February 14 (SeeNews) - International non-governmental organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on the Bulgarian authorities to stop trying to intimidate journalists after a series of verbal attacks and threats by senior officials since the start of February.
"It is distressing to see that personal and offensive attacks against journalists by the most senior officials in Bulgaria are not isolated and keep on occurring,” Pauline Ades-Mevel, RSF editor-in-chief, said in a statement on Thursday.
The most recent string of attacks on journalists began on February 4, when prime minister Boyko Borissov likened journalists, especially women journalists, to turkeys during a press conference, subsequently trying to imitate the gobbling of a turkey despite the protests of the journalists present.
This was followed by the actions of newly-elected prosecutor-general Ivan Geshev, who started putting questions to the editor of the investigative news website Bivol, Atanas Tchobanov, demonstrating he had information about his private life. In addition, Bulgarian MEP Alexander Yordanov called Tchobanov a "little provocateur" after Tchobanov asked him about a case of corruption in which one of his colleagues was allegedly involved.
Most recently, on February 11, the deputy speaker of Bulgaria's parliament, Valery Simeonov, accused two journalists with commercial TV channel bTV of being "corrupt." Simeonov also asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate them for failing to report alleged links between the online casino Efbet’s owner and gambling mogul Vasil Bozhkov, who was recently charged by the prosecutor's office with leading an organized crime group, coercion, extortion, attempted bribery of an official, and several other crimes.
In response, RSF is calling on the European Parliament’s president to clearly condemn the attacks.
"The European Union cannot allow journalists to be threatened in such an institutional and systematic manner in a member country," Pauline Ades-Mevel said.
Bulgaria has been experiencing a serious media crisis for the past decade as many media outlets are owned by just a few oligarchs and journalists are constantly subjected to harassment, RSF noted. This led to the country falling to 111th place in the latest edition of the NGO's World Press Freedom Index - lower than any other EU member state, from 35th place back in 2006.