Abstract
Greece’s continuing economic crisis has resulted in renewed hostility towards the media.
On the night of 4 April 2012, president of the Greek Union of Photojournalists Marios Lolos attended a demonstration at Syntagma Square in Athens. An experienced photographer who had reported from war zones including Bosnia, Kosovo and the Middle East, he planned to cover the rally to mark the funeral of Dimitris Christoulas, a pensioner who had committed suicide in front of the Greek parliament a couple of days before. Prior to the suicide, the political agenda in Greece had focused mainly on security issues and racism, ignited by the government’s plans to control illegal immigration through the creation of closed detention centres. But Christoulas’s suicide, seen as a political act of protest against the government’s austerity measures, drove attention back to the economic crisis and its severe social and political repercussions. What nobody – and certainly not Lolos – expected was that it would also trigger brutal behaviour among the city’s police.
The crowd had dispersed, said Lolos, and there were only about 20 journalists left when police started using their riot shields against them. ‘I started yelling, “Calm down, why are you pushing us?,”’ Lolos recalls. ‘Why are you asking?’, a police officer responded. Lolos told the officer who he was and that the journalists were simply doing their jobs. ‘We have orders to evict the square,’ the policeman told Lolos. ‘I told him that this reminded me of authoritarian tactics. He replied that if it were so, I wouldn’t even be there. As I was walking away, all of a sudden, I felt something hitting me on the head.’
A photographer tries to escape damage from a petrol bomb while covering riots near parliament, Athens, 23 February 2011
Credit: Yiorgos Karahalis/Reuters
Lolos was not just hit with a baton, but with the hard side of its handle, according to doctors – they also believed that the attack was inflicted with the deliberate intention of causing him serious harm. His skull bone was pushed a centimetre into his head and caused trauma to his brain. He survived death by just a millimetre but now struggles with partial paralysis. When he found out what had happened to him, he couldn’t bear it. ‘I survived wars to end up with paralysis in my own country,’ he said, with desperation in his voice.
For the government, this was an isolated event in an otherwise democratic country. Yet there have been several incidents of police harassment against journalists during the last year. In 2011, Greece ranked 71 in the Reporters sans Frontières index of media freedom after having ranked 38 in 2008. In summer 2011, another journalist, Manolis Kypreos, was left deaf when riot police threw a stun grenade, which exploded next to his feet; the case was highlighted in an Amnesty International campaign. Reporting from the streets of Athens has been compared to reporting from a humanitarian crisis or even a war zone. Journalists, photographers and video producers are often trapped behind lines of riot police, facing hostility from protesters as well as harassment by police. This clampdown is a visible manifestation of a much deeper change in society, with direct impact on the quality of free speech in the country. Public debate has become fragmented and polarised, with extreme views splitting the population.
Behind the spectacular scenes of Athens in flames, there is a vacuum of understanding as to how these events have come about and why the media itself is part of the problem. The Greek public is unable to grasp journalists’ frustration and reporters are in turn unable to inform the public in any depth because they can’t gain full access to breaking stories. ‘Our pictures prove that Greek police use excessive force against protesters,’ says Marios Lolos. ‘During the riots of December 2008, they were used as evidence to support the innocence of young people who were accused of vandalism against property or the police.’ Since then, he says, journalists have been ‘systematically harassed by the police’ and discouraged from approaching officers when reporting on incidents. Gathering accurate information has become problematic.
Before 2008, it was equally impossible to report from a demonstration or a strike while carrying a professional camera because of hostility from the crowd. The media were associated with surveillance and discipline, linking them to the police. On several occasions in the 1990s, close-up photographs of people involved in unlawful activities at large demonstrations appeared in national newspapers and on television. Journalists were not welcome at any radical social activity. The slogan often heard on rallies was: ‘Bums, pimps, journalists!’ Some members of the media retreated behind the police and some relied on lazy stereotypes when describing the crowds, among them the ‘hooded youth’, ‘anarchist’, ‘hooligans’, ‘vandals’ – shady caricatures that took on the significance of the ‘mujahideen’ or ‘terrorists’ in local media.
