The Ballsh bureau of Troç, a three-hour drive south of Tirana, is in one of the poorest areas of Albania. The kids meet in an unheated community centre that is missing a few chunks of its wall, set in a yard that looks like a construction site. I’m told it’s one of the better buildings in the village, but I’m warned to not even think about visiting the bathroom.
The facilitator, Merita Myseli, meets her ten young reporters (aged thirteen to eighteen) after they finish school, at 2 p.m. They discuss a story about a third-century-bc Illyrian settlement called Byllis. It’s a partially excavated site on a mountain nearby. The young reporters think it could be better exploited as a tourist attraction, which could help replace the industrial-oil business that is polluting their town and region. “We interviewed people who work in the factories. They are our neighbours and our parents, and they are all sick. Everyone is suffering but nothing is done,” says Klejvis Saliaj, who is sixteen. You can smell it in the air here right now and it’s very bad.”
“Byllis has the potential to change,” says today’s reporter, eighteen-year-old Anjeza Selami. “Our idea is to raise this issue so the people who can change things will consider it.” She leads the entire bureau out in the rain onto the main street, where they interview a woman heading home with her shopping, another woman selling roasted corn, four preteens, some men moving furniture, a group of folk musicians, and finally a shepherd with his sheep grazing on the mountain in Byllis itself. Next, they will talk to the mayor.
They have had success with other stories. After they produced a segment on serious accidents on a road without stop signs, stop signs appeared. After a segment aired about a school without lab facilities for the science students, the school built a lab.
They have enjoyed the freedom of choosing their own stories, but recently the state broadcaster intervened during the country-wide mayoral elections. Way, who worked as a journalist in New Jersey, had suggested that the bureaus each do a segment on local candidates, ask about policies, and then go back in six months to assess how well the winners had kept their promises. After airing a few segments before the elections, the head of programming for tvsh asked Troç to stop covering the elections. When Way and two colleagues went to the tvsh office to protest, however, the state broadcaster backed down immediately.
In fact, the kids at Troç seem to claim more freedom of expression than their adult counterparts. At a UN Press Club meeting held in Tirana, seven adult print and television journalists attended, but none would agree to be interviewed unless guaranteed anonymity; most of them didn’t even want their employers to know they go to the UN Press Club.
When I asked about recent stories in The New York Times and The Guardian about poor Albanians selling their children internationally, there was a long silence. Finally, a television reporter said it was easier for foreign journalists to report those stories: “They can name the politicians or the criminals involved, but we can’t. These kinds of stories are censored by the editor, who is likely a friend of the family [of the criminals or politicians] or he is afraid of them,” he says. “It’s much easier to watch the politicians accusing each other of things and then report on their fights.”
But another new television show, Fiks Fare, is also attempting to push the boundaries. Some people describe the program as being like Troç, because it probes and questions. But the show’s approach is really more like This Hour Has 22 Minutes in Canada or Michael Moore’s TV Nation in the United States.
Fiks Fare is broadcast every night on Top Channel, a private station without the reach of the state broadcaster, and not as well known as Troç. It has become notorious for showing clips of politicians making promises, followed by clips of the same politicians later contradicting themselves. The program ends with a survey of the top stories in the news. By showing how the same story in five different newspapers is presented with five different sets of facts, or how three TV newscasts feature the same laughable lack of consistency, it pokes fun at the low quality of journalism in Albania.
As with Troç, the show’s producers are finding that rather than being shut down for speaking the truth, they are being applauded for it. In fact, Troç is the only journalistic show that Fiks Fare’s hosts, Saimir Kodra and Gent Pjetri, don’t pick on.
