[Note: this piece is based on a project conducted by HlidaciPes and Aktuality.sk, both member newsrooms of IPI’s Central and Eastern Independent Media Network, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The project examined the collaboration between disinformation media in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.]
Czechoslovakia as a state has not existed for 32 years, and the two halves of the former federation are now moving in visibly different directions – including the media sphere. This was definitively confirmed in 2023 by the return of Robert Fico to the head of the Slovak government, which has since effectively nationalized the public media and put some prominent faces of the disinformation and pro-Kremlin media scene into senior government positions. This ‘disinformation’ scene is now trying to increase its reach in both countries by evoking the spirit of the former common state.
Shortly after Robert Fico became Slovakia’s prime minister for the fourth time in the autumn of 2023, he gave an interview to the Czech internet video portal XTV. Few media outputs better illustrate how alternative media in the Czech Republic and Slovakia can be mutually beneficial today.
The main face of XTV is Lubomír Veselý, a member of the supervisory body of the public Czech Television, who has previously made no secret of his support for Fico. In an interview, Veselý suggested that Czech Television (which he helps supervise by virtue of his position on the media board) deliberately portrayed Fico as a “villain” because many Slovak voters live in the Czech Republic.
Veselý’s guests on YouTube are often high-ranking Czech politicians from one part of the political spectrum. It is no coincidence that they adore Fico and similar figures as their role models. These are not journalistic interviews, but rather friendly chats without critical questions. And the aforementioned interview with Robert Fico was no exception.
XTV also gives space to representatives of pure conspiracy theories such as Tibor Eliot Rostas, a notorious conspiracy theorist who has been convicted of anti-Semitism in Slovakia.
The Czech podcast website Radio Universum also came to Bratislava to interview Slovak Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová, who, since taking office, has been criticised for staff purges in cultural institutions and for her earlier work at the internet pseudo-television Slovan.
TV Slovan gave space to nationalist and pro-Kremlin politicians who often oppose vaccines and criticise the mainstream and public media.
One of the presenters of TV Slovan was the aforementioned current Minister Martina Šimkovičová. Her ministerial appointment was a signal to the alternative media that after years of ostracization and ridicule, they would now be given a central role in political discourse.
But is this really the case? While some of the interviews of Slovak politicians to alternative media evoke the impression that Fico’s government has directed its media policy exclusively towards the ‘alternative’ quasi-media sector, a closer look suggests that Fico still needs the media-mainstream.
On the one hand, government politicians “warm up” their audience with appearances on disinformation platforms such as community radios InfoVojna or Slobodný vysielač, but on the other hand, they still call classic press conferences to address the big media. And the alternative media then readily adopt these standard messages to make their own websites look more crowded.
The quasi-media also capitalize on their proximity to politicians and the absence of real journalism. They can monetize the interviews with government officials as their exclusive content – whether by selling web advertising, or asking for direct financial contributions from their audience.
But returning to the Czech-Slovak dimension, media content shared between the two countries does not need to be translated, so videos or other content are usable on both sides of the border – where similarly attuned audiences can be found.
This increases revenue and gives Czech quasi-media an influence on Slovak politics.
In turn, Slovak alternative media with the support of government voices, spread resistance to the Czech “mainstream” and public media and help increase support, for example, for the nationalization of Czech Television and Czech Radio along the lines of the Slovakian model.
The circle is tightening and a Czech-Slovak quasi-media which feeds off each other is emerging.
A distinctive feature of this co-operation between alternative media in the Czech Republic and Slovakia is also its proximity to the pro-Kremlin scene which is hidden under the facade of “fraternal” Czech-Slovak relations, exploiting nostalgia for the former common state. This new virtual Czechoslovakia, which the quasi-media scene is constructing, is built almost exclusively on politicians who share some sympathy towards the current Russian regime.
On the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Robert Fico said that the West “falsely demonises Russian President Putin” and that the EU “supports the mutual killing of Slavs”. Another big fan of alternative media, Lubos Blaha, an MEP from Fico’s Smer party, appears regularly in Russian state media, and in October 2024 he apologised directly in Moscow for what he called the West’s “Russophobia”.
However, the synergy of the Czech and Slovak disinformation scenes has its limits. Hard data show that Czech society is significantly less pro-Russian and significantly less prone to trust conspiracy theories.
According to the Globsec Trends 2024 survey, 68 percent of the Czech public perceive Russia as the main culprit in the conflict in Ukraine, 10 percent perceive Ukraine and 16 percent perceive the West. In Slovakia, however, only 41 percent see Russia as the main culprit, 20 percent Ukraine and even 31 percent the West.
According to the same data, Slovaks also trust NGOs much less, and 44 percent of them believe that the Western way of life threatens the Slovak one. In the Czech Republic it is “only” 26 percent.
This Czecho-Slovak gap is also very visible in state politics. The Czech government’s coordinator of strategic communication, Otakar Foltýn, made headlines by publicly saying that “those who admire Russian President Putin are very often people who are unhappy.”
The Slovak concept of strategic communication adopted by the Fico government, on the other hand, does not mention Russia at all. It does name the trends of the Slovaks’ declining trust in the European Union and NATO, but the causes of this distrust are missing. Experts have long counted among them the significant influence of Russian influence operations.
Shortly after the Fico government took office, a group of people who had long dedicated themselves to combating hybrid threats left the Slovak civil service. In addition to David Puchovsky, who managed the police Facebook profile Hoaxes and Frauds, this included the six-member strategic communications team at the Office of the Government, as well as the head of the Centre for Combating Hybrid Threats at the Ministry of the Interior, Daniel Milo.
Although it can be assumed for a number of reasons that the Slovak-style of “state capture” would not be so easy in the Czech Republic, thanks also to its more robust public institutions including judicial independence and a stronger public media, contemporary Slovakia is undoubtedly an inspiration for some Czech politicians.
The risk that the Slovak experiment may spill over into the Czech Republic, supported by the connection between alternative media and their political allies, is also understood by serious journalists.
Partly in response to the Fico government’s attacks on the media, the respected Czech internet television DVTV established a Slovakian branch to support independent news coverage. Meanwhile, the Slovak Investigative Centre of Jan Kuciak, has formally registered a branch in the Czech Republic where it is helping the Czech committee of the International Press Institute to develop its own platform for safe journalism.
Perhaps surprisingly, the “Made in Czechoslovakia” brand works even more than 30 years after the collapse of the federation. This time as a laboratory for the cross-border influence of the disinformation and alternative media scene.
This article was commissioned as part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), a Europe-wide mechanism that tracks, monitors, and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and Candidate Countries. The project is co-funded by the European Commission.
