Kazakhstan: Government keeps pumping money into rosy coverage
A mystery outlet is getting $2.5 million.
The government in Kazakhstan has allocated around $2.5 million toward subsidizing positive coverage of its policies to a mystery outlet under a long-standing program known as the state order, a media rights researcher has found.
Citing information from the Information Ministry, Diana Okremova, the head of the Legal Media Center foundation, revealed in a February 3 post on Facebook that the government’s planned spending on the state order in 2022 amountde to $126 million.
“It turns out that almost 6 billion tenge [$13.8 million] is being given to privately owned media (it was 2.5 times less three years ago). But because of the open and honest policies of our Information Ministry, you and I will not, alas, learn who is getting this money and for what,” Okremova wrote in a sarcastically worded message.
Under the state order, an initiative that started in 2010, the government provides subsidies to outlets that carry placed materials, typically with the intent of showing government policies in a positive light. Media freedom advocates have lambasted this arrangement, however, for its lack of transparency and the sparse available information about the criteria used to select which media are eligible to receive funds.
This year’s budget for the program looks even more problematic. Okremova noted that $2.5 million in funds were designated under a three-letter, Russian-language acronym DSP, translated as For Official Use, and that no information was provided about the recipient of that money.
While the increase in allocations for privately owned media might at first glance appear like a potentially virtuous development, critics of the state order complain that such subsidies unjustly penalize those outlets unwilling to uncritically reproduce pro-government content.
In December, deputy Information Minister Kemelbek Oishybayev declined to address media queries about which outlets were liable to receive government funding. He said only that the process would be carried out by means of an open tender and that “applications had been submitted by almost all major media outlets.”
“Media outlets that have received money through the state order have expressed the desire for this information not to be made public,” he said. “I think that this information will in any case become known sooner or later.”
Almaz Kumenov is an Almaty-based journalist.
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