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The disinformation scene has become a tool of media capture


Take over regulators, capture public media, and label critical journalists foreign agents — classic tactics to kill press freedom.

Bodoky was speaking to a live audience at the Press under Pressure panel discussion in April 2025, held in Bratislava as part of the World Between the Lines festival in cooperation with The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI). By the spring of 2025, the government – which took power in late 2023 – had passed a law that dismantled the public-service broadcaster, removing its legally appointed director in the process and establishing a new regulatory body which is now headed by Ján Krošlák, the former spokesperson of Slovakia’s authoritarian-leaning prime minister of the 1990s. The Fico government has been legitimising online disinformation channels, of which there are dozens in Slovak, not just by granting them access to press conferences and treating them as fully-fledged journalists, and often giving them exclusive interviews, but also via the use of public funds.

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