Albanian Media Threaten to Boycott Campaign Tapes

Although the campaign for the June 21st local elections in Albania has not officially started, the main parties have already announced their candidates for the race and they have been busy with campaign events.

However, these events are not being covered directly by the media. Instead, they are either taped by the local parties' PR offices or live TV feeds are offered to TV stations.

Reacting to the refusal of the political parties to allow independent coverage of the campaigning, several TV stations have announced that they will refuse to air the tapes and consider them as nothing more than advertising.

The TV stations behind the threatened boycott include the national broadcasters TV Klan and Top Channel, and the 24-hour news stations ABC News TV, News 24 TV and Ora News TV.

TV Klan and Ora News have also said they might completely stop coverage of campaign events before the 45-day official election campaign period starts.

The use of tapes "is a practice that offends the dignity of Albanian editors, ignoring independent coverage of the elections by journalists", Aleksander Cipa, head of the Albanian Union of Journalists told BIRN, said of the prerecorded tapes .

"It's bad practice because it is fabricated news that the political parties sell for their own interests," he added.

Pre-packaged tapes of political events in Albania have been around for almost a decade but have taken on a more prominent role in the last three election campaigns.

Editors increasingly feel pressure to rely on them and not provide independent coverage of campaign events. 

The dispute comes at a time of increased concern in Albania about freedom of the press. The country was ranked in 85th position out of 173 countries in the 2014...