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Journalists Have Gone Rogue After Greece Axed Its Public Media

The government says its plan is to replace the network with a much leaner version by August.

Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, public TV and radio broadcasts in Greece went dark. The prime minister's government ordered that state broadcasting network ERT be shut down, in order to keep post-bailout promises to cut costs.

Though more than 2,500 employees were fired, many of them aren't going without a fight. Some journalists have gone rogue; they staged a sit-in at ERT headquarters, erected a satellite in the parking lot, and continue to stream live broadcasts over the internet.

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Meanwhile thousands of Greeks, outraged by what they see as a gross threat to democracy (imagine if the government throttled NPR and PBS overnight), are protesting outside ERT headquarters for the second day straight, surrounded by riot police, in a movement now known as #OccupyERT.

To make matters worse (or better?) private news stations and unions in the country have gone on strike in protest—"buses, trams, ferries and trains are not running, with no metro service to Athens' main airport,” reports the BBC.

When the public media stations were initially closed, determined journalists turned to Usteam and gegonota.net to stream their broadcast, but those sites have since also gone dark. Now the link to the livestream is bouncing around the web—you want to find it, search #OccupyERT on Twitter, or visit #anonymousportugal's website, which in a show of support has rounded up a list of these "pirate" broadcasters sailing the "ocean that is the internet."

#ERT protest now. Calling for more people tonight.. #occupyert #GREECE twitter.com/RegularGrrrl/s…

— Grrrl in Athens(@RegularGrrrl) June 13, 2013

Unsurprisingly, journalism groups have condemned the prime minister's decision to cut ERT. The European Broadcasting Union stated that “the importance of public service media as an essential pillar of democratic and pluralistic societies across Europe.” The European Federation of Journalists called the shutdown "absurd,” and “a major blow to democracy, to media pluralism and to journalism as a public good in Greece.” And the National Union of Journalists called it a “barbaric act that has been inflicted on journalists and media workers as part of an increasingly vicious austerity program."

To be fair, the Greek government isn't in an enviable spot here. The International Monetary Fund recently pressured the austerity-stricken country to cut civic jobs, too; Greece has not laid off any civil servants since the 2010 bailout, according to The New York Times. "Athens promised its creditors this week to dismiss 4,000 civil servants this year, including 2,000 by the end of the summer,” reported the Times.

So Prime Minister Antonis Samaras chose ERT, calling it "a haven of waste." Employees of its three TV channels, one satellite, seven nationwide and nineteen regional radios, and magazine, are the now first civil servants to lose their jobs in Greece.

The government says its plan is to replace the network with a much leaner version by August. That's bound to comfort the 2,500 Greeks who just lost their jobs and set out into a workplace with 27 percent unemployment. It also means that, for a few months at least, what Greek media are left will be working inside a massive vacuum.