An Interview That Collapsed Before It Began
On Kanal 10, Kushtrim Sadiku armed Albin Kurti with inaccuracies. Kurti did not evade scrutiny. He dismantled it, exposing journalistic negligence in real time.
On 11 December 2025, Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, appeared in a long studio interview on Kanal 101 with the journalist Kushtrim Sadiku. It was billed as a serious domestic reckoning after months of tension, criticism, and controversy. What unfolded instead was something more revealing and more troubling. Not a confrontation between political power and journalistic scrutiny, but an encounter in which inaccurate claims, loosely framed allegations, and factual errors repeatedly handed the advantage to a disciplined and well prepared politician, allowing Kurti to dominate the exchange with ease.
The interview did not unravel when Albin Kurti grew combative. It unravelled much earlier, in the quiet seconds when Kushtrim Sadiku began constructing questions on foundations that would not hold. I was watching closely enough to notice the pattern before it hardened into farce. Assertions were smuggled in as facts. Legal processes were described as though they had already reached verdict. Rumour was waved about with the confidence of record. From that moment on, the outcome was inevitable.
This was not a clash between power and scrutiny. It was a collision between political discipline and journalistic negligence.
Sadiku appeared to believe that force of tone could compensate for weakness of premise. He came armed not with evidence but with insinuation, not with chronology but with atmosphere. Each time he leaned forward to “challenge” Kurti, he did so by introducing claims that were either inaccurate, unverifiable, or plainly false. And each time, Kurti did not evade. He corrected. Methodically. Repeatedly. With visible impatience.
This is the oldest mistake in political interviewing, and the most unforgivable. You cannot confront power with error. You cannot land a blow if your footing is imaginary. When a journalist gets the facts wrong, he does not weaken the politician. He strengthens him. Sadiku handed Kurti a weapon and then seemed surprised when it was used.
Kurti is not a performer. He does not charm, deflect, or improvise his way out of trouble. His instinct is institutional, almost prosecutorial. He interrogates the question before answering it. He dismantles the premise before engaging the conclusion. When faced with a false claim, he does not sidestep. He stops the conversation, rewinds it, and exposes the flaw. Watching him do this to Sadiku was not watching arrogance. It was watching preparation humiliate carelessness.
Again and again, Sadiku tried to corner Kurti with material that could not survive scrutiny. Claims about illegality collapsed under constitutional reference. Claims about corruption dissolved into hearsay. Claims about democratic erosion were framed so loosely that Kurti was able to turn them back as examples of journalistic decay. Each correction drained authority from the interviewer and transferred it, visibly, to the interviewee.
At a certain point, the exchange ceased to resemble an interview at all. It became a tutorial. Kurti lectured on process, on jurisdiction, on the difference between allegation and adjudication. He was not being evasive. He was being precise. And precision, in this context, was devastating.
The cruelty of it lay in how unnecessary it all was. Kurti is not beyond serious challenge. His relationship with the media is abrasive. His rhetoric is often contemptuous. His tolerance for dissent is thin. These are legitimate lines of inquiry. But they require exactitude. They require that the interviewer know the law better than the slogans, the facts better than the outrage. Sadiku did not. And so every attempt at confrontation collapsed into self-exposure.
What emerged instead was the spectacle of a journalist confusing aggression with accountability. He raised his voice where he should have sharpened his facts. He repeated claims that had already been dismantled, as though insistence might substitute for proof. It did not. Each repetition merely confirmed Kurti’s advantage.
This is how power wins without needing to lie. When journalism abdicates precision, authority does not need to conceal itself. It steps forward, corrects the record, and claims the moral high ground by default. Kurti did not dominate because he is uniquely formidable. He dominated because he was handed a weak opponent.
There is a deeper failure here, one that goes beyond an individual performance. In a country saturated with disinformation, subject to constant external pressure and hostile narrative warfare, factual looseness is not a stylistic flaw. It is a structural vulnerability. Kurti understands this. His insistence on definitions, procedures, and institutional boundaries is not merely temperament. It is strategy. Sadiku, by contrast, treated accuracy as optional. The result was not balance. It was capitulation disguised as confrontation.
By the end, the power dynamic was unmistakable. The journalist was no longer testing the politician. The politician was exposing the journalist. Viewers were not watching accountability in action. They were watching its absence.
Kurti did not escape scrutiny that night. He crushed a weak attack. And the lesson is not that politicians are too strong, but that journalism that mistakes volume for rigour does not threaten power. It furnishes it.
Precision is the only weapon that holds. Everything else is theatre.
The Cartelisation of Kosovo’s Press
I have spent the past fifteen months doing what good journalism always does at its most unfashionable, asking the press to look in the mirror. The weekend of 11 October 2025, when vandals smashed the windows of my family’s unoccupied house in Kosovo and desecrated our memorial car