Zhana Popova: We live in a crypto-democracy – on paper we have perfect norms, but there is a deficit of civic spirit

Vladimir Mitev

Key themes and points discussed:

• The Changing Media Environment and Digital Media:
  • The media environment is constantly changing, with the “old guard” having no place.
  • A positive is the existence of a digital generation of media consumers.
  • The challenge lies in how society reacts, with adults creating scary content online and an unfeasible hope for regulation. Adults should instead create content for children.
  • The format of the media program is “dead”; consumption shifts to content on mobile devices (e.g., Netflix, sports, news via Facebook).
• Mainstream Media vs. Podcasts:
  • Mainstream media in Bulgaria is becoming perceived as “alternative” because many people avoid the news.
  • Podcasts are increasingly becoming mainstream, sometimes involving significant financial investment, suggesting a shift in where audiences find content and authority.
• Young People (Generation Z) and Internationalization:
  • Popova disagrees with the observation that the current generation of young people is very internationalized. At the Faculty of Journalism, she observes students who are “extremely nationalistic, even nationalists.”
  • A problem is that while students learn foreign languages, they often fail to use them professionally (e.g., for interviews, translating, or networking).
  • They often remain in their “national orbits,” showing a form of “provincialism or neighborhood thinking.”
• Aspiring Young Media Creators:
  • Young people starting their own media often focus too much on technology and lack substantive content.
  • Amateurism, in the form of slander and insults, harms the journalistic profession. Popova fears training journalists for a non-existent future as their jobs might be taken by amateurs.
• Journalistic Education and Labor Market Integration:
  • The main problem is how quickly students forget foundational principles after starting internships and copy existing, often poor, models.
  • There is a “vacuum” of role models, as there are few strong investigative or cultural reporters on television.
  • The profession needs to emphasize developing unique styles and storytelling to prevent students from becoming “pen pushers.”
• “Crypto-Democracy” and Lack of Critical Mass:
  • Bulgaria operates as a “crypto-democracy”—institutions and norms look perfect “on paper” (e.g., public media law, regulations) but are dysfunctional in reality (e.g., public television not functioning as public, non-working “university television”).
  • There is a lack of a critical mass of people interested in quality media and cultural criticism has “died out” in Bulgaria, unlike abroad.
  • The current situation in institutions, like the election of a BNT Director General, is characterized as “legal tyranny,” where everything is done legally, but is morally questionable and leads to an “impasse.”
• Civic Spirit and Community:
  • The lack of civic spirit is a major issue. Popova sees hope in high school students involved in media festivals, viewing media as a way to bring people together, transform a mass into speaking individuals, and defend their rights as a group.
  • She advises prioritizing saving human lives over “defending the law for the sake of the law itself” and highlights the gap in education regarding human relationships despite transparency.
  • The problem of resonance—a shared emotional and knowledge-based social experience—is absent or very low in Bulgarian society.
• Youth Media and Community Media:
  • Youth media initiatives are often difficult to sustain because they function as “community media” unsupported by advertising, and face burdens like legal fees (PROPHON and MUSICAUTOR).
  • Popova misses media, especially radio, that brings people together, arguing that podcasts do not achieve this sense of communal living.
• The European Union and the Balkans:
  • Popova is skeptical the European legislative act on media freedom will be quickly transposed into Bulgarian law. She believes its measures can only work during crises.
  • She sees a high interest in European programs like Erasmus among students.
  • A key missed opportunity is the lack of networking among journalists in the Balkans (Serbs, Greeks, Turks, Romanians), with Bulgarian students preferring Central European destinations. She advises learning Balkan languages and focusing on regional media development.
• Change and Social Engineering:
  • Popova believes social engineering through institutions like schools is ineffective (e.g., daily physical education but high obesity rates).
  • Hope is paradoxically linked to people being “left on their own” and the “extreme digital loneliness” experienced by the young generation, which she predicts will eventually lead to a desire for community and social change.
  • She observes that a large proportion of young people now prefer to pursue careers in Bulgaria but are quickly discouraged. The Internet offers a chance to change “regional issues” locally.
  • She argues against the strong expectation that “the state will fix everything,” pointing out that the state cannot cope with challenges like controlling internet content due to corruption and mechanisms falling apart.

Intro

Zhana Popova is an associate professor at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” in the Department of Radio and Television.

She is the author of the monographs “Dialogic Models. Between Events and Media Images” (UI “St. Kl. Ohridski,” 2013); “Genres and Forms of Television Entertainment” (Polygraph Yug, 2015), and a chapter on the history of BNT in the collection “BNR and BNT – Between the State and Society 1989-2015” (St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, 2017).

The media environment and the digital generation

I would like to start with something more general, because this is a big topic – the media, the people in Bulgaria, society, young people. There is such a thing as a media environment. What are the good and bad things about it in recent years?

