When I worked at the Ministry of Economics and saw how politicians acted and then publicly said something completely different, deliberately twisting information, sometimes the level of manipulation was such that I could hardly believe it was even possible. I tried to understand whether a particular person was doing this out of conviction, defending some interests, or really did not understand the problem. It is, in a sense, a surreal feeling, which visited me again this weekend when I read what I consider to be a distinctly manipulative reply by Delfi editor-in-chief Filips Lastovskis to my 18 November article.
So, what are these three things?
Presenting wishful thinking as reality.
In my view, the Delfi editor presents wishful thinking as reality throughout his text. The following example, I think, is the clearest, so I’ll start with it. In my article I pointed out that ReTV received 344 thousand euros for news segments and publications on the portal. Dividing this by the 54 segments available on the portal, we get that the cost of one publication exceeds 6300 euros. Filips Lastovskis writes the following about this calculation:
An error that could have been prevented with a single e-mail to the SIF or by examining the contract terms
[..]
Fact check: "ReTV" (SIA "Re MEDIA") in cooperation with 8 regional televisions (Latgales reģionālā televīzija, Vidusdaugavas televīzija, "Vidzemes TV", "Skrundas TV", "TV9 Pakalni", "TV Kurzeme", Kurzemes televīzija, Zemgales reģionālā televīzija) is indeed implementing a local news project in 2025, within the framework of which, from 01.01.2025 to 31.01.2026, a total of 1276 news segments are planned to be produced and broadcast, which complies with the requirements of the competition regulations.
Likewise, according to the competition regulations and the actual implementation, SIA "Re MEDIA" receives no more than 15% of the total project budget from this competition budget – the rest goes to the regional televisions. According to the interim report submitted to the SIF, in 2025, in the period from 01.01. to 31.07., 651 local news segments about current events in all historical regions of Latvia were produced and published. I understand that this does not sound as good as the phrase "among other things, dividing 344 thousand by 54 segments". But that does not cancel the journalist’s duty to check facts and such assumptions before publishing them.
It should be added immediately that on the SIF website the project data look like this:
From the project “business card” it follows that all publications, including those of cooperation partners, must be broadcast on ReTV, published on the YouTube channel, transcribed and made available in text form also on the ReTV portal. It is also known that all publications produced with the support of the Media Support Fund (MAF) must be marked with a reference to the specific project. So, when specifically and in several ways searching for publications on the ReTV portal, I found 54 segments with transcribed text versions. Exactly as Lastovskis writes, while fulfilling my duty to check facts, I did this before publishing my assumptions.
But what does Lastovskis tell us? He claims that I provided incorrect information and that I should have written an e-mail to the SIF or studied the contract terms, where it is written that the contract planned to broadcast 1276 segments.
This is precisely the moment when I cannot believe that an award‑winning journalist like Lastovskis is unable to distinguish wishful thinking from reality. The entire essence of my original article is that, based on facts and data, I concluded that the state supports media close to power, but the quality of these publications is questionable and it is not clear at all who checks this and how. Meanwhile, the Delfi editor‑in‑chief is essentially claiming that a journalist should not rely on facts and examine the actual publications, but instead should ask the money‑giver how many publications were promised and automatically assume that the contract has been fulfilled. I am genuinely puzzled.
If, however, as Lastovskis applies throughout his article to me, this misunderstanding on the part of the Delfi editor himself stems from “good‑faith ignorance”, then I think we can find other analogous examples here as well. For instance, let us imagine that the Delfi portal decides to moonlight as an advertising agent for TV24 and, after agreeing on a commission and volume, provides advertising on TV24. When the time comes to pay, Delfi says it will not pay because the advert was not broadcast in the agreed volume or something else did not work out. According to the Delfi editor‑in‑chief’s logic, there should be no dispute about the volume of work actually done, but Delfi should simply pay because that is what the contract says.
We can look at any other purchase of services or goods in the same way. Say, builders win a tender to build a bridge across the Daugava, receiving 100 million euros for it. Time passes, there is no bridge, but piles have been driven into the Daugava. The question – should a journalist rely on fact‑checking on site, or should they instead write a letter to the ministry, ascertain that the bridge is in the contract and then publish a news story stating that the bridge exists?
It must be said that on ReTV’s YouTube page the segments marked with the relevant funding are, shall we say – irregular.
Invoking and twisting unrelated facts.
This, of course, is also a nice and well‑known method of manipulation. If a journalist lacks arguments but still wants to create a negative background, they start invoking various other events that are not directly related, but that might help them do so.
