Eternal power triangle
Power, money and the media have always formed an inextricable tangle: Those in power control public finances, while those with money influence the political process. The media praise and promote the interests of the powerful who, conversely, are able to control them. In the old days, poets sang the praises of those in power and entertained the public with their tales of kings, heroes and other illustrious mortals and immortals. In our era, the mass media have the ability to elevate individuals to positions of power and, just as easily, tear them down. Whoever seeks power must have control of the mass media or win over their cooperation with the benefits granted by authority. This problem exists in many parts of the world today. In France, for instance, the Figaro newspaper is owned by Serge Dassault, whose company manufactures defense systems and fighter jets. This is a blatant example of the symbiosis that we in Greece have dubbed «entangled interests.» Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the very personification of this triangular relationship between power, money and the media. His inexorable ascent in Italian politics was achieved on the back of his media empire, which he bolstered following his election victory. In the United States, huge multinationals can control defense contractors and television networks at the same time. Across the world, the behavior of media owners is ostensibly monitored by laws and state mechanisms which ensure the smooth operation of the markets. In America, monitoring is based on limiting a television network to having access to no more than 35 percent of the population; there are also restrictions on the number of media organizations that can be controlled by any one firm in a particular region. Irrespective of whether these monitoring systems work or not, there has been no attempt to restrict the power of the media such as the one in Greece. This may be because politicians in these countries believe that domestic media owners are not trying (or are unable) to exploit their capacity to guide the political process, or because they do not want to get involved in a dispute that would demand fierce interventions in the operation of the free market. In Greece, the incompetence of the state monitoring mechanisms often leads to bans based on the presupposition that entire groups of individuals break the law. For example, the «criteria of presumed income» (used for tax purposes) was based on the principle that the self-employed professional is, by definition, a tax evader and therefore the state should impose the level of tax deemed appropriate. The attempt to monitor illegal gambling – which led to the lunacy of all electronic games being deemed illegal, including computer chess – is another example. And so, PASOK and then New Democracy drafted laws indicating that those with a stake (initially up to 5 percent and now 1 percent) in a media organization are not allowed to get involved in state procurements as they are automatically suspected of illicit dealings with the government or state authorities. According to the European Commission, Article 14 (9) of the Greek Constitution and Law 3310/20054 constitute absolute, generalized bans and contravene the principles of the European Union that seek to offer equal opportunities for the acquisition of public contracts to all European companies. This raises the question about the extent to which European law can intervene in a matter that a member state regards as a significant domestic political issue, and to what extent a country can adopt a constitution that deviates from the principles of the union to which it belongs. Greece now has to explain itself to the Commission and appears to be waging the fight on its own. But that does not mean that the Commission will send it to the European Court, nor that Greece would lose the case. In any case, the crux of the matter is that Greece took drastic measures to tackle a problem that other countries have not yet dealt with. Soon, it will be clear whether Greece’s EU partners are leaving it alone to tackle the issue of the illicit relationship between authorities and the media because they are indifferent or because they believe this is a battle that cannot be won. Whatever the conclusion, it will be of interest beyond Greece.
