The publishing of the list of the media and the amounts of money distributed to them through the promotion of the “We Stay Home” advertising campaign by the Minister and Greek Government Spokesman, Mr. S. Petsas, brought to the surface an old but serious issue.
This issue is none other than the lack of a single and widely accepted ranking of the media, electronic and printed. That is, a tool that ranks the media according to their readability, traffic, audience, or viewership.
Obviously, we are not asking for 100% level integration, since there is practically no such thing anywhere, however the extreme situation of the Greek case, where the relevant data range from non-existent to completely fragmentary and unreliable is equally rare.
Today, the publication of the “Petsas list”, including 1,232 Media, instead of being evidence of transparency, is being the subject of “gossip” and political exploitation, precisely because it lacks an – as objective as possible – ranking of the media is missing. If such a ranking existed, the advertising spending criteria would be obvious, without anyone being able to blame anything on the selection process.
Instead, with everyone hoisting their own analytics data as a flag and invoking whatever numbers they want, the distance between transparency and small-talk discussion is just… matter of perception.
