Greek media under Papandreou
Authors: McDonald Robert 
Published: October 2007

The problems of newspapers, radio and TV in Greece today

The murder on 19 March 1983 of George Athanassiades, publisher of the conservative newspaper Vradyni, profoundly disturbed Greek political life. It is one of a sequence of incidents which appear to have been engineered to destabilise democracy in a manner which is reminiscent of events preceding the Colonels' coup in April 1967.

On the last weekend in February there was a security scare which caused the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government to put the police and army on the alert. It is not clear whether some terrorist action or a coup plot had been uncovered but, as well as the security forces, the civilian political defence mechanisms of the communist and socialist parties were mobilised. This involved party activists gathering at vital centres such as telephone exchanges with a view to taking control if necessary. The manoeuvre infuriated New Democracy opposition leader Evangelos Averoff, who believes that PASOK is a socialist dog wagged by its Marxist tail and that if this faction were ever to gain control of the party it would seek to establish a one-party state.

When Mr Athanassiades was shot by a lone assailant, Mr Averoff instantly dubbed the killing an assassination and accused the government of having cultivated a climate of hatred and terrorism which provoked such actions. He called on Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou to resign. The government and some members of Mr Averoff's own party believe the tenor of his denunciation was excessive and further contributed to the tension. Tens of thousands of right-wing protestors turned Mr Athanassiades' funeral into a rowdy anti-government demonstration.

The situation was exacerbated two weeks later when three bombs ripped through a hotel at Didymotikhon near the Turkish border where 80 members of New Democracy were attending a banquet. A chance extension of the proceedings kept party members away from the site of the blasts, otherwise dozens of people could have been killed.

A note purporting to come from a group called the Organisation of Anti-Military Struggle claimed Mr Athanassiades was killed because Vradyni had made light of a number of unexplained suicides among military conscripts. The organisation threatened action against other publishers and journalists if they continued to ignore the ‘appalling’ conditions in the army. The note implied left-wing inspiration for the killing. Pro-government newspapers have suggested that the killing may have been the work of remnants of the Military Police (ESA), the dictatorship's political enforcers with whom Mr Anthanassiades had a running feud. ESA twice closed the paper and, after the restoration of political government, Vradyni published exposés of the unit's torture tactics. The Athens police have intimated that the killing may have been carried out by the same people who murdered CIA station chief Richard Welch outside his home in 1975, an unsolved crime which appears to have been carried out by professionals.

This note on the state of the Greek press in the wake of the election of the socialist PASOK government in October 1981 is a postscript to Pillar & Tinderbox, my book for Writers & Scholars Educational Trust/Index on Censorship, which examines the media under the dictatorship (1967-74) and during the seven years of conservative government which followed. In it I suggested among other things that the press is a microcosm of the state of public life. The thesis of the article which follows is that, following the orderly transition of power from conservatives to socialists, much of the passion of the press has dissipated. There is an increasingly industrial outlook, profits are taking priority over politics. Newspapers are slowly becoming infused with the grey, statistical mentality — a by-product of membership of the European Community — an attitude which, however dull, encourages stability. One can only hope the recent flare-up is a temporary aberration.