A rail disaster spurs a media reckoning
Two weeks ago, a passenger train and a freight train collided on the line between Athens and Thessaloniki, in Greece. Several carriages of the passenger train derailed; some caught fire. At least fifty-seven people were killed, many of them students returning home from seasonal festivities in Athens. Initially, senior Greek politicians attributed the crash primarily to human error—a narrative, Greek media-watchers told me, that was bolstered by major outlets whose coverage is often favorable toward the governing party. But as public anger rose, the government U-turned, at least in part. Last weekend, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the conservative prime minister, apologized in a Facebook post, and acknowledged that the crash couldn’t have happened if basic safety measures had been in place.
Mitsotakis wasn’t the only one to offer an apology after the crash. So, too, did a prominent journalists’ union in Athens, which suggested that journalists themselves must take their share of the responsibility. In a statement, the union said that major Greek news organizations had largely downplayed repeated warnings from rail unions that the system was unsafe, and blamed what it called “structural problems” plaguing the Greek media landscape. “As long as the media distance themselves from their mission to serve as a check on power, as long as the prioritization of news is dominated by criteria unrelated to the defense of the public interest, as long as media companies are limited to operating simply as businesses and in terms of television ratings and traffic, as long as journalists are limited in investigating, then the institutional guarantees for the functioning of the state will be weakened,” the statement said.
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