Kostas Vaxevanis is a Greek journalist. As editor of the investigative magazine HotDoc, in October 2012 he published the leaked “Lagarde list” of major tax evaders – an act for which he has been pursued by the Greek authorities, raising questions about a crackdown on independent journalism. The New Statesman caught up with Vaxevanis during a recent trip to London to receive Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award.
New Statesman: In your acceptance speech for the Index award, you raised the spectre of Greece’s dictatorship years. Is there any danger of a return to that kind of period?
Vaxevanis: It is worrying what is happening in Greece as I said in my speech. It is the first time since the last dictatorship that people can’t rely on the press to see what is happening in their own country. The Greek media for example didn’t cover the case while I was being prosecuted a few months ago.
Every day in Greece, we face the effects of the crisis and there are new measures that are being taken that goes against every right of the public. These new regulations don’t even go through parliament – there is actually a law where you can have a new decision signed by the president under emergency clauses and then rectify it later by the prime minister so they are basically governing the country under presidential decrees and statutes.
They basically pass new laws in whatever way possible to serve certain interests and parts of society and political systems. For example when the agricultural bank of Greece, was supposed to pay millions [in tax], a new law was passed that said they didn’t have to pay anything.
Many TV channels and newspapers are owned by business interests that might benefit from such laws. Has political interference in the media become more common as the crisis gets worse?
In Greece, like in many countries, there is a relationship where the media tries to hold government to account and government will try to hide things. It is ultimately a conflict of interest. Any kind of independent journalism is seen as a threat.
For many years they managed to manipulate the media: for example, you would have a journalist working in the government’s press office and public PR offices and for big businesses. Often these are big businesses that have links and dealings with the government.
During the crisis there has been a greater need for journalists to speak out, but then they automatically become an enemy of the government. I have just received a message from a friend and colleague where he congratulates me for my [Index ] award, but apologises that he can’t say anything about it this evening in his television programme.
The cross-over between journalism and politics is common in Britain and other countries, to a certain extent. What is different about Greece right now?
Of course this is happening everywhere, it’s of course not just a Greek problem, but it has gone to the next level where ministers have complete impunity and they have methods of acting really fast to serve their own interests. And of course this is amplified by the crisis.
For example one of the biggest scandals was with Proton Bank, where the owner bought ten to twenty per cent of twenty-two different media outlets, to make sure no one would write anything against him. And there is no law to prevent a business from spreading in such a way.
The existence of privately-owned, unregulated television channels goes back well before the financial crisis. What sort of long-term effect has this had on Greek society? The TV channels have been blamed for encouraging anti-immigration attitudes, for example.
They have a huge part of the responsibility for that culture of the last ten or twenty years; consumerism and people not being engaged in what is happening, and not caring about the impact of their political action.
With immigration, in the last few years since the bailout, the role of the media has been to create fear among the people. And the most obvious way of creating fear would be to amplify the danger of immigration in Greece. And we would often hear about [the far-right party] Golden Dawn in the news. They would try to create the view: “yes all of us who are in power might be corrupt, but if we stopped being in power and being in control then there is always that danger. So it is basically better to have this corrupt system than any government at all.”
So the media were exaggerating the threat of Golden Dawn?
Yes but it was a two-way thing. By exaggerating the threat of Golden Dawn they are giving them a voice and then it becomes bigger by appearing as a threat and it gives them a new way of communicating with the public.
What they are trying to do is presenting the “two opposites” view where Golden Dawn is one extreme and [the left-wing] Syriza is the other. They are trying to do what they are doing in Italy where they say “well you have these two polar opposites, all you have to do is come somewhere in the middle, where we are. We might be corrupt but you sure don’t want any of those two.”
What happens in the media outside of Greece can have quite a big effect on Greek politics. So for journalists and people outside of Greece what is the most important thing they could be doing?
The only way for the Greek people to know about their own country is through the foreign press. They played a significant role in my case. While this was going on, during the prosecution, we had BBC, Al-Jazeera, CNN treating it as breaking news while Greek media was being quiet about it. Ten days ago I was given another award in Spain, a Journalism Award and a Press Award – no one in Greece will ever hear anything about either those things.
This is really the place to fight that control, in this day and age the Greek people are not limited by the national boundaries and they just look on the internet and find other sources of information. And that kind of potential foreign media can have is very significant. The role of social media is very important, I tweeted something in a press conference earlier and that reached 300,000 people.
The risk of foreign media coverage is that you want to highlight the problems but you might end up making Greece look like a unique case. Is there anything journalists abroad should be wary of?
Obviously there are some very specific issues with journalism and freedom of expression in Greece, but it is potentially a problem in every country and it is something journalists have to deal with every day.
If there was a similar case like mine in the UK the rights of democracy would be raised by every media outlet instead of just one newspaper. In Greece that would never happen. We have to do something about it, demand answers. Every time someone tries to go against what has happened or try to write something about it they will be accused of all sort of horrible things, for example when I talked about the Greek banks there were all types of blogs that mentioned my name and claimed my involvement with the secret services.
When Reuters investigated the Greek banks, they were threatened with being sued, and so was the Guardian [when it reported on the police torture of protesters] . So it’s a multilevel issue where people need to know what is happening and what has happened. Journalists need to speak up and their voices have to be heard.
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