Cartoonists earn a prime minister’s ire, subscription
Satirical newspaper in Bulgaria draws large readership.
A cartoon in the latest issue of Prass Press, a new satirical newspaper in Bulgaria, depicts leaders “in charge of the global circus:” President Donald Trump straddling a missile; Kim Jong Un of North Korea preparing to launch a warhead with a slingshot; and the prime ministers of Bulgaria and Hungary under the label “baby dictators.”
On the cover, the Bulgarian prime minister, Boiko Borisov, is seen holding hands with an ally, Volen Siderov, who is the head of an extreme-right party known for its rhetorical attacks on migrants and on the Turkish and Roma minority groups.
Satire that pushes the boundaries of taste is nothing new in the West, but in Bulgaria — the European Union’s poorest country, and ranked by Reporters Without Borders as the worst in the 28-nation bloc when it comes to press freedom — Prass Press has quickly found readers. It offers a satirical lens on issues like corruption, the region’s rightwing turn and the growing pains of an economy that remains underdeveloped a decade after joining the European Union.
Although cartoons, comic strips and collages are at the heart of the newspaper, it also offers political commentary and Onion-style news parody. Readers have likened its tone to that of Charlie Hebdo in France.
“Young and old, women and men, I got asked the same question every week: When will the new edition be released?” said Yulia Vasileva, who sells newspapers in the center of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.
Even the targets of the mockery are reading.
Borisov — who began a third stint as prime minister after elections last month — counts himself a subscriber, though he says the cartoons make him look too fat.
A deputy prime minister, Tomislav Donchev, posted a photograph on Facebook of himself reading the second issue.
A handful of cartoonists started the publication, which comes out every two weeks, with a meager 4,000 lev, or about $2,200.
“No politicians will be spared and we won’t pull any punches,” said one of them, Chavdar Nikolov.
But the first issue — which carried a story on judicial corruption, an endemic problem in Bulgaria — almost didn’t get off the ground.
Although 10,000 copies were printed, most never arrived at newsstands. The newspaper couldn’t get the distribution company to pick up the phone; it suspected political interference.
Eventually, 3,600 copies were returned, some of them stained and smudged. The cartoonists took them to an outdoor book market in Sofia, where about 50 copies were sold in 10 minutes.
For the second issue, the publishers decided to distribute the newspaper themselves, to independent bookstores and newsstands throughout the country. This time, the print run was 8,000, and only 76 copies were returned unsold.
Stefka Veleva, 77, visited five newspaper kiosks before she could get her hands on a copy of the third issue, at a bookstore in central Sofia.
“I enjoy satire, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” she said. “We need more critical voices in this country.”
Nikolov marveled: “People stop us on the street to congratulate us and tell us that they support us, or just give us a ‘thumbs up’ sign.”
Georgi Lozanov, a media expert and associate professor at Sofia University, praised the newspaper’s focus on images, saying that “messages delivered by caricature” resonated strongly in “societies where traditional media fails to expose problems and deficiencies through deductive reasoning.”
But keeping a new print publication afloat, even an inexpensively produced one, will be a challenge.
“The only way to survive is to stay popular among the audience and to demonstrate their boldness of ideas, biting wit and talent with each upcoming issue,” Lozanov said.
Vesislava Antonova, a journalist who has been covering the media in Bulgaria since 2000, said that a move to online-only publication might be inevitable.
“It’s the best way to escape the traps of the suppressed media market in Bulgaria,” she said.
Aside from economic survival, there is the question of censorship.
Reporters Without Borders, which advocates for press freedom, recently found that journalists in Bulgaria worked in “an environment dominated by corruption and collusion between media, politicians and oligarchs.”
“The government’s allocation of EU funding to certain media outlets is conducted with a complete lack of transparency, in effect bribing editors to go easy on the government in their political reporting or refrain from covering certain problematic stories altogether,” the group noted.
One magnate, Delyan Peevski, owns half a dozen newspapers and controls an estimated 80 percent of the print distribution market. (In 2013, thousands of people protested in the streets when the government tried to install him as head of Bulgaria’s main intelligence agency; he resigned a day after he was appointed.)
Only 12 percent of Bulgarians see their media as independent, while 65 percent think otherwise, according to a 2015 survey by the Media Democracy Foundation, done jointly with a foundation established by the Christian Democratic Union, a political party in Germany.
In April 2016, Nova TV, one of the biggest private television channels in Bulgaria, terminated Nikolov’s contract and removed his cartoons from its website after he depicted Borisov as a leader of a group of vigilantes “hunting” for migrants along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey. The channel said the timing had been a coincidence.
Christo Komarnitski, another founder of Prass Press, said that he had thought that “no one buys newspapers anymore,” and was “blown away by the overwhelming interest” in the first several issues.
He added: “We wanted to give people a paper which is honest and sincere. At the newsstands, the variety of papers on offer is overwhelming, but most of these publications are tabloids peddling gossip and untruths.”
The name of Prass Press is a pun. The word “prass” is the sound produced when a watermelon, or someone’s head, is smacked with a stick — the intention is to mock Peevski’s publications, which are often seen as the government’s attack dogs, and to represent the cartoonists’ own goal of independent, hard-hitting satire. “There will be no harmless jokes in our paper,” Nikolov declared. “But who knows? Maybe for our 100th issue we’ll portray Borisov as thin.”