As Marios Lolos points out, the big shift in Greece happened in 2008, when widespread rioting broke out in Athens. Citizen journalists found the field wide open and simply walked in, posting news online, reporting from behind the barricades and criticising the mainstream media. Photojournalists were the first to respond to the trend by making their photographs available to anyone who needed them. Mainstream media reacted by trying to uphold the status quo, perpetuating popular narratives that had dominated coverage of previous demonstrations. Even so, it was clear that, from then on, ‘truth’ would not belong exclusively to established institutions such as governmental agencies and big media companies. Now it was more likely to be an open social process.
In this context, ‘truth’ represented a contest between different interpretations of social, economic and political conditions. In Greece these conditions are determined to a great extent by corruption, political nepotism and diaploki – the intertwining interests of businessmen, the media and politicians. It is within this framework that the Greek media industry developed, along with deliberate unlawfulness, deregulation and economic failures. In 1988, Greece had a population of ten million people and 450 media companies. In 2008, the population had risen by a million people and media companies numbered 2,500.
Many of these companies operated without a licence and under the protection of influential politicians from the two main parties, with negative results for their image – many were seen as fronts for illegal business. Censorship and self-censorship were, and still are, common practice. The economic crisis has compounded the situation so that an open war has been declared upon journalists’ rights, from wages and social security to the right to free speech. Over the past two years, more than 30 per cent of the country’s media workers have lost their jobs; on average, the whole of the work force has suffered a 25 per cent reduction in wages, creating a climate of fear within the industry. Union members working for big media companies have also lost their jobs and been given the excuse that the redundancies are a result of the economic crisis. Self-censorship is now the only way to survive in the media, given that it has demonstrated its widespread support for austerity measures and the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, despite opinion polls that suggest the wider population does not agree. Oppositional voices from the left are marginalised and weaker, independent newspapers face bankruptcy. Unemployed journalists have started cooperatives that support small-scale projects like news magazines or online initiatives where production costs are minimal – but so is recognition.
In a recent interview with al Jazeera, the president of the Athenian Association of Journalists (ESIEA) Dimitris Trimis spoke of the enormous influence political commentary in the mainstream media has upon the population. During the demonstrations against the austerity measures in 2011 and prior to parliament voting on the issue, the Greek media were ‘systematically twisting reality’ and spreading misinformation, adding that it downplayed the numbers of protesters and misrepresented their demands. Reporting focused on property damage and reduced the story to a simple ‘good police’ versus ‘bad protesters’ scenario.
Dimitris Trimis is the first unemployed president in the union’s 100-year history. He lost his job after Eleftherotypia, a symbol of the centre-left and one of the biggest papers in the country, went into bankruptcy.
Nowadays, every time there’s a protest in Athens, a well-planned strategy must be adopted in order to follow and report on it. In typical fashion, television crews remain behind police lines and on rooftops in ‘surveillance’ positions, photojournalists position themselves between protesters and police, while citizen journalists and small media representatives choose to mix with demonstrators in an attempt to document incidents in detail.
Thanks to the internet, the public now has access to a larger number of voices and opinions, a kind of polyphony that strengthens and deepens the critical debate so crucial to a thriving democracy. But in the current crisis, where austerity has led to despair and despair has led to tension, a degree of authoritarianism has taken hold, resulting in a cacophony. Everyone shouts at everyone and communication has broken down.
This hostile environment was evident in the elections on 6 May. There were representatives from 32 parties on the ballot, resulting in widespread rejection of the two main parties and no clear winners. In some cases, the power struggle between the media and politicians has been all too apparent. During a press conference, the nationalist, neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which won 21 seats, demanded that journalists stand as a mark of respect when the party leader Nikos Mihaloliakos entered the room. Instead, many journalists chose to leave. Amidst this confusion and noise, where the very fabric of Greek society is being broken down, in a state of widespread anxiety, poverty and democratic malfunctions, something seems to be lost from the very essence of free speech.