For example, despite the fact that in my article I talk solely about one funding instrument – namely, the Media Support Fund – and I relied solely on data on funds allocated and contracts concluded, and there are no mistakes in the article, the Delfi editor, in order to justify his illusory rightness, weaves into his text the fact that, when speaking on television about the SIF, the head of the LDDK misread some regulations and the SIF budget. Even better is the attempt to drag in Pjotr Avens, PR agencies and publications on that topic. What does that have to do at all with the allocation of public money to media, including for capacity building and infrastructure maintenance? If we are talking about context, then in my publication, using concrete facts, I pointed to a completely direct and unambiguous problem: it is not right to support some media and keep them at the threshold of survival, including by investing public money in their fixed assets. As one of the examples I also pointed out that about 100 thousand euros in total had been allocated for creating the ReTV website, for employees’ digital skills and then for improving the site, but the result exists only on paper, while the portal’s search function works only halfway.
In the same paragraph the editor writes: “I ask the author not to lose determination when ministry contracts with media are mentioned. Which media then had/have such, apparently suspicious, contracts with the Ministry of Economics?” Here we have yet another proof of fact‑twisting, because in my article it is not written anywhere that a media outlet had a contract with a ministry, but rather with a party. Further in the text he writes: “‘Delfi’ currently has no advertising contracts with parties. Neither with the Union of Greens and Farmers (ZZS), nor with ‘New Unity’ (JV), nor with any other.” In my view, the key word here is “currently”.
I also read in the Delfi editor’s article an overall idea that purchasability of media in Latvia could be a problem, however it does not apply to Delfi because it has internal rules requiring that editorial content be separated from advertising. There are also references to the case I mentioned about the capital market development strategy, which the Ministry of Economics tried to agree with other institutions last December. Lastovskis points out that the said document from the Ministry of Finance was indeed used in his publication. Once again I have to try to conceal my bafflement at how differently we see one and the same situation, and the only thing I see there is manipulation, which is not mine.
In my article I stressed that the documents I sent to the journalist while working at the Ministry of Economics became uninteresting because there was no longer any opportunity to describe “what fools work at the Ministry of Economics”. The situation at that time was extremely urgent, and I will not publish WhatsApp conversations between journalists here only because I respect both people involved, and it is the editor who has the final say on publication, not the journalists who try to obtain information at the editor‑in‑chief’s request. In the end, however, Lastovskis’ article was not about the specific dispute, but about the unsuccessful Minister of Economics, with the letter mentioned only in passing, which would have been fine in itself, but it is unclear why the points raised by the other side were ignored. The December publication states (I am publishing a fragment for those who have not purchased a subscription):
If the Foreign Investors’ Council in Latvia, the Employers’ Confederation of Latvia and the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry have issued a polite call to the government to pay attention to significant problems related to the quality of national policy planning documents and their mutual coordination, then the tone in internal correspondence is much sharper.
Thus, at the end of last year, when the Ministry of Economics submitted for coordination the informative report "Action Plan for Capital Market Development and Access to Finance in the National Economy", the Ministry of Finance had to respond that it could not agree, because most of it was already included in other documents. Someone was solving a problem that another ministry had already solved. The letter contained devastating criticism of the quality of the work and urged the Ministry of Economics to focus more on its own competences, for example, on entrepreneurship.
That is precisely the point: if, depending on the reader’s level of sensitivity, the text of the letter could still theoretically be interpreted as “devastating criticism”, then at least half of the comments in the informative report itself could not be regarded as such, because from them it follows that the critics at the Ministry of Finance are specialists in references and dates, and have a good grasp of which paragraph corresponds or does not correspond to a particular section of the document. The best comment is next to the sentence “Companies are still facing situations in which the opening of a business account at a credit institution is refused, citing excessively high risks on the part of the trader.” Here Aija Zitcere, Director of the Financial Market Policy Department at the Ministry of Finance, writes that this part must be deleted because “the ‘Strategy for the practical application of proportionate AML/CTF requirements to honest clients to prevent excessive avoidance of risk‑taking’ has been developed and approved by the Financial Sector Development Council.”
What does that comment have to do with the statement in question? On paper, does everyone have an account? I think that even today we can ask entrepreneurs whether they have problems opening an account at a bank or not, and the answer will not be: “Everything is fine, because we have a strategy on proportionate requirements…”. Things are not fine.
