Edi Rama’s cruel trap for the opposition

Prime Minister Edi Rama has drawn the opposition into an absurd argument over numbers: how much airtime it gets compared with the government. Statistically, the opposition appears far more often. That is partly because most TV stations need people to fill airtime, and opposition figures are always ready to show up.

Rama is using that statistic to claim that media freedom in Albania is at its highest point, and that the media space is actually tilted in favour of the opposition. The opposition, especially Berisha, is trying to argue that this is a trick: that the numbers are mechanical and say nothing about the country’s real problems.

But this debate is Rama’s trap.

Not because it proves media freedom. Press freedom is not measured in kilos, or in hours of airtime. The point of the trap is to expose the opposition’s shallowness, the poor quality of its public voices, and its inability to act as a serious alternative.

The truth about press freedom has nothing to do with this argument. A government can have almost the entire media on its side and still be badly damaged by one serious journalist. Berisha knows this from experience. In his first term, he had the state broadcaster, RTSH, and most newspapers behind him, yet Koha Jonë alone managed to hurt him. In his second term, almost everyone was lined up with him, except Top Channel and Tema. Until 2011, when two other newspapers joined them, he still paid a heavy political price.

The ridiculous debate Rama has pushed the opposition into now forces it to admit the real problem: yes, opposition voices may occupy around 70 percent of television screens, but many of them are empty and say nothing essential.

That may be true.

But it is the opposition’s problem.

By spending all day on television, filling empty airtime and creating a cacophony of fools on screen, the opposition is doing the government a favour.

A real media battle with power requires people with integrity and public credibility — people capable of shaping public opinion. If your family television is run by fools, and those same fools are then sent to every other screen as well, Rama will gladly give you even 100 percent of the airtime, just so Albanians can see what kind of people stand against him.

So Rama is not lying when he says the opposition dominates television screens and portals. Statistically, it does.

The tragedy is the level at which the opposition is represented in the media. It is miserable. The opposition should be hiding some of these voices from the public, not pushing them in front of it, if only to avoid looking as foolish as they do.

Because opposition voters are not as foolish as many of the people presented as their analysts or journalists. They are better than that. But the fact that these people have captured not only the party, but also the opposition’s space in public debate, is not Rama’s problem. It is theirs.

This is freedom of expression — but freedom of expression used by the opposition against itself. It is one of democracy’s stranger mechanisms: it punishes you precisely because you dare to appear before it looking ridiculous.

Albania does not have censorship or media persecution in the classic sense. But Albanian society is persecuted by television noise and by the forced presence of fools on screen.

Rama has understood this. For the most part, he has hidden his own fools and left the space to the opposition’s fools.

The result is what we see.

Now they are effectively complaining: “You have given us too much airtime, and the public is using it to mock us and dislike us.”

That is one of Edi Rama’s more ruthless cruelties as the “director” of Albania’s media anarchy.

But he could never have achieved it without a banal opposition and its banal leader — a leader who, back when Albania had only one television station, used it 24 hours a day and still lost the referendum.

Precisely because his own madness had too much freedom on screen.

Originally published in Albanian as: Një kurth mizor i Edi Ramës për opozitën