While the title may be a horrible attempt at a journalistic pen pun (seriously, pengovsky!), we really should talk about the shiny new draft Media Act the Golob government adopted on the very last day of 2024.

The text itself is a major overhaul of a woefully outdated piece of legislation. The existing law dates back to the days of linear television, printed press and national-language music quotas. As a result, the new draft addresses many problems at once, with varying success. It also made the political right wing head for the mattresses.
There are a couple of reasons why these guys are so apoplectic over this. On one hand, the new law complicates their life when it comes to hate speech and misinformation. Secondly, the current hellscape that is the Slovenian media environment makes it ridiculously easy to set up straw-man media outlets. And thirdly, the current legislation (what’s left of it, anyway) is The Party’s baby.
A bus full of media owners
Passed way back in 2006, during Janša Government 1.0, it reshaped the grants scheme and put much more emphasis on balancing political speech. But it also opened the door for runaway media concentration, the effects of which are more than obvious today, nearly two decades later.
Because for all the supposed media plurality in Muddy Hollows (and there is indeed a metric fuckton of outlets available today), you could probably fit people who own 80% of Slovenian media on a small bus and still have room to spare.
Whether or not you should drive that bus into a lake is another matter.
On the whole, levels of pearl-clutching, Spanish-language gasping and various media-adjacent types being shocked, shocked!, I tell you, are quite staggering. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion on a fairly technical piece of legislation.
North Korea under the Alps, or something
They claim (in no particular order) that the law is too broad, too specific, stifles freedom of speech, muzzles influencers, penalises criticism of the government and will turn Muddy Hollows into the North Korea of Mitteleuropa. Insofar it isn’t one already. It is, in short, a parade of moving goalposts.
Needless to say the law doesn’t do any of that. It does, however, try to make sense of the current anything-goes environment that is the Slovenian media landscape. It is also true, however, that it mostly plays catch-up.
So, is the new draft law perfect? By no means. In many ways it is years late in dealing with certain aspects of the media business. But it also deals with some long-term issues, such as advertising by public sector entities, both on state and local level. It also overhauls the current opaque grants scheme.
The biggie of 2025
The new legislation is now at the first of three stages of parliamentary procedure. Chances are it will be changed significantly during the second reading, some time in February or March. And so it would appear that the upcoming fight over the Media Act will be the biggie of the first half of 2025.
(full disclosure: outside this here blog, pengovsky is involved with a small online radio and a podcasting/new media network, both of which will be impacted by the new law, to a varying degree)