This is a very good question because what we call the media environment is no longer the same. There is no place for the “old guard,” so to speak, in the changed media environment. I think there is one good thing, and that is certainly that we have young people and children who will invariably use digital media.

We have to accept this. Other young people will not appear. From now on, there will always be people who will live in this digital world as long as it exists.

Incidentally, it is already dying out. You and I have lived through the demise of the analogue era. There is nothing scary about such a technological demise.

But the big problem is how we as a society react to this situation. What do we do? We tell children that the internet is very scary.

This makes it even more interesting to them, because scary things are the most interesting. Consequently, we cannot protect them, and these young people have no way of protecting themselves from the content that we, the adults, produce.

However, I think it is a very good tool that allows young people to talk to each other—something that other media have stopped doing—to present different materials to people, to hold discussions. This happened after the ban and regulation of forums, for example. On the other hand, there was no way to avoid such regulation, as there was too much hatred inside.

Overall, there are contradictory things. But I note as a good thing that we have a digital generation of consumers. And this is where the many problems arise.

First, the hope that there will be regulation. We have to forget about that. There won’t be any.

And we have to see how we live when we don’t have a guardian to protect us on the internet. Instead of using this opportunity as adults, we should turn to children and create content for them. For example, Bulgarian National Television (BNT) could create content for children, which they don’t do on the internet. They have made a few attempts, mostly unsuccessful.

They make a lot of podcasts, which is completely unnecessary for BNT. They are not actually taking advantage of the fact that they can turn to this audience. 

BNR is a little different in this respect. They have a very well-developed children’s editorial team, so they tried to enter this niche much earlier. But, of course, there is one big problem. The pace of development is incomparably faster than before.

And despite everything, I see it as an opportunity, not as a place where we only talk about pornography, violence, gambling – everything that we, adults, produce.

The transformation of media consumption: from mass to alternative Media

If I continue a little on the topic of young people, their consumption of media and adult media consumption, it seems to me that the mainstream media in Bulgaria is to some extent becoming alternative media. In the sense that many people say, “I don’t want to watch the news, I don’t watch the media.” They don’t like it—whether it’s the morning shows on the weekend, or the fact that the same people keep appearing on the same programs, etc. And in fact, the alternative media environment of podcasts is largely becoming mainstream. There are podcasts with hundreds of thousands and millions of views. I can even list them. Some of these podcasts are by people whose names sound somewhat like slang, their names sound like underground people, who at the same time say, “I’ve invested tens of thousands of euros in my podcast team, my technology, my studio,” etc. I don’t know if you agree that mainstream media is somehow lying in wait, while podcasts are becoming mainstream—how does this evolution fit into this conversation about media consumption by young people and all kinds of people?

It’s very interesting to see how we, as people interested in the development of the media, talk about consumption at the moment. First, huge giants such as people meter agencies (who were providing information about TV‌ audiences of different televisions and emissions – note of the editor) disappeared. No one needs their opinion anymore, that’s how it is at the moment.

Television stations don’t need it at all. It is clear to everyone that young people in particular—and in fact, television stations are mainly interested in people who can pay, not so much in young people—these people do not watch television in the way it was watched until recently. However, I would like to make a big reservation here, which we always check with the students.

If you go into a first-year class—these are young people who have just graduated from high school—and ask them what television they watch, they will say, “We don’t watch television.” This means that they don’t watch television on their TV sets. Then, when we start discussing other television phenomena, you see that these people actually do watch television.

They watch Netflix, but they watch it on their mobile devices. A lot of them watch sports, which is also a television production and one of the most expensive, at least in terms of television rights. As strange as it may seem to us, we see how certain news items appear through Facebook content, because Bulgaria is very special in terms of Facebook consumption.

And these young people actually get some of the news that someone else has chosen for them, rather than the entire television program. In other words, what is “dead” as content is the program. The days of programming are over, both on radio and television.

I think that our media – and I’m not just talking about BNT and BNR – our private media also owe it to consumers, as they are called, who are actually viewers, listeners, and audiences, to reach them with the other part of the content. I recently made an exam on the topic of musical art on television because I was interested in what people between the ages of 18 and 25 understand as musical art. And a large proportion of people wrote about television that broadcasts chalga (a Turkish word for Bulgarian popular music of Oriental, Balkan origin – note of the editor) performances.

For me, this is one of the most negative consequences, but it is not because of the internet. It is because of the widespread distribution of this music and the acquiescence of intellectuals, who literally grinned at the television screen, especially with the chalga performers. I think this is a Bulgarian transition that we could have missed, and I continue to believe that television stations can produce other content, which we call television art, and not just chalga productions.

