Greeks Question Media, and New Voices Pipe Up

Apostolis Kaparoudakis at the controls 
of the Athens radio station and cafe of which he was a founder.

ATHENS — Late on a recent evening, crowds gathered at the Radio Bubble cafe in downtown Athens, drinking beer and talking politics. The cafe, in the trendy yet rough-around-the-edges Exarchia neighborhood, funds a small leftist online radio station of the same name, which broadcasts from inside.

At the sidewalk tables outside, where guests smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, the conversation inevitably turned to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s unilateral decision in June to shut down the state broadcaster, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, known as ERT, overnight, turning an institution once seen as a bastion of patronage hires into a veritable martyr to press freedom.

“When a war begins, they send an army to protect public TV,” said Apostolis Kaparoudakis, who was a founder of Radio Bubble in 2007. “Here they sent it to close it down.”

As a song by the Beastie Boys played in the background, Mr. Kaparoudakis said he had started Radio Bubble to play good music, “which is a political act,” but also as a challenge to the mainstream news media in Greece, almost all of which is owned by the country’s business elite, who often dictate the editorial line.

The radio station, which has an active presence on Twitter, is one of many small, often left-leaning news media outlets that have cropped up in Greece in recent years. Although their audiences are still relatively modest, they are playing an increasingly vital role in the conversation, largely because they question the country’s dominant power structures.

Even before the economic crisis hit, polls showed that Greeks lacked trust in the mainstream news media almost as much as they lacked it in politicians, seeing both as intertwined in a kind of crony capitalism that helped push the country to bankruptcy.

Now, four years into the crisis, Greeks are even more skeptical of mainstream news organizations and even hungrier for information from nontraditional sources, especially if it veers from the government’s line that Greece has no alternative to the austerity policies demanded by its foreign lenders....
[...] www.nytimes.com