The Government of VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition failed to stabilize its media image in this period, not to mention raising its popularity in the media. Its image suffers the most because of the widespread conviction among the media that “Macedonia is in the midst of a political crisis”, which makes the foreign politicians and diplomatic representatives “worried, making an effort to point out the situation to the Government and to facilitate a process to overcome it”.
In terms of the manner in which the media perceive and interpret Government’s moves and activities, it seems that the Government constantly exits one complicated situation just to enter into another the very next moment. The sum of unfavourable criticism of several activities of the Cabinet during the period covered by this report is best presented in the phrase “The Government Has a Problem with its Democratic Capacity” (a phrase far more likely to be seen in the media critical to the Government, but not fully excluded from the media that generally approve and promote certain of its policies.
DUI did a great “favour” for the Government by taking some of the media criticism upon itself, thus stopping the trend of progressive growth of media criticism that focused, up to that time, solely to the work of the Government. Namely, DUI, with its atypical behaviour in the Sobranie (the Macedonian Parliament) during the debate on the Law on Police, provoked great criticism in the media. The notable intolerance (also outright conflict) rampaging between the parties of Macedonian Albanians, DPA and DUI, also contributed to redirect the media attention from the Government to other entities. These two mega-topics, as well as the resurfaced wire-tapping scandal “The Big Ear”, helped the Government to reduce the quantity, although not the fierceness of the media criticism directed at its moves and activities during this period.
These are some of the findings of the “Media Mirror” report for October 2006. The report intents to present a clear picture of the professional standards and information criteria of the media and the describe manner in which they cover and interpret the key social and political processes and events.
The monitoring includes six daily newspapers and six national TV broadcasters: “Spic”, “Vecer”, “Vreme”, “Dnevnik”, “Untrinski vesnik”, “Fakti”, TV “A1”, TV “Kanal 5”, “MTV 1″, “MTV 2″, TV “Sitel” and TV “Telma”. The selection of the monitored media was conducted on the basis of the evaluation of the influence they have, or could have, on the general public in the Republic of Macedonia.
Media Mirror, October 2006 – PDF version (309KB)
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