Coping with the Murder: The Impact of Ján Kuciak’s Assassination on Slovak Investigative Journalists

Abstract

In this contribution, using a case-study approach, we focus on the assassination of Ján Kuciak and his fiancée and explore the impact and consequences that it had on the community of investigative journalists in Slovakia. By conducting a series of semi-structured interviews with top investigative journalists (N = 12), we seek to answer two questions: How have they coped with the murder of their colleague? And, how has this incident changed their everyday journalistic practices and routines when it comes to achieving and maintaining safety? We identified 12 coping actions which, based on their function, were organised into five higher order families of coping: emotional purging; sharing and support seeking; avoidance and displacement; defiance and defence; and spreading the legacy and giving meaning to the tragedy. Regarding safety and security practices, the journalists claim that their approach has fundamentally changed. A variety of measures to stay safe, both online and offline, were adopted both on the organisational and on the individual level. However, many of these measures are not used consistently, mostly because they are not deemed necessary when covering non-sensitive topics, but also because of their impracticality in everyday journalistic work, and sceptical and fatalistic approach of the journalists to safety.

Attack or reform: Systemic interventions in the judiciary in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia

“…After the revelations of 2019 and 2020, the Slovak public learned that organized crime bosses, like Kočner, have had a high level of control over a cadre of Slovak judges through the medium of the state secretary and some court presidents (Láštic 2020). No cautious observer thinks these are new developments or even as recent as the Kuciak murder (Urbániková and Haniková 2021). from which evidence of judicial corruption has emerged.…”

Information security and journalism: Mapping a nascent research field

“…Two articles have focused on the situation in Slovakia. In a recent paper, investigative journalists’ working conditions in the wake of the killing of journalist Ján Kuciak 7 show the journalists’ increased use of encrypted communication tools (Urbániková & Haniková, 2021). Previous research in the country had instead highlighted an overall lack of action about infosec by the Slovakian media (Milosavljevič et al., 2015).…”

Anti-Corruption Attitudes in Post-Communist Slovakia “Hellfire and Deviance” or Political Socialization?

“…Few will dispute that Slovakia suffers from political corruption, with the murders of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová in 2018 being exhibit A (Šoltés and Vörös, 2015;Urbániková and Haniková, 2022; for an expression of popular disgust at the killings and their perpetrators, see the cinematic work of filmmakers Biermann and Čengel-Solčanská, 2020). Although Slovakia is a "consolidated democracy" according to Freedom House (2023), Transparency International (2022) ranks the country in the top third of all European Union member states on its measure of corruption.…”