The menace of TV prosecutors
Deputy Public Order Minister Christos Markoyiannakis was not dismissed from his post because of the unfortunate criticism he leveled against Supreme Court prosecutor Dimitris Linos but because of the frenzy that would have erupted on private television had he stayed. This assertion was made by Markoyiannakis and has yet to be refuted. When government spokesperson Theodoros Roussopoulos and the director of the prime minister’s office, Yiannis Angelou, asked Markoyiannakis to resign, they reportedly said: «What can we do, Christos? How are we going to cope with the TV channels this week?» Similarly, Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis gave his outgoing deputy a watch as a symbolic gift. «This is to count down the hours until you return,» he is alleged to have told him – in other words, to bide his time until his TV persecutors deign to grant him absolution for his sins. The above comments were not really analyzed by the media, which deemed them to be of minor importance, but they are actually extremely significant as they highlight the increasingly strong influence of the media on political developments. And those who take comfort in the fact that the growing influence of the media is an international phenomenon overlook the fact that all global trends imported by Greece – whether problematic or useful – are invariably magnified, often to grotesque proportions. Not only does Greece have the most electronic media organizations, relative to its population, of all European countries, it also has the most hours devoted to so-called political debates on its private channels.
