At the moment when a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump, Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico was just returning to work after an assassination attempt on May 15. He was hit by four bullets and suffered injuries to his abdomen and hip.
Fico is our prime minister for the fourth time. He has ruled Slovakia on and off since 2006. And like Trump he has long resented independent and critical journalists. He blames us for his failures and mistakes. He attacks us. He berates or ignores us.
In his thirteen years in power, he started to prefer media that do not criticize him and don’t ask difficult questions, not to mention his own widely followed Facebook page. And when he became prime minister for the fourth time, last autumn, he further hardened his stance and declared some journalists and outlets to be hostile—I’m the editor of DennĂk N, which is one of them.
So in a way, I am writing to you from eight weeks into your own future. I hope Slovakia holds some lessons for American journalists seeking to find the right ways to respond to their own analogue.
Shootings are not common in Slovakia, let alone political shootings. We all felt shock and dismay after Fico was shot. But his closest political allies immediately sought to assign blame. They landed on his political opposition, and journalists. There were calls to regulate reporters and circumscribe free speech.
But when it became clear that the prime minister had survived the attack, the mood changed. For a few weeks it seemed that reconciliation might be possible. Politicians from Fico’s coalition, and from the opposition, talked about it. As did journalists.
In our newsroom we wondered whether our language and harsh criticism of the government and the prime minister had contributed to the radicalization of a whole society, and thus to the shooting that followed.
The role of the independent media is to check power. To look critically at the decisions and statements of politicians who make decisions about the state and manage public money.
But I still wanted to examine our work from a new perspective. I went through my stories and those of my colleagues, and I was relieved to find that none of us had ever, even inadvertently, overtly incited violence or even attacked Fico or other politicians personally.
On July 5, almost eight weeks after he was shot, Fico returned to public life. He was not running for reelection—he was a sitting prime minister. So we felt it was a real opportunity for him to attempt the much talked-about reconciliation.
He came back instead as an avenger. He blamed the opposition, the media, and “big democratic countries,” which he said do not like his even-handed approach to the war in Ukraine.
Fico runs the government already. All the institutions and security forces are run by him and his people. So, even weeks later, we do not know the details of the investigation. There has been no serious examination of the failures of the security, police, and intelligence services. And no reckoning with another awkward fact.
Six years ago, investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée were murdered. I wrote it then and I am convinced of it today: Kuciak was killed because he was exposing fraud and thievery in the government. He was killed because Fico created a criminal system where connections and money, not the law, ruled.
Fico resigned in March 2018, three weeks after the murder. He had lost the support of the electorate. And the police began to bring hundreds of corruption and misuse-of-power cases.
Fico personally faced four allegations. The most serious was that he had misused the office of prime minister to benefit himself and his friends. Parliament declined to place him in custody, and the prosecutor’s office later dismissed those allegations. But more than a hundred of his allies were indicted, and dozens of them were convicted.
The effort to avoid jail rebooted Fico, and politically he was revived. But this time his campaign felt like it had more at stake. As though it were about life and death. He took Slovakian politics down a darker path. One focused on hatred, anger, and fear. He and his allies said that the war in Ukraine was provoked by NATO and especially America. He raised the notion that George Soros was wielding influence behind the scenes.
Fico did not want anyone to shoot at him, but he was certainly deliberately stirring up dark and conspiratorial emotions.
After his recovery, his government continues to attack journalists. It has directly abolished Slovakian public television and radio and created state television and radio in its place, under the direct control of the government.
On the day Trump was shot, Fico spoke out. He did not wish Trump a speedy recovery, nor did he talk about how violence does not belong in politics. Instead he used the opportunity to attack my publication, and a couple of others he considers hostile.
Other notable stories:
- The New Yorker’s Heidi Blake is out with a new story exploring whether an “infamous family massacre” in the UK resulted in a wrongful conviction, and concluding that Britain’s justice system has made it hard to get answers. The investigation marks the second time in three months that The New Yorker has published a major story about a possible miscarriage of justice in Britain, following its recent piece about Lucy Letby, a nurse convicted of murdering babies, which remains blocked for UK internet users.
- For The Assembly, John Railey reflects on a true-crime story that he wrote three decades ago about a man who was convicted of a murder that Railey now believes he did not commit. “I conformed and went for the easy resolution with that 1992 magazine story,” Railey writes—and he wasn’t the only one. Journalists mostly try to correct their mistakes, he adds, “but when mistakes by police officers, lawyers, and judges go uncorrected,” they expose people of limited means to harsh punishments.
- Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen assesses the arguments for and against incorporating prediction markets into news content after Polymarket, a crypto-based startup that counts Nate Silver as an adviser, announced that it is enhancing its editorial offerings in the run-up to the election. Polymarket claims that prediction markets fight “bullshit” by “rewarding participants who make good predictions, and punishing those who don’t,” though critics see them as a smoke screen for gambling.
- Politico reports that the Writers Guild of America East has filed an unfair labor practice charge against Crooked Media, the liberal media enterprise founded by top former Obama administration staffers. “The union claims that the media network is union-busting by keeping certain staffers out of the bargaining unit,” Politico writes; the WGAE’s president said, “It’s a shame when a progressive company like Crooked Media fails to live up to its own values.” Negotiations were slated to continue today.
- And in the UK, Huw Edwards, formerly a star anchor at the BBC, has been charged with three counts of making indecent images of children; a spokesperson for London’s police department revealed that the charges relate to content shared over WhatsApp between 2020 and 2022, and that Edwards was first arrested late last year. As we wrote at the time, Edwards was suspended from the BBC last summer after a story about him appeared in The Sun. He left the broadcaster in April.
