Category: Research

Cardboard for Curtains: Life in Macedonia’s Hospitals

April. For many it’s the best time of year, when people wake from a cold and long winter. For others, such as nurse Hava Sait Nexhip, it means the beginning of an annual, months-long water shortage at the medical campus outside Skopje where she has worked for eight years. “Each April till September we don’t have water,” Sait Nexhip says, though she can offer no explanation. “But this year...

Parties’ property – invisible in reports

Parties’ finances are under scrutiny of the institutions, but not as much as their property, which should be available to the public, experts comment on the SCOOP-Macedonia published story, where we published detailed title deeds of the four main parties. Although the parties claim that they regularly make inventory and submit these documents to the state institutions, however, on their web sites no annual financial statements can be seen,...

SCOOP reveals political parties’ property: from fields and pastures to luxury apartments and buildings (update)

DOCUMENTATION Shops, yards, fields, buildings, flats…This is just part of the ownership of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE, which appears as the owner of 100 title deeds where places unknown to the general public can be seen. The biggest properties owned by the party of ex-Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski are in Saraj, Kisela Voda and Centar, where VMRO-DPMNE owns buildings, apartments and pastures. Unlike them, SDSM owns far smaller property; the...

Between personal gain and public interest: are the media also to blame for the crisis?

When the government began to implement campaigns and advertise them, most of the private media in Macedonia entered the race to grab a larger share of the pie. Experts say that not only advertisements but also tenders buy media support. This situation in the Macedonian media market has raised several questions and dilemmas: Have the media become a cover for the business? Can a medium as a private property...

KEY PLAYERS IN THE MEDIA BUSINESS: WHO OWNS THE MEDIA IN MACEDONIA?

The majority in the Macedonian Parliament, without much debate and deliberation, turned down the bill on reforms in the media just days before it was dissolved. The proposal, comprised under the advice of ex-mediator Peter Vanhoutte, was expected to be seriously addressed by MPs because of their leaders’ signature of the Przino Agreement. But with the rejection of this proposal another unfulfilled obligation remained ahead of the early parliamentary...

SCANDAL: Journalists – “a security threat” to SCPC

“You are a threat to the security of the institution and cannot enter it”. This unpleasant answer was given to the team of SCOOP-Macedonia on April 6, 2016 by a person who introduced himself as the Chief Security Officer at the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption (SCPC). With this, journalists were prevented from filing a request for free access to information under the Law on Free Access to...

Business and politics in the media: Are reforms possible?

DOCUMENTATION     When in the spring of 1996 the first issue of the independent daily “Dnevnik” was published, the then government was aware that the time was coming of the media that it would not be able to control. “Dnevnik” and then the private TV “A1” soon became influential media, taking the power to create public opinion of the then media that were state-owned – newspapers “Nova Makedonija”,...

DIGITALIZATION: FOREIGN CHANNELS MORE ATTRACTIVE, DOMESTIC CHANNELS FAIL SIMPLE FEATURES SUCH AS TELETEXT

Residents of Novo Selo, in Demir Hisar, do not have a major choice on their TV sets, and learn about what is happening beyond their place of residence solely on the three channels emitted by the public broadcasting service – MRTV, including the parliament channel. Although they have procured receivers to follow other channels with national concession, whose signals should reach their homes, they are still denied this service....