„The media landscape in North Macedonia is rather complicated. I don’t think we are an exception from other countries, where the democracy faces quite a few challenges. I would say in the Balkans, in the entire Balkan, more specifically, Western Balkan countries, the media are poor first of all. Journalism as a profession is not popular anymore. There are fewer and fewer students applying for studying journalism. The latest figure, I think, is that not more than 15 students applied for journalistic studies in North Macedonia in the last year“, says Jabir Derala, president of CIVIL, in an interview with Kateryna Sokolova, from the Institute of Journalism in Kyiv, Ukraine, on the occasion of the international seminar “Resilient journalism in the fight against disinformation and propaganda” organized by CIVIL in partnership with Youth4Media (Y4M).
Sokolova: Could you please describe your professional background in media industry?
Deralla: Well, having in mind I’m 55, it’s rather a long list of things I’ve been working in the last 35 years. Mainly I was, and I still am, in the media industry, and I worked as a journalist in some 20. That’s been quite a period of challenges, of opportunities that I managed to grab. It is rather an area of human rights and freedoms, social justice that I have been covering ever since, also in the green issues, in the green area. In the green issues area, I was doing quite a few things. But since some more than 10 years I would say, about 15 years, I started being specialized in disinformation and propaganda, particularly in the light of hate propaganda, with the interacting relations. And since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, of the aggression on Ukraine in 2014, I started digging more deeply into the Russian propaganda, Russian hybrid warfare that it has been conducting against Ukraine, but also against the whole democratic world. That would be in short.
Sokolova: Mass media were once called the fourth power. Which number does it take in North Macedonia?
Deralla: I would still say that it’s quite high on the list of the most powerful entities, or activities in the public discourse, but the thing is that the media are landscaped in North Macedonia, just as in many other countries in the region and much wider. The media are now connected, or under influence, or controlled also by power centers in the politics and in the business. I would even say in the underground organized crime, there are centers that try to control media as much as possible. So, in North Macedonia in many media, a large portion of the media, landscape is occupied, controlled, financed by power centers within the country and also foreign centers, power centers, maybe here I mean Moscow, Kremlin.
Sokolova: So, the internal situation is pretty understandable, we have kind of the same story. What about the external information, do you think people in other countries know enough about North Macedonia and what happens here?
Deralla: I would say that North Macedonia was on the cover pages several times in the last 30 years, 31 years of its independence as a country. And you know, when a country like North Macedonia arrives to the cover pages of the Western press, that means it’s something bad that is going on. So, that is how we were on the cover pages in 2001, when there was an armed conflict in the country, ethnic conflict. Then we were on the Western cover pages also when there was an attack against the Parliament in 2017. Before that, we arrived to the cover pages of the Western press with the huge scandal of wiretapping 26000 citizens of Macedonia by the regime of Gruevski. We were on the cover pages in 2016 when a tiny little town in the central part of the country became famous for hosting a group of producers of disinformation and propaganda, meddling in the United States elections, on the side of former President Trump. And okay, we are, on the other side, also a country that is striving for democracy. We just got the opportunity to start the negotiation process with the EU, the European Union, which we waited for 17 years, not less, but 17 years to start, to begin. And, of course, we were many times a country that showed great hospitality, including the 1999 refugee crisis during the Kosovo war, and also being a country where refugees would arrive from different parts of the world, including the latest war against Ukraine conducted by the Russian Federation. And that’s also an opportunity for the Macedonian society, for the Macedonian state to be in the more positive light, let’s say in the Western press. But yes, we are known, at least in Europe, but also much wider.
Sokolova: Can you say in your opinion, how conserved is the media industry, media space, here, in the country?
Deralla: The media landscape in North Macedonia is rather complicated. I don’t think we are an exception from other countries, where the democracy faces quite a few challenges. I would say in the Balkans, in the entire Balkan, more specifically, Western Balkan countries, the media are poor first of all. Journalism as a profession is not popular anymore. There are fewer and fewer students applying for studying journalism. The latest figure, I think, is that not more than 15 students applied for journalistic studies in North Macedonia in the last year. And that also is an area, a profession in which the workers in media are not protected, neither socially, not even their security is guaranteed. Now there are some changes in the law. The parliament just passed a regulation, in which an attack on a journalist means an attack on an official person. But still, there is a long way to see that implemented. Journalists are very, very badly paid, their wages are very low, their social security is not the best in the country, to the contrary, they are somewhere in the lower part of the list of social benefits that they may enjoy. The employment is not steady and, moreover, the business sector is not interested in sponsoring media in a proper way, but to control media through their money. The country is suffering from a very low quality of journalist work, not because we have bad journalist, to the contrary, we have excellent journalists. I think that the level, the professional level of many journalists is very high, equal to the best Western standards, but then the situation in the country is such that these professionals are facing challenges to pay for their daily bread, from one to another month, and that’s really worrying. And that’s how they are a subject to control, to intimidation even, but also to pressure of different types, including social pressure.
