Of Obscenity, Stupidity and Bad Taste in Greek TV

Greek Communist party MP Liana Kanelli is been invited to a live program on Thursday morning. During a commercials break, she exits the live studio. The moment she opens the door, she gets confronted with two boxing gloves and a jumping jack wrapped up with the Greek flag. A cameraman is filming the ‘farce’,  supposedly to be a ‘comic moment with the victim of a Golden Dawn assault’. 

The clown with the boxing gloves and the Greek flag is presenter a low-level ‘satire’ program at private skai television.

The clown had apparently tried to reconstruct in what he thought a funny way, the scene when a Golden Dawn MP had punched Kanelli on a live program last June.

In a state of shock Kanelli refuses to go back to the studio. The live program broadcasts commercials for whole 12 minutes. When the break is over the magazine presenter explains to tv-viewers what had happened and apologizes for the incident.

After a while, Kanelli is back on the live-studio and is breaking down in tears. She condemns any act of violence even if in the form of  bad joke or farce.

The presenter/host, who officially apologizes to Kanelli to the incident, urges her to turn a blind eye to the whole tasteless incident arguing “Look at it under this perspective: they are men, darling!”

This unprecedented lack of journalistic culture and arguments -to say it politely -comes just hours after a journalist working for the same television channel run an interview with GD leader Nikos Michaloliakos.

THIS was something no Greek has ever seen on the 20 years of private television in this country.

The interviewee pushed the interviewer into his own role. What’s worst is that foolish, inexperienced journalist of the life-style section just accepted the challenge. While the interviewer was asking the GD-leader about the party’s approach to Hitler, Nazism etc, the interviewee was striking back asking questions about state debts of the tv-channel owner and other unpleasant questions of the journalists/high-calibers of the tv station.

And do you know what happened? The master-control, that is the director and editor in chief of the program, was whispering to journalist’s ear the answers to Michaloliakos questions, with the effect that the journalist was answering them with a delay of several minutes and after the discussion had gone over to other topics.

GD-leader repeatedly mocked and ridiculed the ‘journalist’, while the twitter community was in uproar, eating alive the interviewer for allowing the interviewee to gain points and accusing him of offering Michaloliakos a blank check to promote his party’s positions.

• “You can’t defend the interests of skai when the other defends fascism.’
• “I hope many are already in bed, because this on skai is not a joke.”
• “With interviews like that the journo will promote GD into second party.”
• “This interview should be taught in journos’ school as an example of what to avoid.”
• “If you put a nerd of a journo opposite of a populist fascist, then you give points to GD.” 
• ‘Good journalists are without job nowadays.”

At the very end of the interview, the journalist asked the GD-leader, whether his questions were OK – or something like that.

I don’t remember exactly what the journo said due to high adrenaline shots from laughing for the fall of the Greek journalism and the decline of a society as a whole. Although I should had cried…

PS Publicity for the shake of publicity? We should declare October 25th into “Bad Journalism Day”  

 UPDATE: Thursday noon, Liana Kanelli resigned from “Panathinaiki Symmaxia”, an organization set up by Skai-TV Yiannis Alafouzos aiming to support FC Panathinaikos.