Alie told often enough becomes the truth. We’ve heard this proverb at least a hundredfold. Only, it’s not a proverb. It’s part of the truth machine and was formulated by none other than Joseph Goebbels, Nazi German minister of propaganda and (you guessed it!) information. Let us now return to Bulgaria, a nation under the sway of a “media monopoly”. This claim has been circulating for a number of years by a group of publications and their satellite groupings and nobody seriously questions its veracity.
Defining the problem The media group waving the standard of protection against monopolies is the Ikonomedia group, owned by Bulgarian oligarch Ivo Prokopiev. The accusations are mainly levelled at the NBMG Nova Balgarska Mediyna Grupa managed by Irena Krasteva. The Ikonomedia titles like to air the media monopoly story, hardly ever with any particular arguments in support of their claims. What then is a monopoly? A monopoly is a market arrangement precisely defined as featuring a sole purveyor who sells products that have no close competitor. A monopoly is the complete absence of any competition. The word has Greek roots that mean “selling alone”. This is the definition of the problem. Returning to the media, an Open Society Institute study in May 2012 shows that the number of people deriving their information from printed media has dropped over the past four years. Newspaper circulations are falling and some of them are ceasing to exist in print, going entirely online. The reason is the constant rise in readers who prefer to inform themselves of developments through the internet.
Letting the facts speak Irena Krasteva’s Nova Balgarska Mediyna Grupa, said to be a media market monopolist, actually possesses three dailies (Monitor, Telegraf and Meridian Mach), two weeklies (Politika and Europost) and the Borba regional newspaper. Of these, only two have websites in Bulgarian (monitor.bg and politika.bg), with europost.eu being in English. Only the Monitor website, however, features in the Alexa.com ranking of Bulgaria’s most visited sites, where it ranks 260th, far behind Ikonomedia sites, for one. Alongside the latter sites, Prokopiev’s company also owns karieri.bg, bacchus.bg, odit.info, regal.bg, gradat.bg, foton.bg, foton.bg, sofiaecho.com, stroitelstvo.info, zastrahovamse.com, aiidatapro.com, and seenews.com. All these facts are deliberately concealed, for they show that it is precisely Ikonomedia that owns the most visited business and political information websites in the Bulgarian market. Though Prokopiev’s people might hope of being able to manipulate European bodies, too, any attempt is doomed in advance. Monopolists shouting “Catch monopolist!”
It is worth remembering that it was the Ikonomedia group that became Bulgaria’s first proper media monopolist. It acquired its competitor, the Pari newspaper, in rather morally controversial circumstances, becoming a Bulgarian business publications monopolist. Perhaps mixing morality and business is outlandish, yet the deal between Ikonomedia and former Pari publisher Biznes Media Grup remains controversial, even if the most basic criteria for morality are set aside. The formal announcement that Ikonomedia would henceforth be the publisher of Pari came in late September 2011. At the time, the mere hint that new proprietor Ivo Prokopiev actually wished to close down the Pari title where his career had begun and with which he had competed unsuccessfully for years. The acquisition price was never revealed. Immediately after the deal, Lidia Apostolova was appointed executive director. At the same time, she managed Pari. She herself had built a notable career at Ikonomedia and was friends with proprietor Ivo Prokopiev and his wife Galya. The Pari deal is far from the sole example of Ikonomedia attempting to impose control over the Bulgarian media market. The company is part of several “media alliances” involving other influential sites such as mediapool.bg and the Bulgarian version of the Deutsche Welle website, dw.de. Through these alliances, the champion of freedom of speech Prokopiev is able to influence the editorial policies not only of his own titles, but also of a number of “independent” electronic media. The three media companies cooperate editorially, in business, in journalist training, and know-how, and share reporters and databases. Prokopiev is also experienced in other conglomerates. In 2009, he won a communications and publicity tender for the Competitiveness Operational Programme in partnership with Sergey Stanishev’s now-wife Monika Yosifova. The consortium also includes Boryana Dimitrova from the Alfa Risarch sociological agency which is close to Prokopiev. The trio have cemented stable relationships along the media-advertising-opinion polls axis.
