The adjudication of the Press Council of Kosovo on the appeal of the Office of the General Audit of Kosovo against the newspaper “Lajm”
3 June 2008The Press Council of Kosovo, in Prishtina, in its session held on 28 of May 2008, after reviewing the appeal of The General Audit of Kosovo against the newspaper “Lajm” ,titled “Look at your self”, published on 11 April 2008, took this:
D E C I S I O N
The appeal is rejected.
R e a s o n i n g
The appeal submitted by the Office of the General Audit filed against the newspaper “Lajm” due to the publication of the article “Look at your self” dated April 11, 2008, claims that the article of the newspaper “Lajm” violated the provisions of the Press Code of Kosovo, as following: “The press in Kosovo shall observe international standards of civility and respect for the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity”. The appeal then says “the journalists and editors shall not deliberately or by inadvertence encourage discrimination and intolerance”, “Journalists shall not act as the representative of the public opinion”, “Media cannot replace the specific functions of the public authorities and institutions”- (Press Code, Chapter I. items 2,3 and 4).
The Press Council of Kosovo (PCK) is of the opinion that “Lajm” in the above mentioned article has not violated the provisions of the Code which the appeal is referred to, because those appellant claims do not have semantic relations with those provisions because of the fact that the article “Look at your self” talks about the vehicle type “Opel Vectra 3.0” worth of 24.000 Euros which disappeared without even arriving at the parking lot of the General Audit of Kosovo. The current parking lot contains nine vehicles, as the officials of the GAK stated to the newspaper, while according to the official data (log books) of the Department of Treasury it is reflected that the payments were made for 10 vehicles.
Hence, only the misuse of the public property by the Office of the General Audit of Kosovo is reviewed; therefore, treating such cases, or any other case is the duty of “journalists and editors who shall ensure in all their work a respect for the factual truth and the right of the public to know the truth” and “journalists and editors, shall rely, as a general rule, on the identified sources of information”.
In accordance with these provisions, the newspaper “Lajm” wrote about this issue in the above mentioned article. Hence, the question is: whether the newspaper “Lajm” wrote the truth in its article by relying on “identified sources of information” or deformed the truth in the absence of the “identified sources of information” (Chapter III. Item 1 and 2 of the Press Code of Kosovo).The Press Council of Kosovo, PCK concludes that the “Lajm” journalist was supposed to make it clear to the AGJK interlocutors where his suspicions were based upon for the “missing car”
Taking into account this provision of the Code and the content of the afore-mentioned article, and also the sources based on what this article was compiled, the Press Council of Kosovo found that the newspaper “Lajm” did not violate the above mentioned provisions of the Code, because as it can be clearly seen, from the article and the documents of the Office of the General Audit, respectively the Department of Treasury, this article is based upon the source of information: In the parking lot of the General Auditor, the truth is that there are only 9 vehicles, while according to the log books of Finance, there are 10 vehicles, one of which is registered with 2 different codes . Given the provided information,
“Lajm” decided to publish the challenging article. Therefore, the newspaper “Lajm” has not violated any provision of the Press Code of Kosovo. After the article was published, the Department of Treasury rectified the mistake of the cars of GAK, and it turned out that there were indeed 9 vehicles.
Meanwhile, The Office of the General Audit, in its reaction on this issue, published in the newspaper “Lajm” on April 16 2008, stated that 9 vehicles were paid and not 10, explaining that one of these vehicles was coded twice with the same registered number (Item 8011 and 4559). This correction, the statement of the Office of the General Auditor, is taken into consideration by the Press Council of Kosovo and opines that this is an internal affair of the Department of Treasury and a financial expertise may verify the real state.
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