Saturday, July 21, 2007

Marjana Držaj is Guilty of Everything

This was a title of a Slovene drama. I was reminded of it today when I read a Letter to the editor in which again it was written that the School of Social Sciences is to be blamed for a bad interview in the newspaper despite the fact the author of the interview is not a graduate of the school.
Similarly, many in Slovenia think and write in their texts that if there is a problem for example in public health care system, it is only so because of senasationalistic media publicity.
The journalists are the messangers who let the public know about wrongdoings.
However, instead of fixing the it, those who are connected with the problem try to silence the media by forbidding employees to talk to them: as it happened the case of the Institute of Oncology. There the new manager ordered the doctors not to talk to the journalists. He explained that he wants the journalists to recieve the best and most competent answers. However, this was already the case in the past. It is much more likely that the new rule is the result of unfavorable, however fair reports on terrible planning, constructing and financing of new buildings of IO (which had elements of corruption).
All subjects of media reports that recieve what they consider unfavorable treatment forget to re-examine their actions. They seem to be forgetting that the journalists are only the messengers. It is easier to blame them than to fix the problem. Just as it is easy to blame the Faculty of Social Sciences for all the unfavorable reporters even in those cases when the school had nothing to do with their journalistic education.
Slovene journalists are commonly considered as Communists, and the school as an institution producing these red journalists despite the fact that the change of regime happened almost twenty years ago and that school's faculty is relatively young. When this last fact is pointed out,these people would say "they are all sons of former communists". And usually it is these people those who were in fact communists.
It is high time that journalists and School of Social Sciences would not be blamed for everything that's wrong in this country. Just as it is time that reporters would not get punished when they are revealing simple facts, as it happened in now famous Case of the Dog.
And that irony would be even bigger, when they should be, they do not get particularly punished, like in the Case of Pure Plagiarism. In fact, some readers and journalists even tried to defend the person who plagiarized her column, and they condemned those who said that this is simply wrong and cannot be done.
Perhaps I should sign off with Hamlet, if I started with Marjana Držaj ...

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