Stelios Kouloglou - In Greece we have the Balkan variant of an international hope.
Text: Marilena Giannouli
Stelios Kouloglou needs no introduction to Greeks. He is one of the most highly-reputed present-day journalists and his programme “Reportage without Frontiers†won awards as the best current-affairs programme on Greek television for 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. In 2000 his series on the Greek Civil War won an award as the best Greek documentary and the “Eurocomenius†prize, which is awarded to the best European historical documentary. He won the same prize in 2002 for his documentary “Death Struggleâ€.
But these honours have not been enough to avert his dismissal from Greek state television ERT, in such a way as to raise a storm of protest, both among politicians and among journalists, as well as among his loyal viewers. On the internet 45,000 people have declared themselves to be his supporters.
We met him at his home in Aigina. “I spent the summers in Agia Marina in my childhood years. It was very nice then. And the memory has stayed with me. I bought this house in 1996. I always loved Aigina because I spent my childhood summers here. It continues to be a place I love, where I come to relax and also when I need to ‘bring work with me’â€, he says to us.
When we ask him about his life’s course up to the present he answers: “I finished university, but in an unrelated field: pharmacy. During my studies I became involved in the student movement, which was intense in those days, and I brought out a student newspaper. I was the publisher and the director. That was how I came into journalism. I liked it and I subsequently began to work in journalism. I decided to do some supplementary journalistic study and I went to Paris, while at the same time working as correspondent for the newspaper “Avghi†and the magazine “Antiâ€. Two scholarships from the school of journalism sent him to Japan and India: “The most basic thing I acquired from all this was the experience,†he says. After that, during the period of perestroika, for five years he went as a correspondent to Moscow and then to Yugoslavia, living through the whole period of the war. “When the war was over I came back to Greece and bought the house in Aigina.†In 1995 he decided to go into television. “When I started ‘Reportage without Frontiers’ there were no other investigative journalism programmes on Greek television. At that time most people advised me to do a talk show. Nobody thought that this programme would be successful. At that time ET2 (the second programme of Greek state television, formerly YENED, the station of the Greek armed forces) was a wilderness. Nobody went there. But the programme went ahead. And after that there were others.
The story of the “700 euro generation†(young people whose monthly wage is 700 euros)
For thirteen years Stelios Kouloglou made programmes for state television. “As the years passed a mutual respect developed. They knew that all the subjects I deal with are carefully selected. I wasn’t going to put the station in a difficult position,†he says. Usually he didn’t announce his subjects in advance but when he decided to take up the issue of the high cost of living, he sought out people on the internet who would be willing to talk about it on his programme. Already, as he remarks: “although the programme was doing very well on ERT, both from the viewpoint of ratings (it was in the first place at ET1) and financially (it was in the first place for advertising) there was a continual grumbling about its content, which the government didn’t like. The complaints didn’t come to me directly. I found out about them through others. They didn’t like the subject: from the national resistance to organic products. They didn’t want me talking about genetically modified foods, high-frequency transmission towers, the banks. There was hardly anything that they liked.†And he continues: “Of course what followed then was covert warfare. They wouldn’t provide me with technical assistance, as happens with other programmes. For example I asked for material from the ERT archives to use it in the programmes, and they wouldn’t give it to me, or they gave it to me only after a very long delay or they asked me to sign special documents before I could have it. Things that in the normal practice of a television station could be done in an hour. Because we are talking about television, not the run-of-the-mill public sector.†They even refused to give him a letter to certify that he worked for ERT, so that he could get a visa for China: “They said that they didn’t want me to go to China, for political reasons. Obviously so that I wouldn’t touch on the question of human rights in China,†he notes, and continues:
“In the meantime I was receiving hints that my contract was not going to be renewed for the following year.†That led him to send off a letter to the president of ERT, in which he expressed his inability to understand why they didn’t want him to go to China, and also referring to the rumours about non-renewal of his contract with ERT. “After two days Panagopoulos, the president of ERT, summoned me and told me firstly that he didn’t want me to go to China and secondly that my programmes were not going to be continued the following year because he didn’t like them. So the conversation was over in the space of a minute. And immediately afterwards, when I came out of his office, they had prepared a statement, which they released to the press, announcing that they were not going to be continuing my programmes. When he was asked by journalists, he said that he didn’t like my programmes. That was that.â€
The Reasons for the Dismissal
When we asked him about the reasons for him receiving such treatment, he said: “The government had decided that the way to handle the subject of the high cost of living was to launch a public relations campaign.†And he continued: “Whatever happens is on the level of public relations. Everything is handled exclusively as a problem of public relations. In reality nothing at all is subject to control. There is no policy. There is no government. Everything is regulated by public opinion polls and public image. In essence there is no politics. The problem of the high cost of living worsened and they had no answer to it. But then, in February, they had decided to handle it as a problem of public presentation. Evidently seeking help from the big television channels.
