Author: Martin Marinos

Free to Hate examines Bulgaria’s highly mediated populist right in light of the political and economic transformations of media institutions after 1989. The book highlights the negative effects of the abandonment of the cultural and educational features of socialist media and the complete shift toward entertainment and advertising in the 1990s. It also traces how the subjugation of state media to the new elites and the overhaul of the journalistic labor market secured the hegemony of anti-communism, which is the ideology that the populist right feeds on. A significant portion of Free to Hate examines the monopolization of the Bulgarian media market by the Western media giants WAZ and News Corporation, as it discusses the open colonization of Bulgarian media by individual capitalists who use it to denigrate one another. In sum, Free to Hate explains how these structural transformations of media institutions benefited the populist right and offers an inside view and in-depth analysis of the populist right’s own media outlets.

Almost a year has passed since the death of Hugo Chávez on March 5, 2013. Arguably this has been the most difficult one for the Bolivarian Revolution. Many people, both on the left and the right expressed doubt that there could be Chavismo without Chávez. Perhaps a year is still too short of a period […]