On June 11, 2003, Coalition 2000 held a press conference to present the international journalistic research of Dr. Milena Dimitrova on "Media Against Corruption in the 21st Century All Over the World”.
 Milena Dimitrova has been a journalist in Bulgaria for the past 20 years. She has been a parliamentary reporter, editor and head of the politics department at 168 Hours Newsweekly in Sofia. She has published two books in Bulgaria. Since 1994, Dimitrova has been a part-time lecturer at Sofia University, where she successfully defended her Ph.D. in January 2002.
She conducted her international research on the role of the media in fighting corruption in different countries in cooperation with over 20 acting journalists from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and Central America. The website, specially created during her specialization in the University of Missouri, Columbia, in order to cover her research, was presented during the press conference. While she developed her project, she was a Visiting Professional at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
During the press-conference, she presented a number of corruption cases throughout the world since 2000, which have been documented by working journalists from five continents, and which all had something in common - media discovered the corruption.
The cases depicted corruption on the higher levels of state authority, the judiciary, police and local authorities, were systematized in several types of corruption schemes: bribes for issuing a license, public procurement and international projects, weak state control, bank and state budget siphoning, illegal incomes from privatisation, misuse of power and cronyism.
After the presentation, journalists had the opportunity to discuss on key issues, such as freedom of speech and media regulation in Bulgaria. |
