In 2003, there were 330 print media outlets, 83 radio broadcasters, and 37 tv broadcasters officially registered in Slovenia. This seems impressive — especially when you consider that the potential audience is less than two million.

A new report by the Peace Institute in Ljubljana, entitled Media Ownership and Its Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism, takes a look at who owns what, and the current state of media in Slovenia.. with some interesting results.

“While media ownership may appear dispersed at first glance,” the report says, “what it actually comes down to in practice is an intricate web of links among various companies.” (page 3)

“Intricate” is the right word. Take the case of Slovenia’s most-respected newspaper, Delo. After socialism fell and couldn’t get up, employees at Delo were granted a 60% ownership share by the so-called Mass Media Act. The government figured that the best way to ensure an independent media was to let the journalists drive the car. You can probably guess what happened next. The employees sold their shares, to the point where they “virtually do not have ownership stakes any longer.” (page 9)

Currently, the largest owner of Delo is the brewery Pivovarna Laško, which has a 25% share. Another 25% is split among “various investment companies,” while a further 19% is in the hands of the state funds SOD and KAD. But wait, because KAD, SOD and other state funds own nearly 30% of the brewery Pivovarna Laško and “significant stakes” in other Laško shareholders. Confused yet? You should be. It’s like the ouroboros — the serpent feasting on its own tail.

“In reality,” the report continues, “media are concentrated in the hands of a few companies that are directly or indirectly owned by the state.” (page 5) This is further complicated by the fact that “the owners of one newspaper sit on the supervisory boards of other newspapers” (page 27) and by the fact that two leading papers (Delo and Slovenske Novice) are in the hands of the same holding company. (Delo and Slovenske Novice have a combined readership of 650.000.)

The report goes on to make some solid points about the increasing reliance on freelance journalists, but fails to mention the restrictive labor laws that encourage this. It also makes some questionable statements like:

Only a few journalists sincerely care for their education, read widely or have a good overview of international and domestic developments.

They buttress this with the fact that there are more international seminars available to journalists than journalists attending them, and that there is a lack of “solidarity” among journalists. (Has there ever been solidarity among journalists?) And as for seminars: I’ve been to quite a few of them, and can safely say that they did nothing to advance my journalism skills. They’re generally intellectual exercises about the “future of media” or things like “how to cover gender issues,” in which wholly unusable advice is given by people with little journalism experience.

That said, the report is still a good read and ends with this prescient conclusion:

In the popular game Monopoly, the winner is the player with the largest property and most money, the one who remains a sole player by excluding others. In the realisitic media world in Slovenia, it could happen that a group of ten owners and five of the most influential supervisors come through sharing between themselves the entire media property. The game will probably end with their selling off ownership stakes to foreign investors. But it is ironic that, in contrast to other East and Central European countries with the socialist past that sold off their media to foreign owners at the beginning of the transition period (1990 to 1992), Slovenia took the whole decade to carry out the privitisation process, impose restriction on media ownership, and pass two media acts, only to be confronted in the end with the outcome that it strived to prevent at the beginning of the 1990s. (page 28)

You can view the report here: Media Ownership and Its Impact on Media Independence and Pluralism. There are a total of 18 reports for countries across southeastern Europe.