The Slovenian Journalists' Association, the Croatian Journalists' Association and the Journalists' Union of Croatia are following with big concern the events taking place in Slovakia and have called on the Czech corporation PPF, which owns the channels POP TV in Slovenia, RTL Croatia and Markiza in Slovakia, to ensure the independent operation of all editorials. The full statement by the three organizations provided by Siol.net reads:

'We are following with concern the chain of events taking place in Slovakia, where the ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Robert Fico is seeking to completely subordinate both public and private independent media by stifling them and making them financially unstable, even destroying public broadcasters by making changes to the legislation, as pointed out by the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ).

We are also particularly concerned about the serious and completely unacceptable attempts to influence the editorial policy of the largest commercial television in the country - TV Markiza - which at least until recently, was one of the most important pillars of critical, professional and impartial journalism in Slovakia. By replacing its editor-in-chief, making changes to its editorial policy and putting pressures on the independent journalistic reporting of TV Markiza's journalists, we are witnessing a repetition of what happened 2 years ago on Slovenia's largest commercial television - POP TV. Both TV Markiza and POP TV are owned by the same company - the Czech corporation PPF.

In the case of Slovenia, PPF has already been warned by several international journalistic associations that the owner's capital interests must not be related to the operation of independent media and that the dealings the international corporation PPF has with individual governments must not interfere with journalistic reporting. Above all, they must not affect the fact that the owners expect editors and journalists to be subservient to the respective authorities. And this is exactly what's happening in Slovakia - the sterilization of journalism, a new non-critical approach, the prohibition on asking critical questions and the trivialization of media coverage.

The Czech corporation PPF also owns Croatian commercial channel RTL, which is considered a strong, professional and independent media as well but recently, there have been more and more disturbing calls from there that the owners and management are trying to 'neutralize' journalists in their reporting, the working conditions are constantly deteriorating (similarly to POP TV in Slovenia) and the weakening of news programs both in Croatia and in Slovenia is due to the fact that a strong news program isn't 'a priority' anymore but is rather considered as 'an obstacle' for media owners.

All of us from the three journalistic organizations have expressed our full support to our Slovak colleagues, while calling on PPF to ensure that journalist editorials in all three countries operate independently, without any capital or political interference in their work and without setting up editors according to the wishes of the current powers that be', they wrote.