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Anastasia Balezdrova 

George Pleios, Sociologist, is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Athens. He graduated in sociology from the University of Sofia "St. Kliment Ohridski", where he received a Ph.D. In an interview with GRReporter, he described how the Greek media operate, their wicked relations with politics, and explained how they manage to survive despite the economic crisis.

Mr. Pleios, is there room for so many media in the Greek information arena?
 
No, there is no room for so many private media with national coverage. Ultimately, there is no room for so many media. This also applies to newspapers whose circulation is relatively low, largely to magazines and all other media.

The entire media sector has one common problem that occurs in any type of media in a specific way. This is the fact that the Greek media are not and have never been sustainable enterprises earning money from ads, sales of programmes or other sources. Greek media were usually stable because the parent companies or consortia to which they belong provided them with capital.

This is not a Greek phenomenon. The media worldwide operate in the same way. What is typical for Greece is that these parent companies obtained their profits from the state by undertaking the implementation of government contracts. Naturally, the media acted to win projects for the consortia to benefit from any government, whether we talk about road construction or other government contracts. Briefly, what differentiated, and still differentiates the Greek media from the financial perspective is the notorious corruption.

Of course, we should note that they had some income from advertising. Currently, we are in a situation in which, on the one hand advertising revenues have fallen dramatically and are perhaps only one third of the level they were at before the crisis while, on the other hand, the ability of the government to provide funding to the media through assigning government contracts to the parent companies is decreasing.

So, we could talk about a triple pressure on the media. The first is from the drop in advertising due to the decrease in consumer power. The second is the inability of the state to finance the media consortia in different ways: loans, government advertising and more. The third is because of the diminished ability of the consortia themselves to fund the media with the funds the state contracts provided for them.

What is the nature of the other problems of Greek media?

A common problem of the Greek media is that they do not invest in their products: the news or entertainment programs. Recently, we have observed growth in the phenomenon. The media tend to seek products on the Turkish market, which may be cheaper, rather than create their own productions as they did a few years ago. This affects not only the series but also the informing. A large part of the so-called informing is nothing more than discussions and comments on some major events that take place. This is false informing. Informing means having a continuous flow of information. On the other hand, even when they do inform, the Greek media are not doing anything special. They are based mostly on information supplied to them by the government and public enterprises. Therefore, there are more than just a few people who rightly argue that the media in Greece are a propaganda tool. And this is just one of the reasons that make the media positive to any government. The other sources they use are international news agencies. The fact that very few Greek media have correspondents in other countries proves this.

The third problem of the Greek media is drama making. Instead of looking at events analytically and offering the public a useful result, they limit themselves to relatively easy and cheap tricks: raised voice, disputes, and violent discussions. These problems are common to all media, but are typical mostly to television and private channels where they are most evident.

Another problem is the limited geographical horizon of informing Most of the news on the television, radio and newspapers relates more to what happens here in Greece. I am the leader of a group for social studies in the media, which conducted a number of studies. These showed that three quarters of Greek TV news relate to Greece and only one quarter for the rest of the world. This is a very serious problem, because ultimately the media are not able to give the audience a full picture of the events that happen throughout the world. For example, we talk a lot about the crisis in Greece, but the global crisis is less covered. Only recently, we started listening to such news, especially after the problems in the U.S. economy.

These problems are common to all media and they occur in a specific way in any type of media. In television, they occur as a drop in revenue from advertising and availability of excess staff. I should note that Greek television with its way of informing - of course there are exceptions but I speak generally - could do without journalists as had happened in the media of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. People who are not journalists, who only pretend to be, can make news from the world agencies or a talk show. Anyway, it is a very common phenomenon in Greece to deal with things that we do not understand much.