
Austria: Vice-chancellor caught on secret video - novaRom
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48318195
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deogeo
"She offers to buy a 50% stake in Austria's Kronen-Zeitung newspaper and
switch its editorial position to support the Freedom Party."

Little attention is usually paid to media ownership, yet this nicely shows how
crucial it is. I've always found it odd how casual countries are on allowing
foreign media ownership. A quick search turned up this: [https://www.access-
info.org/media-ownership-transparency](https://www.access-info.org/media-
ownership-transparency) \- apparently, even if one does pay attention, getting
the information can be difficult.

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thatoneuser
This is an interesting conundrum. The govt can't outright pay media to spin a
certain narrative (...obviously this happens but it has to go thru abstraction
layers to get around laws) meanwhile a foreign entity doesn't really care and
can just buy them out.

~~~
deogeo
But the government _can_ make it difficult/impossible to hide the ownership of
media. It could even mandate disclaimers, forcing media to declare their
owners the same way drug commercials have to state side-effects.

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novaRom
I wonder if we'll not see more scandals like that. New digital interconnected
world offers more chances to end political careers just overnight.

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acqq
The news houses who published a video don’t say anything about who has made
the video. But it was very professionally made some two years ago and used
now.

~~~
tom_mellior
Yes. So? People have known for a very long time that Strache and his party are
a danger to democracy and human rights. For people with the means and the
motive to set this up, it made sense to do it.

~~~
acqq
> Yes. So?

Independently of condemning what the politician said the media tries to ignore
that some “external power” directly orchestrates not only the compromise of
the political party but also by carefully selected timing the outcomes of the
political life in one european country and even more, in whole Europe.

That secret power is definitely not the media house, they got the whole thing
on the plate, carefully prepared. They just serve it.

An everybody pretends that doesn’t matter?

~~~
tom_mellior
I agree that this should be discussed more. But always with the important
observation that in this case it's not anti-democrats trying to smear
democrats; it's the opposite, it's democrats exposing corrupt anti-democrats.

~~~
kerng
After reading the article it seems that at this point no-one knows who is
really behind this. Could be a foreign government, could be a comedian, could
be another political party,... Or did I miss something?

~~~
tom_mellior
I think the general consensus seems to be that this was a large-scale
operation (the woman groomed Gudenus over half a year or so before the Ibiza
meeting) that points to a very professional actor. But yeah, everybody is
guessing.

This article guesses at a western intelligence service that wanted to stop
intelligence leaks towards Russia:
[https://diepresse.com/home/innenpolitik/5630280/Woher-
kommt-...](https://diepresse.com/home/innenpolitik/5630280/Woher-kommt-das-
StracheVideo)

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tom_mellior
For a longer read with more background and details, here is the original
writeup by Süddeutsche in English:
[https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/politik/caught-
in-t...](https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/politik/caught-in-the-
trap-e675751/) (and not paywalled, unlike the German version)

