In a recent announcement, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) announced that it would cease retransmitting the employee-run protest broadcasts of ERT, Greece's national public broadcaster, on Wednesday. ERT was officially shut down by the Greek government on June 11 but has remained on the air since then with the help of the EBU. In its statement, the EBU claimed that the new "interim" public broadcaster launched by the Greek government will fulfill public service obligations through its impending launch of news broadcasts. The EBU, however, ignores the very private nature of this new "public" broadcaster, and its connection with Mega Channel, Greece's largest private television network.
By Michael Nevradakis
Reporting from Athens
Soon after the Greek government's sudden shutdown of national public broadcaster ERT on June 11, a major show of support towards ERT came from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The EBU, a professional association of national broadcasting services from across Europe, launched European-wide satellite broadcasts as well as internet streaming of ERT's employee-run protest broadcasts in the days after the government officially shut down ERT. Earlier this week, the EBU announced that both the satellite broadcast and the internet stream will cease operations on Wednesday.
In a laconically-worded statement issued by the EBU on Monday, the EBU stated that this decision follows reports that ERT's interim replacement, Greek Public Television ("DT") will launch news broadcasts this week. In a second statement released on Tuesday, the EBU claimed that it had "honored" its pledge to "relay the ex-ERT signal until a terrestrial signal carrying basic public service media output could be established." It added that an interim broadcaster has been launched in Greece and the Greek Parliament has adopted new laws which "will form the foundation for an independent PSM" (public service media). The statement also added that almost 600 individuals have been hired by the interim broadcaster, with another 1,400 to follow when the new public broadcaster is formally established.
The irony of the EBU's decision is that it is based simply on reports that the interim "public" broadcaster in Greece will launch news broadcasts, of an unspecified nature and on an unspecified date. It also ignores a number of other inconvenient realities of the interim broadcaster and of the government's efforts to launch a new "public" broadcaster which will formally replace ERT.
On June 20, the Council of State, Greece's highest court, issued a vaguely-worded decision calling for the immediate resumption of "public broadcasting," including television and radio services, as well as an internet presence. It took several weeks for the government to even partially abide by this decision, through the launch of "DT." Radio broadcasts have not been launched, and there is no internet presence for the new public broadcaster, while ERT's archives, which had been digitized and were freely available online, have also remained unavailable since June 11.
The operation of the interim broadcaster has been both controversial and amateurish. On its first night on air, it committed a programming faux pas by broadcasting a film without having first secured its broadcast rights. It has also brazenly shown materials from ERT's archives, complete with ERT's logo visible on screen. DT's original logo was an almost exact copy of a local television station in the island of Kos that is also abbreviated "DT," and its new logo remains reminiscent of a small-market television station instead of a national public service broadcaster. DT itself is also still not available in much of the country.
Even more egregious is the private nature of this interim "public" broadcaster. DT's broadcasts were launched from the privately-owned TVE studios based in Paiania, outside of Athens. These studios formerly housed Mega Channel, which is Greece's largest private television network and one of the most feverent supporters of austerity and the current government's policies. The signal is then digitally encoded by DIGEA, a private consortium owned by Greece's six largest private television networks, and the signal is sent to DIGEA's transmitters via fiber optic lines leased from OTE, Greece's telecommunications giant, which is owned by Deutsche Telecom.
While it has also been announced in Greece that DT will soon broadcast newscasts and informational programming, what the EBU seemingly ignored is that these newscasts will be produced and edited at the studios of Mega Channel, and not by DT. And adding to the DT-government-Mega Channel connection, the newly-appointed deputy minister of public broadcasting Pantelis Kapsis is a former journalist and former government spokesman who was once an editor at the daily newspaper Ta Nea, which is owned by the Lambrakis Press Group, a shareholder in, you guessed it, Mega Channel. Additionally, Pantelis' brother Mihalis Kapsis is a prominent journalist at none other than...Mega Channel.
DT's operation has been less than transparent in nature, despite repeated pledges by Greece's "reformist" and "pro-European" government that it was shutting down ERT in order to replace it with a public broadcaster that would be transparent, meritocratic, and accountable to the public. An unknown number of employees was presumably hired to first launch DT, and since then, the names of 577 individuals who have been hired to work in the interim broadcaster have been announced by the Ministry of Finance, which is operating the interim broadcaster while overseeing the liquidation of ERT. The employees currently working at DT were hired without any evident public hiring or evaluation process and their salaries are not publicly known, though the journalists' union of Athens, ESIEA, recently accused the Greek government of violating Greek labor law at DT, as its employees are working without a contract and are uninsured.
In the meantime, ERT has continued to face attacks on numerous fronts. On July 29, a group of ERT employees traveled to the Mount Imittos transmitter site east of Athens along with numerous private citizens, to protest the shutdown of ERT. Eight protesters were violently arrested by police and are facing trumped-up charges of damaging public property, endangering air travel, and defiance against police authorities. Police also recently stormed and shut down transmitters which were retransmitting ERT's employee-run broadcasts in numerous locations across the country, including at Geraneia, near Athens, and at Pilion, an important transmitter site which covers much of Central Greece. In other instances, however, it was private actors, and not police forces, which were responsible for taking ERT's signal off the air. Recently, ERT's transmitters in Kalamata were reportedly taken off the air by a security team working on behalf of the owner of a local television station with close ties to the New Democracy party. And earlier this month in Lesvos, the owner of a local television station allegedly broke in to ERT's broadcasting facility, took the transmitters off the air, and then changed the locks on the door before departing. The individual in question has been recently convicted of extortion and has also been implicated in other criminal matters.
Despite these challenges, ERT has continued to broadcast, over-the-air, via satellite, and online. The EBU's satellite transmission, in particular, was instrumental in feeding ERT's transmitters across the country with the station's signal, while the EBU's internet stream has been viewed by 2.5 million unique visitors, for a total of 4.4 million hours of viewing and 8.5 million total views. All of this will come to a close on Wednesday, if the EBU follows through on its decision.
In its two announcements, the EBU has claimed to have offered its "support and expertise" to the Greek government to allow the country's new public broadcaster to "fulfill its potential for independence and solid governance." Yet its decision to cease satellite and internet broadcasts of the "ex-ERT," as it called it, is not only based on mere reports that DT will soon provide yet-to-be-specified news programming, but it also ignores all of the aforementioned realities and ignores the very undemocratic and indeed autocratic governance that both ERT and its possible replacement are subjected to, at the hands of the Greek government.
The EBU claims that "there are encouraging signs that a new public broadcaster will soon be operational in Greece." They must be privy to a different set of "signs" than the rest of us. When ERT was shut down on June 11, the government promised that the new public broadcasting entity which would replace it would be ready within two months. More recent reports, however, are stating that the new entity will launch sometime around Christmas. Perhaps the "encouraging sign" is that DT may soon be broadcasting "newscasts" privately produced and edited at Mega Channel's studios in Athens. Only the EBU and the Greek government know for sure.
ERT, in an announcement on its Facebook page, pledged to continue its employee-run protest broadcasts even past the EBU shutoff, via its website, www.ertopen.com, and via the website of The Press Project. It also promised to continue making its programming available to as many over-the-air transmitters in Greece as possible via other means. In the meantime, an online petition has been created calling upon the EBU to reconsider its decision. The petition is available here.