But even if we assume that all the criticism in the document is justified, does it not seem strange that someone was solving a problem that another ministry had already solved? Given that the Ministry of Economics did not take on the drafting of such a document on its own initiative, but that a special thematic committee of ten ministers was created for this purpose, which instructed the ministry to do it, what was the point of doing it at all? But explaining such things did not seem either important or interesting to the editor, apparently for some elusive reason.
Trends and ostrich policy
Above I have essentially described only two of all the oddities touched upon by Lastovskis – those that truly leave me perplexed. Of course, one could start analysing every paragraph and quibbling over all kinds of nuances, for instance, why the editor calculates the percentage of MAF support in relation to another year, rather than the year in which the support is granted. For example, the 2024 annual report of Izdevniecība Lilita has not been submitted at all; it was calculated against the 2023 data. I see no logic in this, and I consider it wrong to calculate support in 2025 against turnover in 2024. I assume that the differences are not large, and yet we do not know. For the overall picture such errors are not critical, but the rest are also nuances, and there is clearly room for interpretation in any publication.
In my view, it is right and necessary to talk about media purchasability or the chosen course of content, and even more so – each commercial media outlet must itself take responsibility for its actions and choices; this is not some uniquely Latvian phenomenon, it is the same all over the world. In my opinion, that is the most beautiful thing about entrepreneurship, and media business should be no exception.
Commercial media can live on two types of income – from advertising and from services they sell to someone, for example, to advertisers, or from readers who recognise the content as good and are willing either to pay for it by buying subscriptions, or to read it for free, but then again sufficient traffic and a sufficient number of readers make this media attractive to the advertiser.
Thus, each editor and/or media owner decides for themselves whether to sell something or not, for example, company shares, knowing that any owner will exert pressure, or articles, or the possibility to publish opinions, etc. As far as I am concerned, everyone can sell even their soul, accepting the consequences. These are larger or smaller everyday decisions which, in the long term, form a reputation.
By correctly identifying or planning its niche and assessing its business model, a media outlet either becomes more popular or finds that it is not needed by the owner, the reader or the advertiser, and the company must then be closed. This is neither good nor bad, it is simply a process taking place all over the world. If the interests of all parties involved coincide and a balance between interests is achieved, then everything is fine. But if this balance is missing, various things tend to happen: for example, from media where journalists feel under too much pressure, the best journalists leave. From those that become unreadable due to lack of neutrality, readers leave. But there are certainly also those who, precisely because of their consistently conservative, liberal or other editorial line, gain new supporters or advertisers, and this “fan club” grows.
No entrepreneur or politician will buy a media outlet and maintain it if it does not respect its investor’s interests; the same is true of advertisers. In the small Latvian market this inevitably affects content, including that of Delfi and any other media outlet. This is simply reality, and denying it means pursuing an ostrich policy. One can, of course, try, but I read in Delfi in August Hansa Luiks’ opinion on Trump, and quite recently in November also a news piece on a voluntary share buyback offer to minority shareholders. However, in July I did not notice a news story about how the energy company Alexela had sued Delfi, accusing it of making untrue statements of fact and defamation; moreover, Alexela won the case and Delfi was obliged both to retract the false report and to pay compensation, although the case must still be heard in the next instance. I think it would indeed be strange if the portal published information against itself. The only thing stranger is to deny that receiving money of any kind affects media content to a greater or lesser extent.
At the same time, this does not at all mean that all journalists in a media outlet are immediately for sale; often they know nothing about these backstage dealings. Let us remember the former newspaper “Neatkarīgā” and the portal nra.lv, which were directly controlled by Aivars Lembergs. Were all of them there purchasable and tendentious? I do not think so. There was one particular editor who covered Lembergs’ court proceedings, while the other journalists were in no way influenced and calmly worked on their own topics, in which they excelled. Does anyone know a better journalist in the field of welfare than former NRA journalist Inga Paparde? I do not. Did Lembergs influence her? I don’t think so. The same applies to media generally… One cannot automatically assume that all journalists are immediately for sale and biased simply because the media outlet has taken money. However, denying that money influences content is simply ridiculous.
In my first article I also wanted to say this – if a media outlet is paid by the state in the person of the SIF, which moreover is directly supervised by the Prime Minister, then the media can become a tool of the ruling parties in the struggle for power or for retaining it. If any of the recipients of funding wish to dispute this, then I will be waiting in my e‑mail inbox for all the editors’ critical articles on, say, New Unity. I fear that only the wind will be whistling there.
Originally published at https://inc-baltics.com/3-lietas-ko-delfi-jums-nestasta/
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