Sasa Vucinic, a journalist from Belgrade, talks about his fund, which supports media by selling “free press bonds.
The Media Development Loan Fund applies venture-capital principles to create a sustainable free press in developing nations and countries emerging from repressive regimes:
This guy is a hero and his idea is really good… as long as the economy is alright. Once you get any business hooked up on that form of financing, it becomes very vulnerable to liquidity shortages. And I am not sure we would want to do that to the champions of democracy in places where freedom is scarce.
You missed the point, Dilyan. His main purpose is to provide financing for independent press in places where governments restrict that freedom. And it comes from his experience that this is a fundamental problem for the development of independent press.
The economic issue you mentioned may be real, and perhaps in an ideal society we may wish the press to be in more stable grounds, but the point is that without that financing, those organisations would simply not exist. Governments wouldn’t fund them for precisely the same reasons as they restrict their freedom.