Generation Z, Nationalism, and Provincialism

The generation that some call Generation Z—people who are now in their twenties—is often said to be very internationalized, unlike previous generations. Not that previous generations weren’t, but for them it’s somehow more natural, since perhaps quite a few students in Bulgaria come from families who have lived in the West or have had more interaction with peers from other nations. How does this affect media consumption, which we are already talking about? And what is the proportion between the consumption you mention – Netflix, international remakes of media content – and content that is purely Bulgarian, local or national?

I don’t really agree, I don’t have these observations that generations have developed in this way. My first problem is that I can’t understand at all who names these generations, because something that is within a 2-3 year span should not be a generation, but let’s say we are talking about the current young people who are graduating from high school. At our Faculty of Journalism, for example, we mainly have young people who are extremely nationalistic, even nationalists.

These are young people who have graduated from language high schools, they should know languages well and can develop anywhere, but they want to stay in Bulgaria for now. And here comes the big conflict – they stay in Bulgaria, but in which media will they work? This is their big question when they talk about how much they want to stay in Bulgaria.

So I think that at the moment our secondary school is producing a good dose of patriotism. In some ways, this is true. That’s not a bad thing. I really respect that feeling and think schools should encourage it. Other places even go as far as nationalism.

But for me, it’s a problem how, for example, autobiographies are taught in that language. In just a few years, there will be journalists whose biographies say “three foreign languages,” but they don’t use them for anything other than writing their autobiographies in that language. That’s a problem for me. For example, they don’t realize that they can use the language to conduct interviews in it.

It is only in their second year that they free themselves from all inhibitions about using the language they have been learning for about 10 years in private schools, wherever. Even less often do they realize that they can translate publications. Even less often do they realize that they can create a network.

You are an example of how a language can become a way to connect people in a profession and so on. Languages have always been valuable to our faculty. This is not the case at the moment, and I think that we owe it to this generation, which will become journalists.

Because, again, they have everything on paper, but in essence, they have lost the sense of what they can do with this language, how far they can go. And the second thing is that these are children of parents—some of them—who started out with this idea of the division of the world into West and East, which disappeared for a certain period. But they themselves have remained in their national orbits, transporting their towns and villages, or their neighborhoods in Madrid, Valencia, and so on.

I don’t have the feeling at all that these young people are actually international. Even in one of the exams, I give them a task, which is to direct and think about how to show a report from a theater performance, because I believe that theater is an extremely important art form that should remain within our television coverage. There are children who come to me after the exam to thank me and tell me that this is the first time they have been to the theater in Bulgaria, even though they have lived in quite large cities with their parents, but have never been to the theater.

I don’t know if it’s good that these children have only seen the world if they have only seen Bulgaria in the world.

Young media creators and the problem of amateurism

This is, perhaps, a form of provincialism or neighborhood thinking that we probably acquire during our socialization. How do things happen when these young people, who are gradually freeing themselves from certain layers of secondary school or family, want to create their own media or express themselves in the media, for example, through a YouTube channel, blog, or something similar? What do you observe in terms of practices, problems, successes? To what extent do they succeed in having their own media, their own channel, their own image, their own message?

I think they focus too much on technology and don’t understand that technology is changing very quickly at the moment, and you have to have something to say. At the Faculty of Journalism, we try to teach them how to report the news, describe the world and what is happening in it, regardless of what technology will emerge. But we encounter this resistance because, of course, technology is always attractive, and I don’t deny it; on the contrary, it brought me to radio and television.

On the contrary, how can you make the most of technology, rather than it making the most of you? What I observe as a phenomenon, as you said a moment ago, is that the mainstream media has immersed itself in the internet and the people who were masters of images have emerged alongside the new generations on the internet. I think this is part of the process that needs to be experienced, and that’s fine, but on the other hand, the authors who dare to do it – and it’s great to have your own media – unfortunately forget that this is professional work.

Amateurism in its worst form – when you allow yourself to slander certain people, when you allow yourself to insult – this amateurism, unfortunately, puts us in a bad position as journalists. Because sometimes I even feel that we are training journalists who, in just four years, may have nowhere to work.

Their places may be taken by amateurs from all kinds of professions who enter this field, and there will be no standards to speak of, and training people for a future that does not exist is quite unpleasant, to tell the truth.

Education and the labor market: The lack of models and style

You have said before that you create a certain way of thinking, certain standards, a certain approach when it comes to journalistic content, and now you are saying several times that there is a barrier or a problem when students, already trained, have to integrate into the labor market as journalists. What are the most common problems in this attempt at integration?

If we talk about radio and television, for example, for me the biggest problem is how quickly, after the first and second year, the principles and the variety of ways to tell a story are immediately forgotten. Because I think young people are very attracted to this as something they could work in. When they enter our media, whether private or public, they very quickly copy the same model.

Of course, some of them explain that this model is not necessary, but in fact they don’t have many examples to follow. Unfortunately, these are people who know Spanish – there are many Spanish TV stations – who know English and French, but they don’t use them to watch TV or listen to the radio. And so, the models they see are top reporters.

