From SPAK on screen/ How the media is used to defend those accused of corruption

2026-05-18 19:03:00, Aktualitet Blerina Gjoka

According to media and communication experts, government officials accused by SPAK are increasingly using the media to clean up their image and relativize the investigations.

The former head of the National Agency for the Information Society, Mirlinda Karçanaj, appeared on Thursday in prime-time on national television Top-Channel as she faces prosecution charges as part of a structured criminal group led by Ergys Agasi and Ermal Beqiraj in manipulating tenders for this agency.

The in-depth investigation by the Special Prosecution Office, SPAK, shows how AKSHI funds were diverted into the pockets of Karçanaj and controversial businessman Ergys Agasi through fictitious contracts, extortion, wine boxes filled with cash, and anonymous persons to cover up ownership.

But, Karçanaj used her 45 minutes live on the media platform to make an apology without actually facing all the criminal charges in the prosecution's investigative file.

She was given the opportunity to make a personal and emotional account of how she had experienced the allegations of justice rather than confronting these allegations, shifting the public narrative from the question of what happened with public funds under her leadership at the agency to an attempt to provoke public pity.

This is not an isolated case where Albanian media are used by defendants to publicly vilify the accusations brought against them or to lead PR campaigns in their defense, an aspect that is considered a violation of media freedom.

Since the arrest of Tirana Mayor Erjon Veliaj, who faces 13 criminal charges for corruption and money laundering, a series of media operations have been undertaken to present him as a victim of a justice system or a political conspiracy, including theatrical acts in the courtroom.

The phenomenon of using the media for 'image cleansing' by those accused of justice is considered by journalists and communication experts to be a consequence of the relationship that media groups in the country have with politics and mainly with the government, and such cases undermine the Prime Minister's propaganda for media freedom in the country.

"Almost all reports from international organizations, as well as the US and the EU, speak of a media system where the owners of the main TV stations, who are fed with public money, exert pressure and censorship on journalists," Andi Bushati, publisher of the online media outlet Lapsi.al, told BIRN.

Despite Prime Minister Rama's opposition to this, providing dubious statistics on the division of television time between him and the opposition to argue that Albania is a country with free media, according to Bushati, "in fact, media freedom is not a matter of percentages, but the opportunity to independently practice one's profession, to conduct investigations and to seek the truth."

In this perspective, he adds, "the disregard for basic journalistic principles to serve the prime minister's associates who are suspected by the judiciary of being corrupt is the most flagrant case that refutes the propaganda for media freedom in Albania."

Commenting on Karçanaj's interview, Bushati assesses that "she is invited to the biggest screen in the country, given an hour-long interview to clear herself up, without being asked any of the questions she is actually accused of."

In the same model, he adds, "hundreds of chronicles and articles have been created on issues completely unrelated to the essence of the corruption case against Erion Veliaj, which attempt to indirectly defend him, without talking about the concrete accusations. The same controlled media strategy is also evident in the case of Belinda Balluku."

The same strategy serves, according to Bushati, even when theoretical shows are organized about whether justice has the power to suspend a minister, whether we are dealing with interference of the judicial power with the executive power, but almost no show discusses the way in which tenders were predetermined and hundreds of millions of euros were donated to infrastructure.

"So the technology is the same: for the media to best serve the government, a lot of unnecessary noise must be produced to cover up simple truths that have emerged from investigations," he emphasizes.

Even for Erlis Çela, a lecturer in Communication, the use of the media as a platform for the public defense of persons accused by SPAK is a phenomenon that violates the media's mission to report events in the public interest and indicates a broader problem in the relationship between politics, media and justice in Albania, where the battle for public perception is becoming almost as important as the legal battle itself in the justice institutions.

Çela believes that this phenomenon is related to a chronic problem of the Albanian media, which has to do with the media ownership structure and the lack of transparency.

“As long as we live in a reality where media groups have non-transparent relationships with politics, and especially with the government, while engaging in tenders with public money, it will be difficult to demand professional integrity and genuine attention to the public interest,” he told BIRN.

According to Çela, in a democratic society, every individual has the right to the presumption of innocence and the right to give their version of events, but "the problem arises when the media space is transformed from an instrument of public information into a mechanism of pressure, influence or relativization of investigative and judicial processes."

In this context, he says that in many cases it is noted that the public communication of persons under investigation or their representatives does not only aim to clarify public opinion, but also to build narratives that delegitimize the activity of justice institutions, attack prosecutors or create the perception that the criminal process is political, selective or manipulated.

"This creates a serious challenge for media ethics, because the media risks being used as an instrument of crisis communication strategies by various individuals or groups," he concludes./ Birn