Public Television (DT) runs its first news program as the European Broadcasting Union halts its relay of programs that the sacked ERT workers have been producing since the station’s shutdown in June by the government.
Public Television-Dimosia Teleorasi (DT), the country’s new interim state television channel, began airing news programs on Wednesday, more than two months after the government’s abrupt closure of state broadcaster ERT drew international condemnation and triggered an acute political crisis.
Its first news program, a two-hour broadcast that began at 8.00 am, focused mainly on the analysis of domestic news by a panel of journalists, but also included international news items based on the BBC website and footage from Al-Jazeera and British broadcaster Sky News.
The program was presented by two former ERT journalists – Ioannis Troupis, a political reporter who covered New Democracy, and Odin Linardatou, former head of world news. The government authorities announced that more than 577 people had been hired on a two-month contract for DT, which will function until the new state broadcaster, Nerit, is ready for operations. It was not clear from where DT, which was launched on July 10, is broadcasting.
The move came as the European Broadcasting Union, the world’s largest association of public broadcasters, halted the relay of programs that the sacked workers of the now defunct ERT have been producing since the closure.
Since ERT was shuttered on 11 June, ERT workers have remained at the company’s building in Ayia Paraskevi and produced 24-hour programming that the EBU has been streaming by satellite and the internet. Defiant former ERT workers vowed to continue their internet broadcasts.
“We will keep on working and producing the same complete program that we have been producing up to today. It will be available online for everyone, from our live streaming,” Panagiotis Kalfagiannis, head of the Pospert union of ERT employees, told AP. “What we will lose is the capacity to have transmissions… by analogue TV signal.”
Unions criticised the EBU’s decision, with the country’s largest civil servants union, Adedy, describing the European broadcasters’ decision “a severe blow” to ERT’s former employees. The Panhellenic Federation of Journalists’ Unions (Poesy) appealed to the EBU to restart transmissions, “given that the government is not implementing the requirements that the EBU itself has set for independent and objective public information”. But the EBU said it had fulfilled its role. “The new signal is now up and running and they’re producing news bulletins. And the news bulletins should be available in every household in Greece. So the screen is not black anymore,” EBU Director General Ingrid Deltenre told AP in Geneva. She said that as long as the news bulletins “have the quality that the Greek audience judges to be good” then the EBU would not resume the former ERT employees’ transmissions.
“What we want to prevent is having black screens. There shouldn’t be black screens. There should be a proper, independent, good news bulletin, at least, as a minimum requirement,” she said.
The EBU announced earlier this week that it would halt its streaming of those programs on Wednesday morning because DT was to begin news programming. So far, DT had been airing mainly documentaries and old Greek movies, but began showing live international athletics last week. In a statement posted on its website, the EBU said it “believes that independent public service media is indispensable for democracies, culture and societies” and that when ERT was abruptly shut down, it “felt it had no option but to immediately take action to prevent Greek screens from remaining black, by carrying the satellite signal being produced by former ERT staff and streaming it on our website”. As a result, it committed to helping out until a basic public service media output had been established.
“This pledge has been honoured,” EBU said.
Source: AP, EnetEnglish