And here comes one of the changes. In fact, there are no top reporters at the moment. There are no reporters on television who do strong investigative journalism. There are no reporters who are particularly strong on television in terms of cultural news. And I don’t know if this is for better or for worse, but it creates a vacuum in terms of what role models should do. And young people start copying clichés, which is our big problem when they come back from their internships – how to overcome or transform these clichés.

They can literally turn them into art, as long as they learn how. And every year we start the process all over again, year after year. That’s why I think the relationship between the media and education needs to be very different.

Our profession is open, it can be done by people who have graduated in completely different fields, doctors, people who may have no education at all. And instead of feeling guilty that we are producing people for the market – that’s my feeling, of course – a market that will disappear very soon, it’s quite the opposite. We should constantly try to make them believe that they will become authors who will be noticed if they learn to tell stories in their own way.

If they develop their own style and have something they are best at, rather than becoming “pen pushers,” which is what most of them turn into.

“Cryptodemocracy” and lack of critical mass

This topic of narrative journalism, or storytelling, perhaps better said—English has already made quite an inroad—brings to mind a Romanian magazine called Decât o Revistă, and it is not even the only one. There are various Romanian media outlets—perhaps you are familiar with them—Explicativ, for example, or Panorama, which recently closed down, are also making such attempts—media outlets that tell stories or explain context and so on, so that we have depth both in the message and in our understanding of what is happening. I have more questions here, but one of them is: you said that there is a lack of models, authorities, norms, and so on in all types of journalism, but isn’t there also a lack of critical mass?

Because, in my opinion, in Romania, a critical mass somehow emerges around certain media outlets or initiatives, and young people turn out to be leaders and it turns out that they gain this self-confidence, or even had it before, they set the tone, they are the authority, they criticize others who are not doing something modern. And isn’t that one of the shortcomings or weaknesses of the situation in our country, that the critical mass—in every sense, in terms of the number of students, people who are interested in a certain type of media, and so on, or the audience—is lacking?

I completely agree with you about the critical mass. First, how people get their information is a huge problem in Bulgaria. After all, major events should excite them, but I think a large part of the problem is our work as journalists—why people are not interested in the information.

The issue of the student community is very important. I believe that, unfortunately, we have built the ideal form of “crypto-democracy,” as I call it. This means institutions that exist on paper.

On paper, we have a very good law on public media, very well-regulated content that can be self-regulated. Our regulations are not bad; I would say they are among the best. However, in reality, our television is not public television.

No one can convince me that this content is public television. At the university, we have something called “university television” on paper. It has no television at all, let alone anything more developed.

And so on, and so on. Unfortunately, there are many examples. That is, when we look at it – let’s say, if someone takes the documents and tries to write a history of the period we lived in – everything will be on paper there.

But it doesn’t work. It’s like having a building with one elevator – the elevator is perfect, but it doesn’t work.

That’s what happened with this “crypto-democracy,” as I called it.

And the second problem, which you point out very well here, is actually, if you look, for example, I recently looked at Georgi Gospodinov’s profile. I really like his first novels, especially “Natural Novel,” of course. Just look at how many foreign-language cultural supplements there are to newspapers that we think have long since died out. Perhaps in our country too.

In fact, cultural criticism has not died out in the world at all. Radio programs on culture have not died out in the world. They have died out in our country. Only the Hristo Botev program on BNR remains. That is why I think it is good to change our attitude and start involving young people in what you very aptly call critical mass, but I think it is good to involve them in the process of building this democracy. We have currently excluded them and we cannot include them.

Of course, they have to set out on this path themselves. But still, at least we, as adults, should show them that democracy is built every day. It is something that is built every day, not just once during protests. Protests are the extreme form.

Democracy is in the institutions that work. We currently have one of the most catastrophic situations—because this is a catastrophe, not a crisis—the situation with BNT, for example, the election of a director general. We have a regulator whose work is blocked in the name of justice, and you can see this situation in the election of the chief prosecutor, you can see it in the change of the Supreme Judicial Council, and so on.

This is legal tyranny. By law, everything is wonderful. You can’t say a word, because everything has been done according to the law.

However, despite everything, this impasse should literally give rise to extremely strong protest action. In the 1990s, television was the place where rallies and protests were held and ended. Now no one is interested in television.

And I don’t know, I think our secondary education is very well organized, so that the critical mass is poured into sports education classes and that’s it.

Civic spirit and community

I would like to continue this topic of democratic values or civic spirit. Where is this spirit and how can it arise if parents or adults do not have it?

How is it possible, how do you imagine, young people, knowing the situation they are in, and here I would like to add that, in my opinion, many young people are weakened and really need years of experience in society to establish themselves – how is it possible for this spirit to arise in them, and even when faced with this cynicism, let’s call it that, or you call it “legal dictatorship” or something like that, how can they preserve this spirit and even have the power to transform with this spirit? I think I understand it, and I think you understand it, that it is important, but do we have any ways to do this, and do we have the senses – do adults have the senses – if they see manifestations of such a spirit, not to crush it, but to affirm it and defend it?

