From a fictitious journalist to duplicate invoices — Marta Šimečková doesn’t seem too concerned about following the rules.
In 2004, a scandal broke out at the daily newspaper SME that seriously shook the newsroom and the entire media community. Journalist Marta Frišová-Šimečková and culture editor Andrea Puková were behind the creation of a “fictitious” colleague — a journalist named Grassmeier. Under his name, articles appeared in the newspaper that were presented as exclusive pieces on culture or international affairs. In reality, many of them were translations or rewrites of articles from German-language media, mainly from Spiegel Online. The plagiarism was exposed in blog posts by Gabriel Šípoš, then an analyst and later the director of Transparency International Slovakia, who at the time was evaluating the work of Slovak journalists.