Whistleblowers and journalists form a fragile ecosystem. Many of the most important scandals that have shaken the public were revealed by people who risked their careers and their safety, and put their trust in the hands of a select editorial team. In such cases, there must be agreement between the two parties that important sources are to be protected.

In the Czech Republic, the law allows for this protection. This is because sources in sensitive cases are often in a very vulnerable position. Therefore, editorial offices try to secure communications through their internal processes and create possibilities for whistleblowers to be contacted safely by anyone, for example via encrypted messages or emails.

Among other things, whistleblowing is important for editorial offices from an economic point of view, as high-profile cases can attract new subscribers. With this in mind, they seek exclusive sources of information, and well-established security processes can be the deciding factor for a whistleblower to approach a particular media outlet.

This receptivity, at least in the Czech Republic, does not prevail when the whistleblower comes from among journalists themselves, as shown by recent sensitive cases of sexual harassment and bullying in the newsroom of the public broadcaster Czech Television.

In order to understand why, we need to take a close look at the Czech media environment.

Most of the media in a country of 10 million people are based in Prague. Regional media are gradually disappearing, creating not only an information desert for people from the regions, but also limited opportunities for journalists to find a career outside the capital. The community of several hundred elite journalists know each other well and come into frequent contact not only in the course of their work but also in their free time.

This, among other things, creates a complicated environment in that if someone complains about something negative in the industry and the newsroom, they may feel pressure precisely through the close ties that the journalistic community creates among themselves.

Every whistleblower has to calculate in the journalistic environment that his or her name will eventually be known to everyone, even if it is not published publicly. And he also has a high probability that sooner or later he will meet the people he complained about in one of the editorial offices, because transfers and turnover are frequent in the Czech market built in this way. Ultimately, this may also reduce the chances of a whistleblower being employed in the media, as he will be seen as a trouble-maker.

Therefore, media criticism is very rare in the Czech Republic, which leads to the media not being very good at policing and self-regulating each other. Yet this is necessary, as the largest media in the Czech Republic are owned by influential financial groups and individuals. It is therefore necessary to warn about possible conflicts of interest, manipulation or attempts to influence content from within the editorial offices.

If such a culture of whistleblowing was set up in newsrooms, media owners would have less chance of committing unfair practices against the ethical code of the newsroom. In turn, managers would be afraid of creating a toxic and uncomfortable environment for employees.

Whistleblower calls attention to newsroom manipulation

For example, the portal HlídacíPes (“Watchdog”) described in 2016 that the management of one of the largest private television stations, FTV Prima, ordered editors to report on the migration crisis as a threat, which was unethical from a journalistic point of view. Ideally, a journalist should not have a clear opinion on a topic before he or she starts reporting and gets to know all the facts. The audio recording from a whistleblower at the FTV Prima content meeting proved to be a crucial piece of evidence in this content manipulation case.

According to HlídacíPes editor-in-chief Robert Břešťan, the media should not be exempted from whistleblowing, nor should any other part of the business that operates in the country. “It would have been impossible to write the Prima TV case without disclosing information from inside the television station,” Břešt’an points out the importance of whistleblowers.

Thanks to the article, there was a debate in the Czech Republic about ethics in news reporting, and people were able to look more critically at FTV Prima’s coverage because they knew the backstory of how reports could be handled. Until the departure of the TV management that had committed the manipulation, the case was constantly repeated to keep readers alert.

“Of course, it would have been better if everything in the media worked as it should and there was nothing to draw attention to. But we don’t live in such a world in the Czech Republic, and probably not anywhere else either,” Břešťan said. “Moreover, it doesn’t always have to be about media topics, but also about various abuses of money, power or embezzlement by management.”

The link between politics and the media

The urgency to monitor events in the newsroom became apparent during the democracy-threatening ownership of the country’s largest media group – Mafra – by politician and Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.

The importance of monitoring what goes on inside newsrooms increased dramatically in the Czech Republic in 2013. Mafra was bought by the billionaire Babiš. His party, Hnutí ANO, was in government from 2014 until 2021. Only last year did Babiš sell the media empire.

A number of journalists from independent media outlets began to focus on the topic of possible influence of content in favor of Babiš’s political party and his business empire, which is mainly oriented towards agriculture.

