Bulgaria

[BG] CEM Report on the 2014 National Parliament Elections

IRIS 2015-1:1/7

Rayna Nikolova

New Bulgarian University

On 21 October 2014, the Council for Electronic Media (“CEM“) presented its report on the 2014 National Parliament elections. In its report, the CEM concluded that, in more significant television programmes on a variety of audiovisual media service providers (like bTV, Nova, TV 7 and News 7) paid political advertising dominated in comparison to the non-paid agitation forms.

According to the CEM report, the dominating broadcast presence of the little parties, coalitions and initiative committees during the election period was stimulated by media packages, which were paid by the government. With regard to the TV programmes themselves, the monitoring of the CEM demonstrated that there is a trend of distinguishing paid political advertising in a clearer manner by using audiovisual signals, which illustrate the difference between these two forms of election campaigns.

Furthermore, the CEM report stipulates that a large number of audiovisual media service providers (bTV, Nova, ТV 7, Channel 3, Bulgaria on Air, TVV, TV Eye and others) have published information on their Internet sites concerning the contracts which they concluded with regard to the election campaigns with political parties, coalitions and initiative committees that have registered candidates, as well as with other contractors. But in this respect, the CEM report criticises the lack of details about paid political advertising on these webpages.

Finally, the CEM report determines that the audiovisual media service providers, with the exception of the public television service broadcaster BNT, did not introduce sign language in their programmes to allow hearing-impaired persons to understand the messages of the broadcast election campaigns.