German-French television ARTE broadcasted a report on Bulgaria on November 17th. This happens quite rarely – the latest documentary on our country was devoted to the battle against corruption.
The ARTE television channel is quite different from ordinary news television and is presented as a “European cultural space”. This time, Bulgaria managed to attract the attention of ARTE TV with the hysteria related to the Strategy for the Child, which began earlier this year and culminated in October, when scared parents took away their children from schools in panic. This came after false signals that children would be separated by their families and that social workers checks at schools to pick up children. This could sound weird or ridiculous for the TV audience abroad, but for Bulgaria fake news and disinformation are quite a big problem.
Actually this is not the first misinformation campaign. Last year, Bulgaria experienced the same in reference to the ratification of the so called Istanbul Convention. The mythical “gender” continues to arouse fear and horror in the public narrative. Actually the true meaning of the word “gender” is not understood and it has become a pretext for everything hostile, different and alien. In 2019 at the epicenter of the same hysteria is the Strategy for the Child and the scary Norwegians, rumored to take Bulgarian children to be given for adoption of Scandinavian gay couples.
The bill of a new Law on Social Services has been the target of misinformation in the last month.
What is the next? Prohibition of abortion, maybe?
For people of Berlin and Paris all that matter sounds exotic and perhaps even insane, but we, Bulgarians, have long lived in this altered reality and know that the consequences can be real. And scary.
You can watch the documentary in the Dossier Europe news program, aired on November 17 HERE
(The television ARTE is not responsible for the translation in Bulgarian)