Very sharp criticisms were leveled at the ČT council, even at you personally. Do you feel that you yourself have made a mistake somewhere?
“I think that the mistakes that are being blamed on us, which were supposed to lead to the termination of the 168 hours program, are so small that I do not believe the reasons at all.”
Your and your colleagues’ dirty laundry is being washed in public. And you went on vacation to Croatia? Wasn’t this a mistake?
“The vacation was planned and I had no idea that my superiors would cancel work for me and my colleagues two days before departure. None of us could have guessed that. We’ve heard signs that this is coming, but we haven’t been told anything officially. Frankly, that’s just not how shows close. We were all on vacation, after all, even my superiors.”
You talked about signals. Did you suspect that your show might have a problem with the arrival of a new director?
“With this type of show, you always have to count on that. But the year went plus or minus as usual, and we received the first signals that we were to be canceled at the end of May. That’s when I was checking if we were on the production schedule for September. We already had the number of our show for the first September episode. Then came another rumor from the Karlovy Vary film festival, from the mouth of a politician who said it there. And then it happened.”
The council accepted the explanation of director Jan Souček by a vote of ten to six. At the same time, she invited him to add more information, especially about what program will replace 168 hours. How do you perceive these conclusions?
“You don’t change the fact that the show is over. If I understood it correctly, the CEO said there that the impulse to stop the show came from my superiors. From the News Director and Editor-in-Chief. The news director was telling me again that it came from the CEO. This kind of ping pong is going on between them.”
Why did you go to counseling?
“I consider it an obligation to go to such meetings. It was public and mainly related to a show that was watched by an average of half a million people. I also wanted to hear exactly what resonated with our address, our work address and me personally.”
Jan Souček repeated there that the last straw was your conversation with Mark Wollner via SMS. He described her as lascivious, intimate, or even masturbatory. The word is mentioned twice in it, and it bothered him that you did not come to consult with the management.
“It is good to mention what preceded the publication. That was the leak of the Mark Wollner commission of inquiry report. This should never have happened. It was a big mistake of Czech Television that it did not ensure that this did not happen. That material affects a number of people, many of whom are named there. Not once has CT contacted me about the fact that this is out there and how I should proceed, for example. The leak of this news put Marek Wollner under enormous pressure and began to deal blows around him. And this time I caught it. Marek took my answer, which came after about three days, and which was a joke. There was nothing intimate or lascivious about her. That’s how Mr. General Manager Souček pushes it.”
Didn’t you actually provide some ammunition for them to criticize you with these texts?
“If it wasn’t for this text message, it would have been something else. I consider this to be an information fog on the part of ČT and a completely foul and below-the-belt procedure. This is something the communists did in our country, when they shot down women they didn’t like like this. I don’t want to say that the management of CT are communists, but I want to say that this attack on a girl’s integrity, on a girl’s honor, is something that simply works in the Czech Republic, and now my employer, which is Czech Television, is taking advantage of it.”
News editor-in-chief Michal Kubal here at Epicenter talked about the fact that your team’s work was accompanied by legitimate problems. And that he couldn’t stand up for you when deciding the end of the show. Were you disappointed by his reaction?
“Absolutely. It is the first time in his life that the editor-in-chief has opposed his own people. It also happened to us at the ČT Council in June of this year due to a report about the ugly words of the mayor of Repóry, Novotné, to the singer Anna Slováčková. We had no idea what the editor-in-chief would do. Then I had an email polemic about it with him, and if Michal Kubal had any problems, he didn’t tell us about them. We never even saw him at a meeting. Michal is the type of editor-in-chief who practically did not appear in the programs that fell under him. In your case (editor’s note in the Epicentrum program) he stated that he handled everything with his representative, through whom he sent messages. I’m only now reading what we were supposed to do. These are descriptions that do not correspond to reality, and I do not know if the distortion occurred in the head of Michal Kubal or in the head of Aneta Snopová, his subordinate and our superior. The biggest mistake is when the editor-in-chief doesn’t stand behind his people and doesn’t build a dam. And that’s what happened in this case. If Mr. Petr Mrzena, Michal Kubal and Mrs. Aneta Snopová had not given the green light to the end of 168 hours, it would not have happened.”
In an interview for DVTV, your former colleague Karel Novák, the current chairman of the Council of the Czech Television, spoke about the fact that working in your team was not a completely pleasant experience. Recall your charge of bossing.
“I was surprised that he remembers it like this now, because he is also the chairman of the Council and should be speaking impartially, when it happens to be his council that is considering, for example, the cancellation of this program.”
Let’s take a look at your future work at ČT, according to Michal Kubal, he would like you to stay there. Do you wish it too?
“When I hear the rhetoric directed at me, I feel that my perspective in CT is not great. But I got the offer, I’m considering it now, and we have a meeting about it on Friday. I don’t want to close the door in advance because I like CT, I liked working there and I would like to do meaningful work there. The offer is complicated for me. He is on the Bilance show, which is a monthly magazine and has two teams that take turns producing one month each. That means, I would either produce once every three months, or I would help find something in some way. I don’t want to bring it down, I’m still thinking about it.”
Do you think this is an adequate offer?
“I can’t sit here and cry, beg for more. Such an offer is simply on the table now. So this is all I have in hand.”
Doesn’t the bickering after the show’s cancellation damage the reputation of CT?
“I think she was irreversibly damaged by the decision to cancel 168 hours. On the contrary, I consider what happens around it to be important. For showing that journalists there are able to fight for their work and for the fact that they worked in a free environment. It’s not something comfortable and pleasant for me either, but I decided to do it because I consider it to be an unequivocally right step, I’m simply defending the principle of truth.”
