The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 2010)
Radio Euskadi, the public radio of the Basque Country: A sad case of censorship
It is always sad to report cases of censorship, particularly when they come from supposedly progressive sources. Here are the facts:
On February 19th, Manex Rekarte Cowie, the content advisor of the Boulevard radio programme of Radio Euskadi, sent an email to Takis Fotopoulos, the editor, requesting an urgent interview on the current economic crisis of Greece for the Panorama section of their program, which Takis immediately accepted. As Manex wrote at the time: “Weekly on our programme we do an international interview with a personality of worldwide importance who reveals us an international point of view of one of the themes of the week (…) This interview would be done by phone, in English and would be relatively brief (maximum 20 minutes), and then it would be held through our 4 radio stations and 4 television station as voice news, it would also be held on our webpage where thousands of Basques around the world would be able to follow your words specially in the United states and throughout South America”.
The interview did take place on February 22nd, but we only managed to contact Manex again a week later (March 1st) to learn that:
“The interview was fantastic and we followed it up with a great debate about how the economic scale has changed for various countries in the eurozone and how the community must react in order to gain back the economies of certain countries (…) I must admit that I was well aware this polemic would come up. I personally am very fond of this type of diverse points of view and polemics even in a public radio as ours. Things got somewhat hefty talking about Greece’s division from the EU and eurozone and also about the corruption (bare in mind we actually had somebody from the PP one of the parties most damaged by corruption in Spain over the last years). But our listeners phone’s were burning once we had broadcast the interview. And that is a fantastic sign".
However, since then, Manex disappeared and did not reply to any more messages from us to the extent of not even answering the phone. In the meantime, we realised that the interview was never posted to their webpage and they did not even have the decency to send us a copy of the original interview in English, (despite our repeated requests to him), which we had in mind to post it to our website and as an article in the journal.
It is obvious to us that this is a clear case of censorship, presumably, because they did not approve of the antisystemic stand of Takis on the matter and changed their mind about giving the interview any more publicity, following their original “mistake” to air it.
We very much regret of their decision and we publicise the event so that future interviewees by this station have this experience in mind before they take any decision to participate in an interview with this program.
The Editorial Committee
March 28, 2010