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Parliament Discussing Merger of Public Radio and Television Outlets
Thursday 04 November 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, November 4 (TASR) - Opposition Smer-SD MP Jan Podmanicky assumes that Culture Minister Daniel Krajcer (SaS) has violated the law when submitting a bill on Slovak Radio (SRo) and Slovak Television (STV) merging into a brand new public broadcaster Radio and Television Slovakia (RTS) via a fast-tracked procedure in Parliament.
"There are no reasons to have it fast-tracked," said Podmanicky during parliamentary debate on Thursday. Krajcer said the reason is to fix the devastated finances in STV in time, which Podmanicky thinks is only a poor excuse.
Podmanicky noted that the planned merger of STV and SRo is only designed to advocate "a stupid and coarse attempt to take control of STV", director of which (Stefan Niznansky) is not the right puppet for the Coalition to play with.
Former Culture Minister Marek Madaric (Smer-SD) said that the newly-proposed legal norm is not acceptable, to which the huge number of comments arriving at the ministry in only a couple of days attests.
In response to the criticism, Krajcer said that it was precisely the MPs currently in Opposition who "honed to perfection" their political takeover of public media during the 2006-10 term in office. Hence Krajcer called their criticism absurd.
Krajcer also mentioned that Madaric himself, as minister, was considering merging STV and SRo, and the former minister actually had an audit done in preparation for the merger. However, Madaric never had the courage to push it forward, according to Krajcer.
Late Thursday afternoon Parliament voted to proceed with the merger.
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