Yes, you know, this year at our student television station, we held a school media festival and invited young people. These are high school students who devote their time—which is already considered an extremely valuable resource—and their attention to doing something that we all declared to be “dying”—the media. I found this very interesting.

In many schools, what is called STEM is actually innovative because the technologies used in video and audio production are extremely high-tech processes. Many teachers have chosen to set up classrooms and studios, and people are starting to gather because that is actually the role of the media. It is not the high quality of the filming, it is not the high quality of the sound, but bringing people together to criticize, to transform from a mass into individuals who lead by speaking. This is very important, by the way.

People who tell us what is ultimately modern. Fashion is very important to young people, so I became interested in how excited they are about it. Fashion in political ideas is also very important.

We started conversations with them that gave us a little hope that, alongside a state structure that is so obsessed with innovation, we can return to what is important in society – being together. I believe that this is something that schools can teach people – how to defend their rights together or how to do something better together. Because there are two topics that really excite me at the moment.

The first is that we talk a lot about justice in the media. In fact, everyone thinks that justice is on their side. On the other hand, I always give this example: just because someone is right on a pedestrian crossing, they will not stay alive if a car is coming towards them.

It is better to look around. It is better to stop telling young people that they are wrong or that they are right, that something is fair or unfair, and instead try to save human lives every time, because that is where we must start as a society, instead of so strongly instilling in them the idea of defending the law for the sake of the law itself. This is what happened with the BNT competition, for example. Everything in the competition for BNT‌ head is legal. Whether it is moral is a separate question. 

And the second thing that I think is important when we talk about young people and their transformation into people on whom our lives and the lives of our children will actually depend is transparency of actions. In fact, everything is transparent.

Everything is visible, everything is even recorded and broadcast. There are so many cameras everywhere. Unlike me, they do not even notice that their lives are being recorded at school, they are constantly threatened that they must not bump into each other in the corridors because the camera is recording them. This has become part of their everyday life.

This is transparency. And this transparency should protect us, but we see that the opposite is happening. The more transparently we live, the more everything is on display, the more things happen that are related to human relationships.

And that is where our education is still falling short.

Youth media and community media

It is becoming increasingly painful to discuss because this is a reality that probably everyone knows in their own way. I would like to ask, perhaps to continue the positive spirit I felt when you were talking about youth media. There have been attempts in our country, and perhaps even successful ones, for youth media.

“Toest” seems to have a youth media profile. Or “Klin-klin” is perhaps an example of youth media to some extent, although I think it has difficulties, but it also had investigative publications. Perhaps Factcheck.bg is a media outlet for young people. Perhaps its content is not exactly youth-oriented, but many young people participate there. And I’m sure you can think of many more projects, including university ones, for youth media.

When you look at youth media, what are they succeeding at, what are they failing at, what are their problems, and what could they perhaps do better?

Unfortunately, I think that many of these otherwise very good initiatives are very difficult to sustain because they are examples of what is known as “community media.” That is, media that are not supported by advertising because they do not want to depend on advertisers. Here, I am happy to say that our radio station, which was our students’ radio station, is currently “muted.”

There are podcasts instead. Even the fees that must be paid by law for radio and television to PROPHON and MUSICAUTOR are a burden for the students. However, I believe that we do not have many good examples.

I think that this “youth to media” is a pretty good alternative media to everything that goes on as monopolistic speech. But despite everything, there is some glimmer of hope. I thought about what you pointed out as important.

We often talk about the lack of investigations in Bulgaria. Generally speaking, you can count on your fingers the number of media outlets that conduct investigations. However, I miss much more the media where people, again, come together.

Because that is the meaning of radio. I see, for example, that BNR has given a lot of attention to podcasts, but podcasts don’t bring people together. Podcasts are something you get, there’s a reaction, it’s usually short-term, but people don’t live together.

Radio made them live together. At the moment, it is not capable of doing that. For example, to show how powerful such phenomena are: when a video platform like YouTube emerged, Bulgarian communities abroad felt nostalgia for their country and began to broadcast short songs by Bulgarian pop musicians themselves.

At that time, Bulgarian pop music was “dead,” it was not on television, no one wanted it, but in such communities, these musicians are now even the leading musicians. They are still on the air, which is another flaw in our situation, because new music needs to be created. So I think communities are very important, but democracy is threatened because, first, there is not much room for communities, and second, it is quite difficult for them to come up with the idea that they can use the media as a place to gather.