Shortly after Babiš entered politics, the police began investigating a case of possible misuse of a subsidy for a farm project called Čapí hnízdo, and it turned out that the Babiš-owned media had no ambition to cover the case in detail and bring new information to it that could harm the owner. Until then, the media from that publishing house were well known and appreciated for their important investigative outputs. Now they have become dysfunctional.

The climax of all this was the case when a leaked recording of Babiš arranging with the editor of his newspaper, Marek Przybyl, what texts should be published and what his political opponents might be harmed by it. This revelation led to the departure of a number of editors from the publishing house because, in their view, all boundaries of responsible journalism had been breached.

Toxic editorials

Another high-profile case occurred in 2023, when public broadcaster Czech Television dealt with a mobbing and sexual harassment scandal by star presenter Mark Wollner. His co-workers were promised that the statements would be anonymized and not get into Wollner’s hands so that he could not pressure them during the investigation.

The documents, from which witnesses could be identified based on the context in which they testified, were eventually obtained by Wollner. Unlike him, the employees who testified before the investigating committee did not see a copy. This made it impossible for them to mount any defense in the public domain when Wollner started talking about passages from the document in the media, putting whistleblowers under pressure. This went on until the commission came to clear conclusions. All this eventually led to Wollner’s departure from Czech Television. To this day, some whistleblowers report that they did not feel sufficiently protected by the broadcaster.

Czech Television has so far not admitted wrongdoing in the investigation. “Whistleblowing is defined in law as whistleblowing in economic matters. Whistleblowing was not involved in the Marek Wollner case,” spokeswoman Vendula Krejčová said.

But other journalists disagree. “I doubt that whistleblowing should be limited to economic topics, I see it as a general effort to protect all those who want to report wrongdoing in the broad sense of the word,” explains Břešt’an of HlídacíPes.

Jan Dupák, chief lawyer of Transparency International’s Czech office, also disagrees with Czech Television’s assertion. “In general terms, the term whistleblowing includes reporting any kind of illegal conduct and can also include drawing attention to ethical violations. So bullying or sexual harassment, which would not in themselves constitute a violation of the law, can also be the subject of whistleblowing,” he says.

As far as the law is concerned, in the Czech Republic only serious cases of sexual harassment would be assessed as a criminal offence. “However, less serious cases would probably not fall under the scope of the law, as they are typically not offences with a fine threshold of over CZK 100,000 (€4,000),” Dupák explains. In Slovakia, the European directive has been applied more broadly and includes “anti-social activities.” This makes cases such as sexual harassment in the workplace and bullying easier to deal with.

“However, those who encounter bullying or sexual harassment deserve some form of protection, but this can be provided by employers voluntarily or completely outside the whistleblowing regime if they want to contribute to a functional work environment. But it is certainly not true that whistleblowing only applies to economic crime,” Dupák contradicts the opinion of Czech Television.

The discussion is at the beginning

The media industry still lacks data and stories on how whistleblowers are protected in the media, suggesting that the debate on the issue has not yet started intensively in the country. According to Adam Černý, chairman of the Czech Journalists Syndicate, in theory, journalists in organisations could be protected by codes of ethics. “Many publishing houses have adopted such documents. How far such protection is functional can only be guessed,” Černý said.

According to Černý, the Journalists Syndicate itself is also willing to help journalists legally in an emergency. “The syndicate is ready to provide legal assistance to those journalists who would be threatened in the exercise of their profession or because of it. We consider the topic of whistleblowers’ protection to be crucial, because exposing unfair practices is one and often the only way leading to correction,” Černý explained.

However, the problem is often the low awareness of journalists about how to solve potential problems, and there are not many specific cases in the public domain that have reached a successful conclusion. If there was more awareness of them, it could motivate more journalists to expose problems and also act as an education about what rights people have in newsrooms. Černý recalls one case that illustrates this problem.

“One of the TV editors got into a dispute with his employer over his job and even won the dispute, but when I contacted him about covering his case in our newsletter, he refused, saying that he was satisfied with the outcome and that he didn’t want to see it covered because it could damage his reputation as a troublemaker when he was looking for another career,” says Černý.