Sokolova: And which makes it good background for propaganda and brainwashing.
Deralla: Absolutely.
Sokolova: Let’s talk a bit about that. How do you think, are these concepts analyzed by the practitioners enough, and are there any research and expert discussion about these topics, and do they provide any recommendations to the government?
Deralla: I will be very honest to you, and I will tell you that there are researches and analyses, recommendations practically produced on a daily basis. Think tank organizations, NGOs, are taking the courage, I would even say arrogance, to analyze media on a daily basis, and provide all sorts of knowledge, and recommendations on how media should be improved and helped and everything. So, they are picking up most of the attention, while media are still sinking in their well-known problems with the financial and political, and social and security and other types of challenges every day. And, yes, there are researches, there are analyses of the media landscape, of the media conduct, and many of those authors are actually a part of some structures that are threatening the quality and the integrity of journalism in North Macedonia. And I think it’s also an example in the Balkans. I see that in Serbia, I see that in Kosovo, I see that in other Western Balkan countries as well, in which big think tank organizations are digesting hundreds of thousands of euros and dollars to give “training” to media, to analyze them, to monitor them and to provide recommendations that mean nothing to the everyday life of the media, people that are actually producing the media content in the country.
Sokolova: You mention that it takes courage to work with these topics. Are the journalists oppressed because of that?
Deralla: Journalists, I have to repeat, journalists are facing challenges in their work on a daily basis. They have to dig into the events, into the connections, into the processes, and to bring real independent news, to fulfill their public responsibility, their social responsibility to the citizens, to bring information to them, to bring also opinion to them, because media are also opinion places where opinion is published, and where the social-political dialogue is taking place. And, yes, they are under pressure, financially, they are under political pressure, they are under pressure from other media owners and structures that are not really media, they are propaganda centers disguised as media or non-governmental organizations, and they are actually pressuring the journalists on a daily basis. Journalists are also under threat on social networks, where all sorts of bots and trolls are threatening their lives. They are also being attacked physically, on a number of occasions, we have such examples also during the democratic period of development of the country. In the last several years we had a number of incidents, in which nationalists attack journalists, both verbally and even physically at occasions for doing their job. If they are progressive, then they are completely, completely under siege of hate propaganda against them. If they are trying to bring real relevant news about what is going on Ukraine at the moment, they are proclaimed to be traitors and to be Western spies and so on, including myself. You know, it’s quite difficult nowadays to produce real media outputs that are providing citizens with relevant information, because the propaganda is so strong, it’s so well-paid and it’s so well-entrenched within the society, in the media landscape, that it’s pretty difficult, to say the least.
Sokolova: How do you think should propaganda be criminalized by media alone?
Deralla: Well, when it comes to media, and when it comes to freedom of speech, things are very complicated. And whenever you try to regulate it, then it’s always a danger that you will overregulate it. And when overregulation takes place, then freedom of speech is dying. If you just leave it like that, then propaganda is using the democratic tools, the democracy itself to kill democracy. So, it’s a million-dollar question. I don’t have a real answer to that. I think that what we should do is to maintain our course of bringing the truth and bringing different opinions on board to maintain the vivid, the vibrant, the dynamic social dialogue in the country, in the society and wider. And what we need to do is to promote values, high professional standards and values among the community, the journalist community, and to promote solidarity. And of course, work with others in other countries, to provide each other any support that we can provide. And of course, if I may, the donors in the democratic countries should consider a new plan for support of media and democracy in these countries, because it’s abused, because propaganda and criminal and political centers are infiltrated within the most sensitive sectors within societies, and actually are using Western money to promote and to conduct anti-Western propaganda. And that’s something that should be also re-thought, to give it another thought in the centers where the support for democratic processes are being decided and provided. Well, this sounds all a little bit complicated, but, yes, this is a very complicated area. We need to understand that very long ago, the hybrid warfare started and it’s being waged against democracy, against democracy in these countries, also in the West, whilst business centers and political centers were in a romantic, idyllic hug with Putin and with similar characters like Putin. And that’s why we see these challenges now also in the European Union countries, where all sorts of far-right groups and terrorist groups are being nurtured or popping up across the continent and where the far-right political parties are gaining more and more power and even gaining government power in some of the countries as you know. So, that’s a complicated question. The answer must be comprehensive, decisive, multi-leveled, multi-disciplinary, and it has to be decided that we must bring a decision that we will prevail, otherwise we will lose this war against democracy in Europe and in the world.
Тranscription: N. Cvetkovska
camera and video editing: Samuel Debus/OK-TV Ludwigshafen
