Putting the ‘public’ into public-service broadcasting

“Investigative reporting has survived and will survive because the public values it and because the fire to do it burns in the individual reporters and editors who do it, not in the companies that employ them,” Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Deborah Nelson told me in an interview during her first visit to Slovakia in 2016.

Nelson recently returned to Slovakia with a group of students, who came here to explore how Slovak media are coping with fake news and to find out which groups of people are most receptive to propaganda-driven messages on social networks. As it happens, they arrived just as Slovak media were discussing the decision by the management of RTVS, Slovakia’s public-service broadcaster, to scrap Reportéri, the last investigative reporting show on Slovak television.