The Political (in)dependence of the media in Lithuania

Analysis presented in this paper shows that significant part of the Lithuanian media subjects (especially in the municipalities) are controlled by politicians and some – by authority institutions. Another form of political influence on the media subjects is finances allocated by the State, municipal institutions and political parties to the media organizations in order to publicize their activities (or publish advertising) – which often provide guaranties of more favorable news media content for the allocators of financial resources. There are only individual economically capable and independent media organizations (national and local) that administer the media which provide relatively comprehensive and unbiased political picture. The claim of the article is that the level of political parallelism of the Lithuanian media system tends to be high