...apart from when it is silent about hidden media investors.



A classic TIME cover under Henry Grunwald's editorship.

Echo 24, the web-based news and current affairs project led by Dalibor Balsinek and financed by Jan Klenor, will be launched next week. It uses for its slogan the first clause in a somewhat grandiloquent quotation from the Austrian-born journalist Henry Grunwald, the former editor-in-chief of TIME magazine:

“Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”

It is all very well for Balsinek to make such claims on behalf of Echo 24. But as editor-in-chief of Lidove noviny before Andrej Babis bought the paper, Balsinek displayed a propensity to keep his mouth shut whenever the subject of fraud and mismanagement in CEZ came up. He demonstrated over and again that journalism can be silent: that was his greatest virtue, at least for those profiting from the fraud, and his greatest fault for the shareholders that got screwed.

Balsinek’s selective catatonic tendencies makes his use of Grunwald’s observation about the drama and urgency of journalism a touch cynical. His track record begs the question: will Echo 24 speak out about the media interests of all oligarchs, not just those of Andrej Babis?

Balsinek has just announced that he has signed up Jefim Fištejn to be a regular contributor to Echo 24. Fištejn is of course the veteran journalist and Charter 77 signatory. But he is also the chairman of the supervisory board of BigBoard, the country’s largest outdoor advertising business. As such, he must know if Martin Roman is an investor behind JOJ Media House, the Cypriot registered company that controls BigBoard, as the Czech weekly Reflex has claimed.

Certainly, BigBoard has a soft spot for Roman. PORG and Čtení pomáhá are both Roman projects that have been given enormous coverage on BigBoard’s billboards recently. It is a wonder that BigBoard makes any money at all with so many of its billboards given over to Roman's charitable causes!

Perhaps Fištejn and Balsinek know as well whether Roman is an investor in Blesk alongside Daniel Kretinsky, and whether it is Jan Veverka of ODS, who sits on the board of directors of BigBoard, that Roman uses to make these investments on his behalf?

I wish Echo 24 well. The Czech media desperately needs an independent voice these days, to speak and to speak immediately, but not only about the rise to power of an acquisitive billionaire with a disputed record of collaboration with the Communist secret police.

We know what media Babis controls. His influence over the editorial content of MF DNES and Lidove noviny is apparent every day. But we do not know for sure which, if any, parts of the Czech media are controlled by Martin Roman, and this in spite of Babis's efforts to persuade journalists that Roman is behind Kretinsky's Blesk -and even behind Jan Klenor's Echo 24.

So let Echo 24 demonstrate its rightful title to use Grunwald’s lofty words, by speaking out against both Babis and Roman, and by refusing to take sides in a proxy war in which journalists are deployed to fight for the business interests of oligarchs.