I will elaborate on this idea of community because I think it is important to me, and I associate it with a word called “resonance.” In some cases, this may resemble an echo when someone posts on a podcast or a show and there are many shares on Facebook, etc., but by “resonance” I also mean an emotion, let’s say, or an emotion related to knowledge, to experience, which enriches the members and moves between them, and becomes more and more enriched the more it moves. I don’t know if I’m expressing myself clearly, it’s a little difficult for me to put it into words. I think this is also one of the great shortcomings of society in Bulgaria.

It may not only be journalists, it may be people in creative professions in general, it may even be people in marginal positions, who humanly need a certain social experience, or reaction, or understanding. There is no or very low resonance in Bulgaria. So it turns out that some people have a kind of resonance because they are in certain “cliques,” in certain “mafias,” if you want to call them that, in certain cliques that are perhaps even influential at some levels. But there are many people who do not have such access to resonance.

How can it be that in Bulgaria—knowing the realities, knowing that there was socialism, there was a transition after that, this transition ended earlier for some, for others it did not end at all, perhaps, and so on – how can it happen in our society that a community emerges, that resonance emerges through the media?

I find it increasingly difficult to imagine, because the media are under a lot of pressure. This is political control, unfortunately. This is something that did not change during the transition.

And since I believe that the transition ended quite some time ago, we should now be living in a democratic regime that has managed to develop the mechanisms to protect ourselves. I don’t think that has happened. We, our generation, have not developed these mechanisms.

And despite everything, I think that young people can do better than us. So I’m putting my hope in them. But what I’m thinking, for example, while you’re explaining this resonance thing, I thought of a law, which I’ll give as an example.

What happens to young people who are addicted to gambling? Especially people who enjoy gambling. What is happening in Bulgarian society?

For me, the debates on this topic are extremely important because we can apply them to any moral issue. Everyone is very concerned. That is the first thing that can be seen.

Even the bad players in this debate, the companies themselves, are very concerned. A dialogue with representatives is immediately established with the Council for Electronic Media (CEM), and representatives of the association immediately appear, saying, “We will reduce the volume of the advertisements.” And in the National Assembly, at first all the deputies say, “We will not vote on anything.”

And just before the elections, the DPS introduced a bill to satisfy the CEM’s request at the time to amend the gambling law. So far, so good—advertising disappeared from television, but when it comes to internet advertising, things are not so good. In fact, this law, which we hardly understood, leaves a loophole in the mechanism that actually controls the internet content of gambling operators.

That is the National Revenue Agency. And something similar keeps happening. In our law on radio and television, the media hardly exist.

This is scary. This is scary to me. The media, let’s say online media, are defined in the Electoral Code.

It shouldn’t be like that. But alongside everything that is written about the so-called media packages, the definition comes from there. And, of course, it’s still the same.

Who will control, who will transfer responsibility? I think this is the perfect example of how we actually do things on paper. I continue to see internet advertisements for gambling operators, but the National Revenue Agency does not see them.

The same website that, say, the Central Election Commission explains is a media outlet, the National Revenue Agency says is not a media outlet, so it will not fine them. So this is something that I consider a very important example of this resonance.

In fact, imagine that you are in a dead end. That you don’t know how to defend your rights. And a large part of journalists are subjected to similar pressure – whether through monetary demands or through lawsuits.

In this case, if it weren’t for the Facebook community—which is why I personally don’t deny the role of Facebook in Bulgarian reality—if it weren’t for the networks that people themselves have created, whether they are communities is another topic, but if it weren’t for these internet networks, very few of them can defend themselves in this “crypto-democracy,” as I called it a moment ago.

The European Union and the Balkans

I think it is time to introduce the European Union as an actor, both in legislative terms and in every other sense. Since August 8, 2025, the European legislative act on media freedom has theoretically been in force. Of course, as far as I know, it has not yet been transposed into the legislation of Bulgaria and other countries. It will be introduced into legislation at some point. And what do you expect to happen?

First, I don’t believe it will be introduced so quickly. I gave up that hope a long time ago. I think Bulgarian lawmakers have proven that they can drag their feet.

No matter how much the European Union tells us that we are behind schedule, no matter how much it fines us, we as a country pay very large sums for this delay. I think that this process will be delayed in our country.

Despite everything, the people who are on the committees and will be responsible for these newly created bodies are already known. So there is hope that at least something will work. The other question is what do we imagine these committees will do?

I think the idea of protecting the independence of journalism is absolutely unfeasible. There is no way this can happen. And unfortunately, our Bulgarian examples are a rare exception compared to the UK, even compared to Germany, which is one of the countries with the best public television, compared to France.

Not to mention countries like the Netherlands, where there are already problems, as we somewhat idealistically say that the BBC is the benchmark. The BBC was the benchmark. For many of the younger generations, the BBC is not the gold standard at all.

What we failed to do during the transition, and what no one is interested in at the moment, is how public media is financed. Very often, opponents of the Radio and Television Fund, which is enshrined in law and has never, ever worked in all the years since 1998, very often say that people do not want to pay media fees. However, we see the opposite.

