As a young journalist in the late 1980s, Janez Jansa, now prime minister, played a critical role in spurring Slovenia’s pro-democracy movement after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for opposing the Communist government and writing articles attacking the former Yugoslav Army. In an extraordinary inversion of the past, his opponents now accuse him of trying to censor the news media whose freedom he fought to uphold. A recent report by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog group based in New York, said that the Slovene news media 'faced indirect political and economic pressure from the government and business interests' and that government officials sometimes treated journalists as if they were 'the political opposition.' (New York Times, Monday)
Power tends to corrupt.
FEE Timely Classic
The Morality of Freedom by Robert A. Sirico