The business attackers and the press NGOs trying to protect their "honor"

Today, our newsroom received two emails sent on behalf of "two associations." One was called the Albanian Media Council, the other the Ethical Media Alliance. I had never heard of either of them.

They wrote to complain about our articles on two people who actively called for negative review-bombing against businesses targeted by the so-called "Revolution."

The first complaint was about a woman named Sonila Sota. In a WhatsApp group set up by Fatos Lubonja, she openly urged people to leave fake negative reviews. The association's complaint was that we published her name, photo, and phone number. Given what she did, we could have easily revealed where she works and what she has done in her professional life—and she would have deserved it. Instead, we simply showed the public who was responsible for terrorizing Albania's tourism sector for a week, right up until Google stepped in to clean up the mess.

The second complaint was about a guy named Enea Doku. He runs an agency that trains young people on how to use social media. Following the orders of the "Revolution," he left six negative reviews in just a few minutes, targeting businesses from the north to the south of the country. One of those reviews hit a business owned by media publisher Artan Dulaku, who owns Vizion Plus. Yet on his own agency's website, this same guy boasts that he trains staff for one of Dulaku's other companies, Ford. In plain English: he is a dirty hypocrite who bites the hand that feeds his own business.

He has now been reported to the police by one of the businesses he attacked. He will have plenty of time to defend himself before the prosecutor and the courts. The police have documented the evidence following the criminal complaint, so he can rest easy.

By exposing these two business attackers, we simply did what any responsible media outlet should do: protect the public interest instead of hiding the names of culprits involved in a crime. Now, these attackers want to ruin local businesses while keeping their own identities secret, hiding behind anonymous profiles to destroy people's livelihoods.

My real issue, however, is with these two media associations. I asked ChatGPT who ran them. It turns out that both are led by the exact same person: someone named Koloreto Cukali, who is apparently part of this same revolutionary crowd.

Just as his business attackers use one name to drop eight fake reviews, this guy uses one name to run two separate organizations. And from that perch, he lectures us on "media ethics" and demands that we stop exposing the attackers.

Any organization that claims to represent the press—and takes funding supposedly to protect journalists—should stand on the side of the media and the public interest. Instead, this Koloreto fellow, running two empty associations without a single member, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the attackers and demands we stay silent so we don't cause them any discomfort.

Think about the anxiety of the business owners who spent days in terror because of the brutal assaults led by these malicious groups. Imagine people who have bank loans to pay, who employ their own family members, and who face total ruin simply because they were put on a blacklist for not agreeing with Andi Bushati, Gjergj Erebara, Arlind Qorri, and the rest of the mob following them. The associations don't care about those families. They only care about protecting the goals of their "Revolution" and making sure their attackers are not exposed.

I don't mind that this guy with two associations supports this mob and their destructive campaign. His freedom of choice should be respected. But he must also respect the freedom of others to defend themselves against him and his attackers. Above all, he has no right to speak on behalf of the media—or on behalf of me and the many other working journalists who don't live off NGO grants, but actually survive in the real newspaper market through our own hard work.

I hope he also ends up in court once the trials against these business attackers begin. He can show off his talents there, explaining to the judge that destroying a local business is a noble ideal to be proud of, while exposing an attacker is a lack of media ethics.

The world is full of parasitic associations used to trade political favors that never actually represent working journalists. But nowhere else in the world will you find organizations registered to "protect the press" that instead protect attackers and fight for their right to remain anonymous. Yet in our country, we have both associations like this and journalists like this.

For example, while BIRN runs around trying to expose traditional journalists who write under pen names, these people from BIRN-linked NGOs are outraged when the real names of business attackers are revealed by the media.

This absurdity proves one final point: we now know who is writing the fake reviews about the Albanian press. It is the very people whose only real "writing" in life consists of leaving negative reviews on anyone they hate.

Originally published in Albanian as: Përdhunuesit publikë të biznesit dhe OJF-të e shtypit që duan t’u ruajnë “nderin”