An open letter to the editor-in-chief of Lidové noviny



Dear Mr. Balšínek

As editor-in-chief of Lidové noviny, I would draw your attention to a story in the newspaper on November 30, which ran under the title, “Brussels has rejected complaint against ČEZ”.

The article breaks the news that the European Commission will make an important announcement before Christmas that will be good for ČEZ and bad for Czech Coal. But on reading further, it becomes clear that the EC announcement, which in any case is unlikely to happen before 2013, by which time the world will have been obliterated, is merely a hook on which to hang a whole page of heavily biased 'analysis'.

Judging by the style and content of the article –a giddying mixture of fantasy, insinuation and premature triumphalism as good defeats evil, the piece must have been written by an excitable junior with a taste for Tolkien, not the chief business editor of the country’s oldest newspaper.

The article's coverage of the issue –the long running commercial dispute between ČEZ and Czech Coal, is far from impartial. Daniel Beneš of ČEZ is given a megaphone to proclaim his wishful thinking and, somewhat surprisingly given his immense power and wealth, to display his paranoia as well.

Czech Coal is rendered catatonic, its voice altogether absent from an article devoted wholly to it.

Your colleague concludes the piece with three loaded paragraphs on the firm in which I am a partner. And as with Czech Coal, we had no chance to speak, and in our case to rebut the false accusation made against us by Mr. Beneš –that we are paid by Pavel Tykač to harm the firm Mr. Beneš leads.

Only a beseiged mindset of the kind Mr. Beneš displays would assume that anyone who is sharply critical of the management of ČEZ must therefore be paid by a company engaged in a commercial dispute with ČEZ. This is as paranoid as assuming that anyone critical of Soviet Communism must therefore have been an agent of imperialism.

Naturally, Mr. Beneš would want journalists to think that his critics were paid. But why would a journalist want to believe Mr. Beneš, given his track record?

An understated Englishman might describe your colleague’s journalism as ‘possibly a tad one-sided?’ Your chief business editor prefers the term ‘100 per cent bullshit’. I would not go quite so far.

As the editor-in-chief of a local newspaper that is not owned by a local businessman, and that has a record of speaking truth to power for over 100 years, you will be aware of the political influence of ČEZ in this country, and the need for the media to hold such a powerful institution to account at all times. With no local owner-oligarch breathing down your neck, what is there to stop you?

It is essential to make a distinction between the institution itself, which is largely public property, and those who are appointed to supervise and manage it (Miroslav Kalousek, Martin Roman and Daniel Beneš) on behalf of its owners. There is only one way to prevent further destruction of economic value in ČEZ, and that is to expose past and present failures of supervision and management. This will harm the reputation of the supervisors and managers. But to describe this as harming the institution itself is absurd. On the contrary, it is the duty of a journalist to investigate and uncover these failures.

We are told by established broadsheets like your own, most of which are struggling to compete with a flood of free digital content, that the news and analysis we buy from you is trustworthy. Unlike the reader of a blog ('especially your blog!', I hear you say), the readers of your newspaper open it each day in the expectation that it has been rigorously edited, for objectivity as well as for grammatical errors.

This expectation has not been met in this case. The style and content of the article are so startlingly unbalanced and so precipitously far below the quality journalism found elsewhere in Lidové noviny, that one is forced to one of two conclusions: that the piece is an aberration caused by an editorial heamorrhage. Or that it is the calculated outcome of an editorial intrusion brought about by the forceful application of some irresistible, outside pressure.

A third conclusion, that this is just how David Tramba writes, is not fair on David Tramba, many of whose articles seem rather good, to this reader at least.

It would be too much to hope for an apology. But might we dare hope for an explanation, Mr Balšínek?