The risks and rewards of investigative journalism in Central Eastern Europe

Photo: Ladislav Luppa (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

Warsaw, Prague and Bratislava fare better than Budapest, but follow a similar trend. Over the last four years, Poland spiralled down on the Press Freedom Index from 47th to 59th place, the Czech Republic went from 21st to 40th place, and Slovakia from 12th to 35th.

Investigative journalism is particularly affected by this worsening situation since it requires long, in-depth research and access to data, archives and reliable sources. Reporters working on investigative stories are due to chart dangerous waters and may experience personal threats. These might come from organised crime or from political power, but also from a deadly combination of the two. Between October 2017 and April 2019 four journalists doing or promoting investigative reporting were killed in Europe: Daphne Caruana Galizia from Malta, Ján Kuciak from Slovakia, Victoria Marinova from Bulgaria, and Lyra McKee from Northern Ireland. Their deaths happened in different circumstances, but they were always related to their profession.

Given that investigative reporting is public interest journalism, it should be safeguarded by governments. However this is not always the case in Central and Eastern Europe. As Australian reporter John Pilger wrote: “Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job, who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks”. Today, there are many reporters who work that way in the region and they have become a nuisance for some of those who hold the power. Investigative journalists in the region might not be arrested, as happened to Ivan Golunov in Russia, but the recent case of Polish reporter Anna Wilk who, in June 2019, was banned by a court from practicing journalism for three years due to a story she published shows how freedom of expression in the press is endangered. 

Shrinking space

The headquarters of the biggest media conglomerate in the region are located in a one-storey cottage along Bethlen Street in the small Hungarian town of Balatonföldvár, near Lake Balaton. A passer-by looking at the low-profile property with its maroon shutters would never guess that KESMA, a foundation including about 80 per cent of Hungarian media, is registered here. The house belongs to Gábor Liszkay, director of KESMA and friend of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

KESMA was created when the Hungarian owners of 476 media outlets donated them to the foundation in September 2018. Its aim is “to promote those activities of print, radio, TV and online sections of the Hungarian mass media which serve to build values and strengthen national consciousness”. In December 2018 the government exempted it from media-competition regulations due to its “national strategic importance”. In fact, stresses Hungarian investigative reporter András Pethő, “They hardly ever run investigative stories. What they do is not even journalism, but they function more like a political weapon.”

Orbán sees things differently. “The freedom of conscience, expression and the press is more colourful, broad and profound in Hungary than it is to our West,” he said in December 2015 during a congress of Fidesz, the party that rules Hungary and got 52.6 per cent of the votes at the latest European Parliament election. In fact, the introduction of a controversial media law in 2011, the distortion of the advertising market and media concentration have left little room for independent outlets and have curbed press freedom. Orbán understands the importance of media and has used them effectively to strengthen his power.

Pethő started focusing on investigative journalism about ten years ago. “The situation back then wasn’t ideal either, but there were more Hungarian media where you could do this kind of reporting. Since 2011 the space for independent journalism has shrunk a lot. Several independent media or media critical towards Orbán have been shut down or taken over by allies of the government,” he says. In 2015 his former employer, the news site Origo, changed ownership and the political pressure exerted on Pethő forced him to leave his job. Today Origo joins KESMA and publishes pro-government propaganda.

Hungarian investigative reporters have been fighting back thanks to a handful of independent media, such as Atlatszo, Index, and 444. Pethő co-founded Direkt36, a non-profit investigative journalism centre, focusing on important stories ignored by KESMA outlets as well as by government-friendly public television channels. He admits that “for investigative reporters it’s difficult to develop institutional sources and hard to get stories to the public as the government controls an ever-increasing share of the media.” Pethő maintains that the laws are fairly protective of journalists in Hungary, but warns that independent media can still become targets as “the government-controlled propaganda machine attacks them by spreading false accusations”.

The legacy of Ján Kuciak

When the bodies of Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were found at their home shot dead on February 26th 2018, their murder shocked and shook Slovakia. Kuciak was 27 years old and the first journalist killed in Slovakia since 1993. He worked as an investigative reporter for the news website Aktuality and had been co-operating with foreign journalists on international stories. Kuciak’s talent for digging key information out of data and archives was legendary among his fellow reporters, but his name was less well known to his compatriots as investigative journalism found little room in Slovak traditional media.

Eighteen months later, the Investigative Centre of Ján Kuciak (ICJK) is operating in Bratislava. It was founded in January this year by Peter Bárdy, the editor-in-chief of Aktuality, Zuzana Petková, director of the Stop Corruption Foundation, Pavla Holcová of the Czech Center for Investigative Journalism in Prague, and Arpád Soltész, a political commentator and former reporter. “The idea to create the centre was mine, triggered by the frustration following Ján’s murder, but its final shape is a result of the many long discussions with Peter, Pavla and Zuzana,” Soltész says. “There was no other subject focusing on investigative journalism in Slovakia before our centre was established.” Today, thanks to a small but dedicated team, the ICJK is building a network of investigative reporters in Slovakia and beyond. “We want to publish our own investigations, but our main purpose is international cooperation as Ján was the first Slovak journalist who realised its importance and potential working on cross-border stories,” Soltész adds.

