"He will not go on air on bTV as long as it depends on me." The case of Martin Atanasov says a lot about the Bulgarian media. From it we also learn this: that there are still people at bTV who want to do their job. By A. Detev.
"He will not go on air on bTV as long as it depends on me." Although written in a chat, these words of the director of news and current affairs programs on the first Bulgarian private television station echoed in the public space. They confirmed a very serious diagnosis, namely - the profanation of the media in Bulgaria. It turns quality journalism into an increasingly impossible task for the few remaining professionals in the industry.
What is it about?
The young activist Martin Atanasov, who became famous with his project "Black Track", presented his new platform this week - "Diagnosis Bulgaria". In it, he clearly presents the anomalies and problems in healthcare financing in Bulgaria through publicly available documents. The topic has become very hot for society because it practically shows a problem that has been very painful for years, and Atanasov himself has become a desired interlocutor for every media outlet.
It is quite logical that the current program in "Face to Face" has decided to invite the young expert. Because, as it says on the media outlet's website, the program "looks for first opinions and in-depth analyses of the news of the day". What bigger news than the topic that everyone is talking about in the public space and on social networks, and what more first opinion than that of the creator of the platform?
It turns out that the adequate journalistic impulse of the "Face to Face" team is meeting direct resistance from the management. From the media outlet's internal chat, published by Martin Atanasov on social networks, it becomes clear that Asen Ivanov, who heads journalism at bTV, brutally intervenes and forbids Atanasov from appearing on television.
The reason, as can be understood from Ivanov's messages (which are not without spelling errors), is that when he appeared on bTV in December, Atanasov demonstrated support for the removed host Maria Tsantsarova. He appeared in the studio with a cup with the inscription Time to make real change - which the presenter herself had placed on her desk before she was officially removed from the screen.
Self-censorship, profanation, spinelessness
From the whole incident we learn something very important - there are still people at bTV who want to do their job. There are also those who are tired of not being able to do it freely and professionally. One of them apparently took a screenshot of the chat and sent it to Atanasov.
The figure of Assen Ivanov is an adequate reflection of the problem facing the major media in Bulgaria. Nikolay Barekov's former aide, pictured next to him grilling kebabs, succeeded Anton Hekimyan in office in 2025.
The one manager who turned out to be deeply tied to the GERB political party was replaced by another of his colleagues, who dragged the television into a series of scandals. The sluggish coverage of the mass protests in December, the ouster of Tsantsarova, the low ratings and the increasingly absent journalism on bTV are dealing a blow to the media and journalists in general.
The "Reuters" Institute recently measured that trust in the news in Bulgaria has fallen to 21 percent. The audience is increasingly withdrawing from the big television stations, where the business interests of the owners and the dependencies of the management staff stifle the possibility of professional journalism even for colleagues who are proven names. The migration to online sources of information opens the doors wide to the spread of disinformation and propaganda. A 2026 study by the Open Society Institute concluded that Bulgarians remain the most vulnerable to disinformation in the EU.
What is the solution?
The media business model faces huge challenges on a global scale, and in Bulgaria, the long-standing erosion of journalism's authority by politicians and propagandists is added to these.
It is a public secret that big media outlets no longer make money, and their owners have other businesses and trade their influence to monetize their investment in television, radio stations and online publications. This puts journalists in a particularly risky situation - today you can be the star of the media, winning awards with investigations, tomorrow - to be taken off the air without good reason. In other words - to be traded.
Advertising budgets are not enough to guarantee the survival of the profession, grants and European funding - too. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. It is in the audience. This very audience, which no longer trusts traditional media, but realizes its need for professional, critical and independent journalism. It is they who, with their support for media projects, can guarantee the backbone of journalists. And there are still journalists, even when they are "Off the air".
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This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the DV as a whole.