In the meantime, from March onwards, when it started looking as if the “700 euro generation†was not going to be screened, I let the leaders of the opposition parties know about this and contacted Roussopoulos (the Government’s press spokesman). In the summer of 2004, as soon as the New Democracy (centre-right) party won the elections, he had found out that I was negotiating with MEGA channel and rang me up and asked me to stay (with the state television). In return I asked for a free hand, which I had had before, and he told me there was no problem with that. So when the “700 euro†problem came up I telephoned and told him that what was happening was a violation of our agreement. He told me that he didn’t know anything about it and that he would speak with Panagopoulos. So Panagopoulos’ decision to stop my programmes was taken with the knowledge of the government. Certainly Roussopoulos was involved. Because the agreement that I should be with ERT was not between myself and Panagopoulos but between myself and Roussopoulos. It is true that the pressures were coming not from inside ERT but from New Democracy and the Prime Minister’s office.†And he continued: “It was bad for them at the public relations level because Panagopoulos handled it very badly, arrogantly, in a Bonapartist style. He will pay for that one day. But the decision was from the government.â€â€¦
“I wasn’t doing news coverage. I wasn’t getting involved with Zachopoulos (a recent scandal). The present government is trying to put its stamp everywhere and follows the policy of whoever is not with us is against us. If you are not one of us, in other words, you are out. And that was shown in what followed too. That is to say in the matter of Zorbas, the special investigator into corruption. That is a similar case. Of course what is involved there is much more important than television programmes. But it is all part of the same mentality. What is being erected is a kind of parallel secret state. The only difference from the secret state of the 1960s is that they are not murdering people. They just fire them from their jobs while at the same time corrupting consciences with money and positions. That is the project under construction at the moment.â€
Apology of an Economic Hitman
“Reportage without Frontiers†and “Thematic Evening†haven’t been Stelios Kouloglou’s only activities in these years. He has written seven books, of which the latest, “Never go alone to the post officeâ€, is a best-seller, with more than 35,000 copies having been sold (in the small Greek market, W.H.) And it doesn’t stop there. “In parallel with all that I shot a full-length (90 minute) dramatized documentary, which is a very big production and took me three years. It is called “Apology of an Economic Hitman†and it is the story of an American economist who in the sixties worked in a team with other American economists, in collaboration with the Pentagon and the World Bank, and their mission was to go to Third World countries and bring them into economic subjection. Loans were the key instrument. That is to say they gave loans to these countries knowing in advance that they couldn’t repay them, so as to get them under their control. If some president of a specific country didn’t want to play that particular game, they sent the CIA to assassinate him. If the attempt at assassination did not succeed, the army, following the custom, would intervene. I took a very large number of interviews with one of those economists where the whole process was analysed. Finally I took him to Ecuador, where their president had been assassinated. He apologized to the people of Ecuador and I filmed him doing that. It was turned into a film, with actors also playing. It will be screened in Greek cinemas in October and is already being screened in Los Angeles. I don’t know if I will manage to get there. It has been selected for screening at the 61st Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, one of the most important European film festivals, where it will be included as part of the Critics’ Week on 12th and 13th August and they have asked me to present it.
