In Greece, in 2009 there were 39 national dailies, 23 national Sunday papers, 14 national weekly papers, plus dozens of TV and radio stations for a population of 11 million. Some papers had a circulation of 100 copies but survived thanks to ads by state-owned businesses.’

In spite of the variety and richness of the media production, Nikos Xydakis, a columnist with the daily Kathimerini, argues that in Greece the big media conglomerates never bothered to analyse what was going on in society.

Freelance journalist Nikolas Leontopoulos said that Greek media owners used to be too close to political and financial hobs of power. In fact: “They didn’t care so much to earn money out of their media businesses. they cared more about winning state contracts,” he stated in an interview with Sylvia Poggioli for NPR (National Public Radio, USA).

Today, after years of economic depression, people in Greece witness a dramatic change in the national media production. Several newspapers and TV channels have closed, and more than 4,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Many reporters have seen their salaries slashed up to 40 percent.

Is it possible that those who survived so far  will remember Immanuel Kant’s famous appeal (Kant 1784) that the true good citizen should  be actively involved in society?  Hence, will they understand that one way to see a publication sell is to give voice to the worries and wishes that are really in the Greek people’s minds? Is there space in Greece for publications which contain unguided audience participation? There is no answer to this, yet.

In the meantime,  polls show that the media’s credibility has plunged. Leontopoulos is sure that worse is to come: “Recently there was a prediction that in the following year, in 2013, almost 50 percent of journalists that used to work for the media will have lost their jobs.”

As a result, one might think that a change is needed. Maybe a change that will start with the way the economic crisis is portrayed in the Greek media, as the ‘voices of the public’ seemed to have been firmly ‘angled’ in the past years.

It is not hard to see how years of ‘tracking the crisis’ have produced a language about it, a way to represent the same issues.  Reporters developed very quickly a stock of phrases, a familiar journalistic way to portray the government as opposite to the people experiencing the prolonged economic hardship – people who were mostly represented as victims. Rarely projects of active citizens who continued to work, and produce in spite of the situation, became serious material for the media. What the daily agenda dictated was nothing but ‘drama.’

However, ‘drama programmes’ presented a distorted image of the crisis and of poverty; an image in which the effects of low income were depicted as a tragedy revealed in order to be sympathetically corrected by the intervention of the media. This downplayed effectively the relevance of the phenomenon, and contributed to the creation of a polarized understanding of the crisis. The human cases depicted showed people who appeared to be deprived of essentials, but did not focus on the vast majority of the population who faced a more controlled but not less dramatic change in lifestyle. On the whole, one could state that such a coverage had somehow a voyeuristic trope to it.

Today, it seems that something is changing. First of all, in the last two years several publications were born and they run on-line. When Poggioli interviewed Press Project’s journalist Pandelis Panteloglu, he explained that the site’s purpose was to see serious public dialogue in Greece, and the site he is working for is not the only one engaged into the process.

However,  more and more Greeks are forced to give up Internet connections to pay for their daily needs, and the promising development born out of the revolutionary change the media had to face due to the crisis seems to be in danger.

It is true that on-line media are increasingly popular among young Greeks, but will they survive as independent outlets?

It is a fundamental question, which goes beyond the economic survival of the outlet as it touches its core and intentions. These publications were born out of an unsatisfactory coverage of the Greek reality by the media traditionally established in the country, and those circles of power are not too far from understanding that the Internet is the new arena for the country’s political and cultural games.

The question remains. Would the media benefit from a real confrontation with the people’s voice? What would be for Greece ‘public discourse’? Is the country that created democracy ready for it?