They even pay for a channel like Netflix, for example. That’s a lot of money that people are spending. The fact is that they are spending it on specific content, mainly films or sports, but if people can be persuaded to spend money on one thing, then they can be persuaded to spend money on journalism too.

This was not done. Because, in fact, the crisis with BNT is also a crisis of what to do with public media if we separate the budget and they are not linked to the state budget. If they really become public and publicly funded, then the responsibility is ours alone, and clearly none of us as a society wants to bear that responsibility, since the law does not in any way allow for the idea of separating Bulgarian television and radio from the state budget.

I think that this European act on media independence can work in situations of crisis and disaster. That is when people become more sensitive. Unfortunately, we live in a situation where war is close to us, the threat is daily, so we are not far from this situation.

But otherwise, I don’t think there is any will in the councils to change anything so that we can guarantee independent journalism. There is only one thing that can lead to this, and that is people’s personal morality.

Because our profession is like that of a doctor, but for people’s souls. If journalists themselves do not enter this profession with the idea that they can be independent, nothing can save us.

I would like to stay on the topic of the EU a little longer, because the fact that Bulgaria, through the European Union, allows, at least in theory, Bulgarian journalists, including young journalists, to apply for various grants, to undergo training if they choose, in another country, including journalism, allows them to do cross-border projects with colleagues from other countries, allows them to go on exchanges to leading media outlets, there are organizations such as N-ost, for example, which have various programs for cooperation, training, and so on.

To what extent do you think that the fact that Bulgaria is part of the European Union is appreciated and used by young people and journalists, and to what extent does what they use as opportunities actually lead to change?

I can say, from our experience with our students, that there is a great deal of interest in European programs. This is encouraging. Especially in Erasmus.

A great many people are interested in these opportunities. Fortunately, they manage to take advantage of some of the best examples. It is very good that they work in Bulgaria, meaning they have access to programs, a wide variety of programs, to which journalists, regardless of whether they have a degree in journalism or work in the media, have access. This is a great asset and we hope it will continue. But I think we are missing out on something very important, and that is our region.

Our region is very interesting, but we only realize this when someone from outside the region sees it and appreciates it. The time of Balkanization, about which there are many texts, is over, and it is very nice to think of Balkanization as a negative image. However, at the moment, we are simply losing out because we are not creating a network among ourselves with people who speak different languages.

These are the Serbs, the Greeks, the Turks, and the Romanians. And we are trying our best to be at the center of the European Union. And our students, of course, are mainly heading to universities in Central Europe.

That’s normal. However, my advice to them would be to learn many Balkan languages and take a keen interest in the media, because here in the Balkans, the development of the media is very different. We often talk about our socialist heritage, about the slow development of television during that period, but in fact we are surrounded by countries that had military regimes.

In both Greece and Turkey, the development of television was under pressure from military regimes. If we don’t remember this history, then what history should we remember? We have the former Yugoslavia next door, and now we have North Macedonia, which is an interesting neighboring country in its own right.

And instead of maintaining these contacts, creating networks between journalists in the Balkans, we are trying in every way to be among the first. I think this is unnecessary. We are first in a different way.

The periphery is always turned in such a way that you see things differently, and this, let’s say Portugal, wins at a certain point in time, and then loses precisely because of that. But just think about which TV programs you are interested in, say, what is happening in Lebanon right now, or what is happening in Jordan right now. Even during the closed regime of socialism, most international journalists at least received information about what was happening there and, of course, allowed it under strict control.

At the moment, it’s as if we’re not interested in the other part of the world. Except for the direct threat to us, as part of NATO and as part of the European Union, this news is extremely peripheral to our attention. For me, this is a serious problem in terms of training journalists, and I think it needs to change.

Change and social engineering

Our conversation is coming to an end. But what you just said kind of puts the ball in my court, as you know that I try to “dig” not only into Romania but also into Iran with my personal blogs. And here, of course, I have certain philosophical or whatever thoughts and passions, as a colleague put it some time ago, but perhaps if I open up these topics, the conversation will become even longer.

We talked about quite a few problems in journalism, in society, in civil society. Ultimately, can there even be a change in today’s Bulgaria that is orchestrated, that is synthesized in some way with some kind of social engineering in our society? I have an answer. It is even somewhat rhetorical to this question. But still, I would like to ask you, doesn’t it all come down to us ourselves, and then as active citizens, active people in our society, to bring about this revolutionary change, in which a new spirit, new thinking, new practices, etc., everything we say is missing, are established. People have to do it themselves; it cannot be done through “engineering,” in my opinion. We are not in a society where something can be generated through “social engineering.”

To some extent, I would say that this is a good thing. Because if you look at Bulgarian schools, for example, children have physical education every day, and yet we are the most obese nation, especially among children. And we are moving up in the rankings.

