Olaf Steenfadt, Reporters Without Borders’ global Project Director of the Media Ownership Monitor (MOM), stated that the hold politics has on the Albanian media is a disadvantage in negotiations of EU membership.
The MOM study published two days ago stressed that the Albanian media market is deformed and concentrated in the hands of a few families.
Steenfadt stated in an interview for Deutsche Welle:
– I was taken aback by the high audience concentration, especially the TV one, in the hands of two or three families.
– This, obviously, relates to the advertising market, that, in small countries like Albania, usually depends on a handful of very large corporations, that own audiovisual medias and printed presses.
– In Albania, there are two survey institutions – Abacus and Telemetrix – that gather and publish data about audiovisual media and their data is very different from each other.
– If two official institutions come up with entirely different conclusions, there can only be two explanations: either they are not professional, or the data providers are corrupt.
– In a global level, we are increasingly observing a “media oligarchization”, where journalism is becoming more and more unsafe and endangered; media is increasingly seized by owners with political or economic purposes and weaponized for the achievement of these purposes.
– This kind of concealed deal between political, economic and media power is on the rise.
– This is happening in both Serbia and Albania. Both countries are in the process of negotiating EU membership, and this high concentration of media audience and ownership damages both their chances.
