September 2016<\/p>\n
Between 2013 and 2015, 10 Bulgarian municipalities\u00a0spent a total of 2.7 million Bulgarian lev ($1.54 million) \u2013 mainly to media companies and PR agencies \u2013 in return for positive coverage of their activities, an investigative series by news site Dnevnik.bg<\/a>\u00a0found<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to the articles, the\u00a0local governments of\u00a0the five largest, excluding the capital Sofia, and five of the poorest cities\u00a0in the country were found to be engaging in \u201ccorrupt practices<\/a>\u201d and displayed a disregard for \u201cjournalistic ethics and loyalty to the audience\u201d.<\/p>\n Under the guise of using contracts to create advertisements, \u201cjob posting messages and other texts\u201d \u2013 not only in publications but also for radio and television broadcasts \u2013 all 10\u00a0municipalities were found to be buying influence in media outlets and attempting to eliminate criticism,\u00a0Spas Spasov, the author of the series, told Index on Censorship. The cities reviewed were\u00a0Plovdiv, Varna, Burgas, Ruse, Pleven, Stara Zagora, Shumen, Kazanlak, Blagoevgrad, Vratsa and Montana.<\/p>\n The data, which was obtained through freedom of information requests, does not claim to be exhaustive but provides\u00a0an indication of administrative control over news in the cities covered by the investigative reports. \u201cThe idea behind the project was to reveal the deep crisis in which freedom of the press finds itself in Bulgaria,\u201d Spasov said.<\/p>\n One visible trend in the series is that media content is sold at a discount\u00a0to local governments who buy \u201cwholesale\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe results of my investigation show that virtually all the media in the analysed municipalities are dependent on the public funding they get,\u201d Spasov told Index. The lack of an advertising market outside the capital only\u00a0strengthens this dependence on handouts from local government, he added.<\/p>\n He found that in many cases the money private media outlets receive from municipal administrations often covers the entirety \u2013 or at least a significant portion \u2013 of their budgets. In one case\u00a0a\u00a0source told Spasov that the entire salary of a journalist was covered by Vratsa municipal funding.<\/p>\n In the city of Varna some advertising contracts were signed by municipal companies that are monopolies that\u00a0were not in need of advertising. Spasov said that this is a way to buy political and institutional influence in a media outlet.<\/p>\n Many municipalities were found to be contracting \u201cadvertising\u201d and \u201cpromotional activities\u201d through private media despite the fact that almost every municipality has its own municipal media, through which they already publish official announcements.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, there is nothing vicious in the practice of municipal administrations buying advertising in private media,\u201d Spasov said. He does, however, stress that in order to avoid buying media influence, local administrations and government institutions should publish their advertisements only in media outlets that comply with the Ethical Code of the Bulgarian Media<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis code clearly stipulates that all text covered by the contracts will be marked as sponsored content but this is not the current practice,\u201d he said, adding that vague wording\u2013phrases such as \u201cother texts\u201d\u2013helps to disguise sponsored articles published as editorial content.<\/p>\n This is possible because Bulgaria has no law requiring print and online media outlets to label\u00a0sponsored content they are publishing. Existing regulation only addresses\u00a0television advertisements.<\/p>\n \u201cTransparency of sponsored content is crucial for a functioning free press. It is vital that existing legislation on advertisers be reformed swiftly to include all media outlets in order to protect the public,\u201d\u00a0Hannah Machlin, project officer for Index on Censorship\u2019s\u00a0Mapping Media Freedom<\/a>, said.<\/p>\n The investigation went on to find that many media outlets from smaller municipalities were created by political entities with the purpose of bullying their opponents in local government.<\/p>\n Spasov told Index that if the remainder of the country\u2019s 256 municipalities were also to be investigated, \u201cthere should be no doubt\u201d that the findings would be similar to the 10 which were analysed in his investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 2016 Between 2013 and 2015, 10 Bulgarian municipalities\u00a0spent a total of 2.7 million Bulgarian lev ($1.54 million) \u2013 mainly to media companies and PR agencies \u2013 in return for… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[409,336,157],"tags":[63,69,156],"class_list":["post-2164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english-2","category-336","category----2","tag-63","tag-69","tag-156"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2164"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2574,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2164\/revisions\/2574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spasspasov.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}