The Carrot Comes First

Albania’s media market is broken. The answer is formalization, not prosecution — and certainly not a prime minister pointing fingers from a podium.

By Ylli Manjani (Tirana)

On March 13th, Prime Minister Edi Rama expelled a journalist from his press conference and publicly accused her outlet of money laundering. No charges have been filed. No evidence was presented. No institutional process was invoked. There was only a prime minister at a podium, pointing a finger at a television channel he dislikes.

This is not how a state governed by law behaves. And it is not, in any case, how you fix a broken media market.

Let me say clearly what I am not arguing. I am not here to defend Syri TV’s journalism, its editorial line, or the murky questions surrounding its ownership and financing. Those questions are real, and they are not unique to Syri TV. Albania’s media sector operates in a condition of structural informality that has been allowed to fester for years — unpaid salaries, undeclared revenues, opaque ownership structures, advertising flows that track political allegiances more than audience ratings. This is a system-wide problem. It predates any single outlet and implicates far more than the ones the government finds inconvenient.

That is precisely why criminal prosecution is the wrong starting point.

When Rama calls critical outlets tenxhere — boiling pots, in the dismissive Albanian vernacular he deployed that day — and in the same breath accuses them of financial crimes, he conflates two entirely separate things: editorial hostility and legal accountability. The first is his political problem. The second is a matter for due process, evidence, and courts that function independently of the executive. Mixing them at a press conference is not accountability. It is intimidation dressed as enforcement.

Here is the real problem. Albania’s media sector needs what I would call a year zero — a structured period of financial formalization during which outlets, including online portals operating in something close to a regulatory vacuum, are given the framework and the time to bring their accounts into legal compliance. Albania’s government, as the largest single generator of advertising and public procurement flow in the economy, almost certainly knows where the money comes from. It has the leverage to compel this transition without reaching for the criminal code.

The logic is simple: you cannot demand financial accountability from a sector you have never required to be financially transparent. For years, the state tolerated — and in many cases benefited from — an informal media economy where political loyalty was purchased with undeclared advertising contracts. To now prosecute the outlets that were never required to formalize, selectively and without institutional procedure, is not reform. It is retaliation with legal dressing.

And the selectivity is the tell. If financial irregularity in Albanian media were genuinely the concern, the investigation queue would stretch to the horizon. It would include outlets with national licenses, not only opposition-aligned portals. It would proceed through the tax authorities and the financial intelligence unit, not through a prime ministerial press conference. The fact that the accusation lands first on a channel that has been a persistent irritant to the government — whose journalist was expelled from the room moments later — tells us everything we need to know about the motivation.

None of this means that media companies are above the law. They are not, and they should not be. The goal of formalization is precisely to bring them within a legal framework that creates genuine accountability: for unpaid journalists, for undeclared revenues, for the damage that poisonous content causes to public life. Albania’s online media environment in particular — some of it genuinely toxic, operating with neither editorial standards nor financial transparency — requires serious regulatory intervention. But regulation is the word. Not prosecution. Not exclusion from press conferences. Not accusations hurled from a podium.

The sequence matters. Formalize first. Establish the legal baseline. Give the sector a defined transition period with clear obligations and state support for compliance. Then, and only then, does the criminal code enter — for those who refuse to come into compliance, not as a first instrument wielded against those who report inconvenient things.

Carrot before stick. That is not a soft position. It is the only position that holds up as law, as policy, and as democratic principle. What Rama demonstrated on March 13th was neither. It was a prime minister using the language of accountability to do something that accountability cannot sanction: silence a critic by calling him a criminal.

That is not governance. That is the boiling pot calling the kettle dirty.

About the author
Ylli Manjani is an Albanian lawyer and former Minister of Justice (2015–2017). Since his dismissal from government — after which he publicly accused the Rama administration of protecting corruption — he has returned to legal practice and become one of Albania’s most persistent critics of prosecutorial overreach and judicial dysfunction.