Final Word from Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The Czech government withstood a no-confidence vote yesterday,but the political crisis continues to bubble under thesurface, as do questions about the role of the media. It wassimplistic and self-serving of Václav Klaus and his Castle gangto blame the media for causing the crisis. If there had been nosubstance to MFD's revelations about Vít Bárta and ABL, therecould have been no crisis. But Klaus was perhaps half-right,because it's legitimate to ask whether MFD served someoneelse's purposes in its drive to win fame and boost readershipby running the ABL stories when it did. As we noted before,reporter Jaroslav Kmenta of MFD hasn't always been honestwith the public. He and his paper lost a Kč 670,450 libel judgmentin 2006 - apparently the biggest in Czech history - but hecontinues to conceal this embarrassing fact when asked aboutit publicly. Just as the pen incident told us plenty about Klaus,this demonstrable transgression by Kmenta is reason to questionanything he and MFD say about the way they operate.
Glossary of difficult words
to withstand - to remain undamaged or unaffected by; to resist;
to bubble under the surface - to continue under the surface;
simplistic - treating complex issues as if they were much simpler than they really are;
substance - the quality of being important, valid or significant;
revelation - a surprising and previously unknown fact;
to be/get it half-right - to be right in one respect but wrong in another;
libel case - judgment No. 16 Co 178/2006-202, Obvodní soud pro Prahu 1;
demonstrable - capable of being proven;
transgression - an act of going beyond the bounds (of a moral principle or other standard of behavior).