Description
Czech regional newspapers published by municipal authorities are widely misused for self-representation of the ruling political party and represent long-lasting electoral campaigning at public expense. This restrains objective debate and even retaliate the political opposition and active citizens. The project aims to support free competition of political parties and participation of citizens at the local level. The project focuses on the content of the information (regional newspapers, information campaigns) spread by municipalities and its quality and promotes its objectivity and balance, thus supporting the accountability of municipal representatives and public oversight. Within the project we will carry out analysis, prepare recommendations and advocate for its adoption on local level. An on-line tool will be prepared to activate and support public debate. We will also monitor the implementation of the Press Act and provide legal counselling and legal aid in cases of breaches.
Summary of project results
The project aimed to the problem of abuse of local public media and public campaigns in order to spend public money in favour of local leading party instead to ensure objective and opinion balanced information about local issues. The project general goals were to promote equal political competition in local level, to support opinion balanced and objective information in local public media and to enhance participation of local citizens in local issues. The project achieved all particular goals as to bring clear evidence about the range of the problem, to increase awareness of target groups about the problem and desirable solution and to promote principles of public media and 3E principles in public campaigns among target groups. We worked out the rare content and systems analysis of 100 publisher of local public newspapers in Czech rep. and named main causes of censorship and unbalanced content in favour of local political leaders. In issue of public campaigns we processed general description statistics of domestic campaigns and 5 case studies named main failures of contracting authorities. We prepared with experts set of recommendations based on our findings and we spread our findings among target groups. We provided also expert advisory in public media issues and helped defend the rights of local representatives for publishing their opinions in local public newspapers in according the press law. We achieved greater awareness of target groups about problem and its solutions when the project outputs were 63 times mentioned in national and regional media (TV, radio, newspapers) compared to the original assumption of 5 mentions.
Summary of bilateral results