Slovaks were deeply moved by Kuciak’s assassination and demonstrated against Prime Minister Robert Fico’s government. He eventually resigned in March 2018 and Peter Pellegrini took over. The presidential elections in March this year were won by Zuzana Čaputová who ran for an emerging social-liberal party called Progressive Slovakia. The first thing the new president did was pay tribute to Kuciak and Kušnírová’s memorial. It is still too early to tell whether things have changed. However Soltész feels “considerably more support and trust from the public than the one we had before Ján’s murder”. The Slovak public might be aware of the important role of these reporters, but some institutions have not changed their attitude yet. As Soltész highlights, “on March 14th 2019 the prosecutor’s office denied the ICJK access to a press conference about the investigation of Ján’s murder, as it didn’t consider us journalists”.

Fighting corruption

At first glance, the situation for investigative journalism in the Czech Republic looks better than elsewhere in the region. “There is demand for quality investigative reporting here as it’s considered one of the most efficient tools to fight corruption,” says Pavla Holcová, director of the Czech Centre for Investigative Journalism (CCIJ), established in 2013 to bring international journalistic projects to the region. “No one else was doing it, so we saw the need to join the international investigative journalism community. We do important cross-border stories and bring important data home so that everyone can reach them,” she explains. She is also one of the co-founders of the centre and had worked with Kuciak on the Panama Papers and the presence of the ‘Ndrangheta (an organised crime group based in Italy – editor’s note) in Slovakia. Among the Czech media doing quality investigative journalism, she lists the daily Denník N, the weekly Respekt, the monthly Reportér, the portal Hlidacipes and the public broadcasters.

However, the respect investigative journalists have gained among the Czech public is not enough to protect them from political power. President Miloš Zeman has called reporters “dung, faeces and cesspits, hyenas and stupid people who try to brainwash us and should be liquidated,” and Holcová points out that “the ongoing political climate and financing are the two major issues we face”. The country has been going through political turmoil with Prime Minister Andrej Babiš facing fraud charges over alleged misuse of EU funds. His decision of installing a close ally as the new minister of justice prompted up to 250,000 people to gather in Prague on June 23rd to demand his resignation in the biggest political protest the country has seen since 1989.

Czech investigative reporters have helped unfold the Agrofert scandal which Babiš was involved in, but they had many hurdles to overcome. In April, three journalists claimed the police had summoned them multiple times for questioning over their reporting on the prime minister. “We are convinced that these investigations are to confuse and intimidate us and our sources and discourage us from further work,” the journalists stated. This episode is a warning sign that what can happen in a relatively safe environment with no recent or forthcoming legislation aimed at curbing investigative journalism.

A profession in transition

What investigative journalism in Poland shares with Hungary is that it is published by independent outlets “even though there are no Polish equivalents to investigative Hungarian media such as Atlatszo or Index as we cannot compare our situation to the Hungarian one. However, we are aware that we should be prepared for worse times,” stresses Wojciech Cieśla, director and co-founder of Fundacja Reporterów (FR), a Warsaw-based foundation, established in 2010, by a group of Polish reporters coming from leading dailies and magazines such as Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Newsweek Polska.

Cieśla reports that investigative journalism in Poland is not paid enough and has been disappearing from newspapers and from the internet while finding limited room on television. However, challenges could be turned into opportunities. As Cieśla puts it: “On the one hand, the scene for investigative journalists is getting smaller and smaller and we see more people leaving the profession than joining it. On the other hand, investigative journalism is in transition and we look at it optimistically as there are going to be more chances around for investigative reporters and for us as mentors.”

The profession is still attractive to many in a country where investigative reporting has a long and worthy tradition. Yet the main problem is the lack of space for publishing stories. FR wants to tackle the problem by launching a platform for Polish reporters by 2020. On top of this, they have been expanding their network that includes people from the private broadcaster TVN, as well as from the online news portal Onet, and they co-operate with the University of Warsaw to attract students for internships. The lack of financing remains a key issue as the foundation only has a single donor and steers clear from private wealthy sponsors in order to stay independent. What Cieśla and his colleagues do, instead, is to try and get international grants.

In its early years, FR collaborated with Ukrainian reporters and established an annual award for the best investigative journalistic works, thanks to grants from the Polish foreign ministry. Since 2015 it moved towards Central Europe by creating a network and platform called Vsquare – a cross-border project focusing on investigative journalism and involving people from Fundacja Reporterów in Poland, Atlatszo and Direkt36 in Hungary, the Czech CCIJ, and Aktuality in Slovakia. It started publishing content on its website in 2017 and joined the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) as well as the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN).

“We’re neither a news agency nor an investigative watchdog controlling those who hold the power, but we try to know and explain what’s happening,” Cieśla says, adding that “investigative journalism needs special attention and in Vsquare we can delve in-depth, focusing on a story for as long as it needs.” All the people involved on the project work for a living in other media outlets because the budget allocated is just enough to pay reporters for their stories and to cover editing, fact-checking and English translation costs. The topics they focus on are discussed online every day and a first plenary meeting took place in Slovakia in March this year.

Working on cross-border stories encompassing the CEE region has helped Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak reporters to get a better understanding of the ongoing social, economic, and political situation in each of the Visegrad states. “There are differences among our countries, but I believe we should group them together as they share a common pattern. For example, in Poland the ruling party, PiS, has been copying and pasting some Hungarian policies such as the media laws. Hence, knowing what happens there can help predict what might happen here,” Cieśla argues. “Our role is to make Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks more interested in what happens in each Visegrad state and abroad. Vsquare is not that big yet, but it is energy consuming and needs constant attention. It means additional work, but we have fun doing it,” he insists. As András Pethő confirms: “I believe there are important stories to tell together as we face similar challenges.”

Lorenzo Berardi is a freelance journalist based in Warsaw. He is a contributor for several media outlets and co-founded the Italian journalistic project Centrum Report covering Central Eastern Europe.

Central Europe, investigative journalism