SASO ORDANOSKI

That’s how it’s always been in modern politics: parties have their own propaganda offices (when they are in power, they are harnessed and upgraded to a government propaganda), and the job of these offices is to produce propaganda that suits the policies of party/government leaderships, some are more skillful, some are less skillful, but their most essential job description is to contact media and journalists in them, to penetrate their “truth” on whatever is on their agenda. They issue statements, they brief, arrange interviews, hold about a hundred of press conferences a month, offer various “materials” to anyone they can “pass” them on to, they have lunch, dinner and drink coffee with hundreds of journalists…

Gossip is a great part of that propaganda activity. Even the most fantastic constructions find their way to the media, and if not there, then to the social networks that are a “gift from God” for finishing the propaganda “activity”, usually with a whole army of Facebook and other bots whose job is to slander, spit, create an atmosphere of a social disaster or atmosphere of national revival, depending on whether they are fighting to come or to stay in power.

The job of journalists and media editors is to have insight in such party propaganda, to sit at meetings with propagandists, to receive messages in all formats and through all kinds of communication channels… This among journalists is called “working the sources”, to get information “before the others”, to find out nuances or to discover data that the “competition” doesn’t have, and all in the public interest. Otherwise, only press conferences available to all would be left for the public to inform itself; or copy paste of articles in other media in which only the title is changed and the order of sentences and paragraphs. The two-year pandemic has truly made the work of journalist difficult and the opportunity to physically meet with their sources, to talk “live” with them, to ask both logical and unwanted questions.

And, that’s not a problem. It would be a problem if everything that were said/sent/submitted only by one and not the other was published, as if the media outlet were a “mailbox”, without a critical distance and editorial “filter” towards the propaganda, which also includes eliminating the “other side” in the story. This, in itself, is not easy, but is the essence of the journalist trade: not just to publish facts (and even fabrications and half-truths), but to put them in context. Usually, the context is the problem that the propaganda wants to hide, and is a measure of the reputation and influence of every individual media outlet. And, yes, it doesn’t attract many “likes” and “clicks”.

Zoran Zaev disrupted most of the “rules” in such an established system of information, including also the work of his party-government propaganda: in the last four-five years he became available, 24/7, literally to all journalists, hundreds, who had the need or desire to ask him something. Hundreds of affairs could be “tailored” from their telephones, if that is your intention. I know, and also cooperate with a dozen journalists who exchange around 3-4-5 messages with the recent Prime Minister on a daily basis, about all kinds of government and party activities, without any editorial, ideological or “business” directions (and consequences!) from higher media instances.

We could talk until tomorrow about how good this is for journalism (when for every little thing the prime minister himself is a source of information) or for the very government structure (when you don’t have the need to turn to the institutions and their managers, when you can get a comment or information from the prime minister himself), but for sure such a “regime”, in the media sense, can hardly be treated as “hybrid” – epithets like “chaotic”, “populist”, “personalized”, “direct”, “open”, “sometimes stupid” and so on come to my mind more quickly.

Especially when this is compared to the highly established and maintained media control, the state propaganda with manipulations with use of threats, pressure, blackmail and physical attacks against journalists and their property during Gruevski’s decade-long autocratic, undemocratic regime. The propaganda apparatus of this government and the propaganda industry of the previous government is like comparing a provincial (Strumica?) Church – with the Vatican (the Vatican is, by the way, a place where for the first time in history, in 1622, the service for the “Propaganda of the Faith” was officially established).

That’s why they seem unconvincing (for those who are no longer convinced) that the propaganda of Zaev’s government was a source of a “hybrid regime” in Macedonia. Of which he himself, left voluntarily, with a general impression that he is fed up from solving (and even producing) problems, and not from a regime rule! F*cking regime.

Translation: N. Cvetkovska