(CN) — When Eliza Triantafillou, a Greek investigative journalist, opens the door to her apartment in Athens, she feels trepidation: Maybe someone's rummaged through her house looking for her notes and other material behind her exposés into a scandal known as the “Greek Watergate.”
When Thodoris Chondrogiannos, a fellow Greek investigative journalist, goes to meet his most confidential sources, he leaves his smartphone behind. He doesn't trust bringing the device with him. Too many of his colleagues have had their phones hacked and spied on by the government.
This is the deeply disturbing state Greek journalists live in as they come under attack for their work investigating corruption, human rights abuses, organized crime and government mistakes and abuse.
Last year, Greece plummeted in the Reporters Without Borders annual world ranking on media freedom from 70th to 108th place – the worst ranking of any European Union country for that year. Among the EU's 27 member states, only Bulgaria has scored lower since the Paris-based journalism watchdog began releasing its index in 2002.
The fall in Greece's ranking comes amid a yearlong scandal over a widescale domestic surveillance program allegedly run by the conservative New Democracy government. At least 13 journalists have been among those targeted in a scandal dubbed the “Greek Watergate,” according to Reporters Without Borders.
But it's not just government spying that caused Greece to fall.
Nearly two years since Giorgos Karaivaz, a prominent crime journalist, was gunned down outside his Athens home by two men on a scooter, his murder case languishes unresolved. Karaivaz was known for investigating organized crime in Greece.
Greek journalists also have been hit by defamation lawsuits for reporting on the spying scandal and even faced criminal charges for reporting on a corruption scandal.
“In no country in the EU has the press freedom deteriorated so rapidly and so significantly as in Greece,” said Pavol Szalai, the head of the EU and Balkans desk at Reporters Without Borders.
“Clearly, the situation has deteriorated on the ground and we had an assassination of a journalist in a European, democratic country and this is extremely serious,” he said.
He said the investigation into Karaivaz's murder has been “extremely slow and inefficient” compared to probes into the killings of journalists in Slovakia, Malta and the Netherlands, other EU member states, in recent years.
Arrests and prosecutions have been made in the other killings: In 2017, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb; in 2018, Slovakian reporter Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend were shot to death in their apartment; and Dutch journalist Peter De Vries was shot to death in 2021. These murders have shaken the EU, which as a whole has suffered a slide in press freedom in recent years.
“Almost two years into the killing of Giorgos Karaivaz and we know almost nothing about the killing,” Szalai said. “Killing a journalist is the most extreme form of censorship and we cannot let it go unpunished.”
The 2010 killing of Greek investigative journalist Sokratis Giolias also remains unsolved more than a decade later. He was shot multiple times outside his Athens home.
Add to these problems the fact that many of Greece's biggest private media outlets are concentrated in the hands of the country's oligarchs. Large media outlets have been lambasted for ignoring the surveillance scandal, leaving it up to reporters like Triantafillou and Chondrogiannos at smaller, often online, outlets to do much of the digging into government spying.
For Triantafillou, her life as a reporter took an ominous turn after she wrote a story with a colleague, Tasos Telloglou, about the discovery of the use in Greece of a new spyware program called Predator.
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