. It is this normalized cancellation culture that makes him and others treat journalists in the ugliest way possible.
Veliaj had no choice but to do it differently from Rama, who only a few days ago with his arrogance towards journalists had conveyed his harbut mentality to critics across the Adriatic when he was scolded by the head of RAI for his investigative show of the screaming truths of the Albanian reality. Even Rama's political history is simultaneously a history of an almost criminal relationship with the media, a history which has two views.
It has the appearance of a beautiful crime, very well accepted by us as something that has no reason not to happen, because with interests and advertisements it has pocketed a large part of the media and broadcasts. And on the other hand, there is the appearance of a classic crime with blackmail, advertising blocking, fines, personal attacks and intimidation against quality journalists. And no one could have done this double-faced crime better than Veliaj revealed, as he attacked those journalists who were not part of the fulfillment of interests with unacceptable language.
But this culture of speech cancellation is even deeper and has an even more hypocritical appearance. It is not only censorship obtained in many forms as an obstacle to the transmission of the word and self-censorship that have brought down free speech in Albania. Censorship is no longer realized only as an obstacle as it used to be, but it is now also realized as inflation, aiming at the defactoring of truth and reality and bringing a false reality to the public.
And this is the most vile way of destroying freedom of speech. This whole modern scheme of devaluing the truth through the inflation of speech and disinformation is carried out by the servant part of the power media that dominates the media theater today and has two targets: the fight against the political opposition and the glorification of the political rule of the majority.
It is this media theater that draws in its vortex many finances with dubious sources, that distorts information and public communication and conveys false images.
Meanwhile, the solidarity of the journalistic community has shrunk dramatically and the protection against them is almost at zero level, despite the sincere voices of some young journalists passionate about the truth and the word.
Under this lens, the figures who dominate power in Albania today, Rama-Veliaj, are not real figures, but simply media projections that have been served to the public outside of shocking truths.
The progressive discovery of their political truths is unmasking not only propaganda, disinformation, inflation, the pyramid of media-political interests, but also is a corridor of light for the return, in a different political future, of media freedom to bed its natural, as one of the fundamental and guardian pillars of democratic values.