Sewers and media
For many years, the leftist main opposition couldn’t stop talking about the “systemic media,” the “media of intertwining interests,” and the “sewer media.” The latter was a loan from the extreme right, which also called it “porn media.”
These were not terms used by the semi-official troll army. These were publicly uttered by SYRIZA officials and, in fact, on the first birthday of the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition government (January 24, 2016), instead of a cake, organizers showed excerpts of news bulletins with TV presenters making mistakes, to the delight of the people who had gathered at the Tae Kwon Do Stadium in southern Athens.
The insults continued throughout the SYRIZA-ANEL term in government and after. TV channels were blamed for SYRIZA’s electoral defeat in 2019, the re-election of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in 2023 and his consistent first place in the polls throughout this period.
The TV channels are capable of filling up an entire news bulletin out of the vague comments of a party official
Two months after the June 2023 elections, the insults and the laughs stopped abruptly. A new TV “product” hit the market and the TV channels started obsessing with the familiar shallowness and voraciousness that characterizes them. So we saw new leader Stefanos Kasselakis walking his dog, returning sweaty from the gym, drinking coffee in a plastic cup – which is not recycled – etc. The leader of PASOK, Nikos Androulakis, remarked on October 5 that “you cannot talk of sewer media, but when they start promoting you day and night, you don’t say a thing.”
SYRIZA members voted for their new leader. Some say they shot themselves on the foot. Kasselakis was elected, he started expelling party cadres and all hell broke loose. It sparked controversies, statements and attacks. “The Kasselakis phenomenon,” party official Nikos Filis said on September 26, “concerns the phenomenon of metapolitics, the spectacle and not the substance, something like Beppe Grillo in Italy or even worse – I saw the way Mr Kasselakis delivered his speech – it resembled Trump’s style, not substance.”
Great news for the TV channels, which are capable of filling up an entire news bulletin out of the vague comments of a party official, especially when they have statements like the above. In SYRIZA, they are still unhappy, even though its officials appear on television all day long. The grumbling now has to do with the over-promotion of those who disagree with Kasselakis, forgetting that the viewing public wants fights – disputes increase ratings, and these in turn create demand for those who “talk boldly.”
Don’t get me wrong. The relationship between television and politics is problematic, but this has nothing to do with SYRIZA, nor the conspiracy theories it occasionally spews. It has to do with the nature of the medium and its Greek version. On this last point, I have more to say.