Facing bankruptcy But why would the Kapital circle wish to promote the fallacy that the NBMG is a monopolist? The explanation is not hard to discover and comes down to a lack of money. Ikonomedia appears to be in economic difficulties. In 2012, the company reported a rise in negative equity and made year’s end losses of over leva 10 million. This is all in black and white in the company’s annual report, as published by the Commercial Register. In the same report, auditors Zaharinova i Partnyori note that the company’s critically worsened financial indicators threaten to face it with failure. It turns out that debt-ridden publisher Ivo Prokopiev is on the way of driving his company to a deadlock as it suffers from a sustained worsening in its financial indicators. Hence, it is a matter of life or death for him to convincingly don the hat of champion of the interests of ‘civil society’ and ‘media freedom,’ for these areas are subject to funding from foreign governments and ‘non-governmental organisations.’ Ikonomedia, thus, is a favourite of the America for Bulgaria Foundation which has given it a 3 million leva-plus grant to reinforce media freedom. In return, the Foundation has secured a platform of influence and for publicising, under the guise of ‘media partnership’ of all its initiatives and events.
The influence of printed media According to the above Open Society Institute study, Bulgaria’s top-selling and most-read dailies are Trud and 24 Chasa. Until recently, they were owned by pharmaceuticals magnate Ognyan Donev and his partner Lyubomir Pavlov. After being arraigned on prosecution service charges of money laundering, tax evasion and asset stripping of the Obshtinska Banka municipal bank, Donev and Pavlov were forced to sell their equities in the papers. The ranking appended to the study of Bulgaria’s most influential newspapers contains but a single Nova Balgarska Mediyna Grupa title: Telegraf. While its circulation is growing all the time, however, its influence remains far lower than that of the two leaders Trud and 24 Chasa.
Hard figures While Ikonomedia titles cover near the bottom of printed media rankings, online platforms show an entirely different picture. The latest Gemius data on Bulgarian internet traffic show that dnevnik.bg ranks 24th among most visited sites with over 492,000 unique calls. Only 24chasa.bg ranks after the Ikonomedia site among political information portals. Close followers are capital.bg and “partner” sites offnews.bg and mediapool.bg. The Nova Balgarska Mediyna Grupa newspaper sites monitor.bg and politika.bg simply do not make it into the top 300. The Alexa ranking of Bulgaria’s most popular sites (which includes the world’s largest sites like google.com, facebook.com, youtube.com and others) places dnevnik.bg 20th. The Bulgarian traffic analysis system tyxo.bg attributes some 35,000 visits daily to the site. The dnevnik.bg friendly site offnews.bg ranks 34th and capital.bg ranks 65th. Kapital circle media sites are significantly ahead of the internet portals of all leading national television channels like bTV, BNT, ТV7, and Nova Televizia and also those of the largest daily papers like Trud, or Standart. As early as 2004, the Ikonomedia sites announced they were working in alliance with Nova Evropa, the Bulgarian version of the Deutsche Welle site dw.de and with the mediapool.bg electronic edition which attracts some 14,000 calls daily according to tyxo.bg
Business on the media environment If all the above, including data, fails to come across as sufficiently convincing, the Bulgarian periodical publishers’ views on media monopoly might carry more weight. The publishers’ position is that there is no monopoly. “The members of the Bulgarian Media Union categorically oppose attempts to manipulate public opinion and European offices by presenting untrue information about freedom of speech and the state of the media environment in Bulgaria,” says a Bulgarian Media Union statement. Publishers are also concerned about the fact that freelance journalists who represent nobody but themselves are attacking freedom of speech in Bulgaria in a campaign to discredit independent media, with only the Kapital circle media joining in. “These insinuations mostly take the form of manipulations and the dissemination of untrue information about the Bulgarian media environment. Alongside this, the slanderous campaign attempts to bring pressure over Bulgarian business and offices of state, in essence aiming at destabilisation and chaos,” add the publishers. According to them, the Bulgarian media environment needs self regulation and uniform journalistic standards.
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