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The government can no longer ignore the civil society

02 July 2013 / 21:07:23  GRReporter
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These divisions are fairly obvious attempts to impose a particular interpretation, to place obstacles in the way of the sense of community between the different groups of people who have gone out to protest in recent years. We saw divisions like "Sofia - the rest of the country", "satisfied - hungry," etc. This is pretty obvious and a known historical arsenal of the BSP. I would say that, purely analytically, there is no doubt that this is a process of accumulation and cultivation of a mindset and culture of intolerance and civic action, which we have largely ignored so far. We have had many examples of such behaviour over the past years - from smaller causes related to neighbourhood parks and overdevelopment and this kind of problem to large and important social and political protests such as those of last summer and in February. I think that this is rather a matter of accumulation and culmination of this culture of active citizenship and intolerance. Many people, including those who are related to the present government, are sufficiently aware of the process. That is why they are constantly trying, acutely and persistently, to draw dividing lines between the protesters.

How would you comment on the role of the media in these protests?

In general, we often comment on what has been happening to the Bulgarian media in recent years, on the degree of concentration of ownership and power in the media sector. From this point of view, I think what is happening now is a positive development because we have seen that they have the minimum strength to at least partially recover their independence and the ability to reflect and comment on what is happening in Bulgarian society more adequately.

Of course, there are whole segments of the media publicity that continue to be blocked by this concentration of ownership and they offer their readers a completely parallel world.

We have also seen significant resistance from the public media by declaring a firm stand in defence of their independence and professionalism. I think we have a decent level of coverage and analysis of events.

Anyway, we must henceforth pay significant attention to this issue. I think that it is necessary to change some basic ways of functioning of the media, to expand the scope for the involvement of on-line editions in covering the media reality. Our televisions have press review sections which pay more attention to what is written in a newspaper with a circulation of 5,000 to 6,000 copies rather than to what is written and commented on a website that is visited by hundreds of thousands of people a day. These changes in the media environment need to be taken to improve its quality.

Tags: PoliticsSocietyProtestsBulgariaGovernmentVladimir Shopov
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