If you look at Bulgarian schools, they have information technology classes every day, but our children are on porn sites. In other words, we haven’t even taught them what to do with all this theory. There, for example, every year as a parent you are required to buy a textbook: “I follow the rules,” while our children kill other children, growing up and taking books.

So I’m not sure that school is a good example of social engineering in action. Rather, hope is paradoxically linked to the fact that people are left on their own. This is an extremely big social problem, and it is not only ours. Unfortunately, the demographic crisis is not the problem, even though every night you can hear shocking news about the demographic crisis, which is one of the most normal things, in my opinion, in Europe, if you know the history. The problem is that the lives of those who were born, that part of their lives is spent in extreme digital loneliness. Even though you have so many friends, in the end, many of them still don’t respond or talk to you. I think that since people would find it difficult to endure such loneliness for long, it will give rise to some kind of social phenomenon. I don’t know if it will be a revolution, although I think the time is coming for another revolution to happen 45 years from now.

But I think this loneliness will make people want to be in places where they can be together.

And to return to the topic we started with, young people, let’s say people between the ages of 20 and 30, to what extent do they have the spirit, the potential, the ideas, if you will, the determination to offer an alternative?

I think that in Bulgaria there are enough young people who have the desire, even if you want to enter politics, even if you want to be active in different ways. I rather think that we are seeing the opposite of leaving. A large proportion of young people who, just five years ago, would have gone to foreign universities, now prefer to pursue their careers in Bulgaria.

I don’t know how long they will last, because when they live like this for a while and work here, they become discouraged. But I think the following: if the internet increasingly becomes an opportunity for so-called regional issues, for something that can be changed locally rather than globally, this is a chance for people to live better.

Because in our country, even though so many generations have changed, there is still a very strong expectation that the state will fix everything. In fact, the market has now replaced the state, and this has not turned into a market economy at all. Just look at how badly this mechanism works in the entertainment field.

You have ATVs, you run over children with ATVs. The journalistic question immediately arises: where is the state? We should not be asking where the state is.

It should not even be our imagination, our sense of entertainment should not reach such a basic form, driving an ATV for fun. Suggestions on how to have fun should not depend on the state. Unfortunately, there is a very strong tendency in the media to talk about how to restore the role of the state.

It cannot cope. And it is very important to understand this. The state cannot cope with controlling internet content.

We should not expect it to do so. It should be able to, because our state is strong and rich enough, but unfortunately, there is a lot of corruption.

Something we cannot prove. And all these mechanisms are gradually falling apart. And when you are in the position of a Robinson Crusoe who understands that he is alone, that he has to cope, you start doing things that will save you from this legal, judicial, just barbarism, the consequences of which we have been seeing in recent years.

I think this development that is currently emerging on the internet is very important. And that many people there realize that they can use the internet as a means of normal contact that they can have outside the internet. This is a very long period that has passed.

People were only on the internet. They couldn’t imagine seeing someone in person. Now it is simply the most normal way to arrange a meeting.

And the second thing I see as a desire is that people are acting as a group. This is something we should encourage, and the media can do that.

You mentioned that you see young people who are ready to enter politics. I want to end with a provocation. You said that there are many young people who want to get involved in politics, who have studied in the West. But 25-30 years ago, the director of BNT was also a young man and a leader of young people who entered politics. He even studied in the West. And that doesn’t seem to be enough. It turns out that the ongoing socialization in Bulgarian society leads to a loss of civic spirit or prevents its appearance.

How can the media change this? Perhaps we should not expect change from the mainstream media, but from alternative media, independent media? What could be the formula for creating a space that is not subject to the logic that characterised the transition?

First, I personally do not work with the concepts of “young people” and “older people” because, among other things, this has also changed. The age of people who are currently actively watching and listening to internet content is very high. Fortunately, even in Bulgaria, people as old as 80 are now able to cope with everything in digital media. And this is a change that no one notices because everyone is interested in young people. But in Bulgaria, older people are more affluent. They have managed to save money.

Strange as it may seem, all these tools for measuring consumption always fail. Especially the 70-year-old group. They are of no interest to people meters. But I think this is a change we need to take into account. How can we bring together generations that are just starting out, just entering active, civic life, and generations that have a whole history behind them, of various cataclysms and processes that have taken place?

So, what could be the easiest thing to do in the media right now is, unfortunately, the hardest thing. Because each of us can take pictures, each of us can create internet content, not to mention online formats such as podcasts. Anyone can do it right away.

But the easier something is, the more you put it off. Or the more you put off collecting stories that no one else is telling. Or you don’t go at all, I mean, even to neighboring countries, Greece being an exception as tourists, not as people who want to understand more about other people’s lives.

Because the easier it is to make a media outlet, the harder it is to choose what to tell people from the many things there are to tell.

Photo: Zhana Popova (source: YouTube)

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