TV without frontiers, Greece
Among Stelios Kouloglou’s plans is one difficult pioneering project. “I think that the traditional media, newspapers and journalistic television are going to come up against a great crisis of credibility. There are very many questions about their future. What is up-to-date today is Internet, which is the future for everything, including television and new broadcasting. Already the news bulletins of the state and private television channels go over the internet. Young people get their news nowadays from the internet. So we are planning to create an internet television, which will have honest and reliable news and quality entertainment, with documentaries, good shorter and longer films. It will operate with user participation and will try to make use of the great creative potential that exists among young people. This potential is today is today devalued and blocked.†And he informed us: “The station, named “TV without frontiers, Greeceâ€, will be starting from 1st November and there will be around fifteen people working on it.†He acknowledges that “it is a very difficult undertaking, the basic income being from advertisements, which are becoming more and more common on the internet.â€
“Apart from conventional news – a fire or an increase in charges for electricity – there will be other news of the kind that does not usually get out, either because of vested interests or because of attitudes. When I speak of attitudes I mean ecological issues and when I speak of vested interests I mean economic and political issues, which they don’t want aired. We want it to be a station which will have good, up-to-date information so that the user can find out what is really going on. Beyond that, there will be the possibility for those who are interested in going deeper into questions to look at the points of detail.â€
Although Triantafyllopoulos (a Greek ‘yellow’ journalist) “is not really to his tasteâ€, as he acknowledges, he recognizes his great success in terms of the number of visitors to his site and he is also pleased that Roussopoulos and Zacharea are preparing something similar (the wife of Roussopoulos, Mara Zacharea is a well-known “anchor woman†in Greece). “For me this is good. It opens a market. It educates people, and beyond that we will judge the content and the presentation.†When we asked him about the risk involved in his project he said: “It’s touch and go. We could be a year in front. We could be a year behind. It may turn out that this time next year there will be another five in the game. It is a gamble. We’ll try to be provident in winning the gamble so that we don’t get too deeply into debt before we see how things are going after a year.â€
The contribution
More than 150 “Reportage without Frontiers†were screened on Greek television. To our question on how he managed to compile such a volume of material, he replied: “If you make the effort, they talk to you. Not everyone is nice. But it is in the interest even of the bad guys to talk to you. If you give them the opportunity to talk without distorting what they say, they talk.â€
When we asked him if because of some of the subjects he touches on he has sometimes received threats, he automatically said no. But he did speak of “interventions from the American Embassy at the time that Miller was the ambassadorâ€, which led in 2005 to his being transferred from NET to ET1, “a channel not visited by those zappingâ€, as he characteristically says, along with an announcement that all informational programmes were being moved there – which was not true – and giving him “Thematic Eveningâ€. The public followed him and he himself recommended to his collaborators that they should be particular careful not to provide anybody with ammunition. “We didn’t give them any pretext. This is why they decided to do it the aggressive way they did,†he says.
As for the future? “At some point things will change. This downhill course can’t continue forever. I think that we are part of a global system, from which there is no escape. There is no hope and things are getting worse. It’s just that here in Greece we would have, I would say, the Balkan variant of a global hope. There are frightful contradictions that are so great that I think we have reached the edge of the precipice. At some point the pendulum will start to move in the opposite direction. I don’t think it will start from Greece. Nothing has started from here, except in antiquity. We are a small country, with little power. Some global current will pull Greece along with it too. But the change will start somewhere else. Probably in the United States, where there is a very powerful protest movement, which could make Obama president. Now, as to whether Obama will live up to the expectations is another story. The world seeks hope. That much is obvious.â€
When we yielded to the temptation of asking this distinguished journalist to choose a subject or a programme that stands out from the others owing to its content or its difficulty, he said: “There are a lot of programmes. I am proud of some things that have happened in parallel with those programmes, to which I have contributed.†And he elaborated; “I did a tele-marathon in Thessaloniki from the proceeds of which a school was built in Afghanistan. At one point they telephoned me and I arranged for them to be given some unutilized funding from a bequest to Non-Governmental Organizations. I did a series of programmes on drugs and “The Over-18sâ€, a state organization that does very good work on drugs and rehabilitation of users. A friend of mine became interested, I put him in contact with them and he gave them a significant amount, with which a building was constructed which hosts mothers and their children, when they are at the stage of re-entry into the community. These are things that have been presented to me where have I have been able to make some