The Welfare Lie: Inside Kosovo’s Media Disinformation Machine
Flaka Surroi’s Koha and Berat Buzhala’s Nacionale replaced verification with venom recycling Trump’s rhetoric to inflame diaspora hatred while hiding sources methods and accountability deliberately.
Koha Ditore is not some anonymous blog run from a kitchen table, it is part of the Koha Group, a major media business in Kosovo, owned by Flaka Surroi, who holds 100 per cent of the company that controls Koha Ditore and KTV1. Nacionale is not an accidental outlet either, it is operated by a company fully owned2 by Berat Buzhala.
So when these two megaphones decide to shovel a claim into the public sphere, it is not a mistake made by amateurs, it is a choice made by institutions that know exactly what they are doing, and exactly what their reach can do to a fragile country.
On 4 January 2026 Koha Ditore published a piece3 stating that President Donald Trump had posted a list on Truth Social claiming that 46 per cent of families from Kosovo in the United States receive social assistance, and that 41.3 per cent of families from Albania do the same. That is the core act, a political post is treated as finished truth, then repackaged as news, then launched into the bloodstream with all the swagger of a verified fact and none of the discipline of verification. Koha does not provide the dataset, the year, the definition of family, the definition of immigrant family, the list of programmes counted, or the method.
If you want a definition of journalistic negligence, it is right there, a number without a methodology, served as a moral judgement.
Then the echo follows, and it is always the same routine, repetition dressed up as confirmation. Other outlets recycle the same chart language4, the same percentages, the same smug certainty, again with no proper sourcing, no documentation, and no visible attempt to establish what the numbers actually measure. And in that echo chamber Nacionale5 plays its part as it so often does, not by slowing the story down, but by accelerating it, stripping out the last remaining friction that might force readers to ask the obvious question, what exactly is being counted here?
This is where the ugliness becomes the point. A statistic framed as social assistance is not neutral, it is a cultural weapon. It is designed to make the diaspora look like a burden, to make Kosovars abroad look like scammers, to turn ordinary social policy into shame, and to give every small minded bigot a tidy percentage to fling around at family tables and comment sections. It is not reporting, it is labelling.
And Koha Ditore has form. In February 2025 it published a piece that treated the social media noise of Richard Grenell and Donald Trump Jr. as though it represented the international community6, an inflation of partisan messaging into diplomatic authority that any serious editor should have killed on sight. That earlier episode matters, because it shows a pattern, not a lapse. It shows an outlet repeatedly choosing amplification over accuracy when the narrative suits its interests, and then acting surprised when the public trust continues to rot.
Now look at what this welfare story does in practice. It offers a simple hook, Kosovars take, Kosovars abuse, Kosovars live off others. It needs no proof beyond the repetition of the number. It invites the next step, anonymous anecdotes, rage bait screenshots, the usual theatre of invented certainty.
Manufacturing outrage in plain sight.
The Berat Buzhala’s screenshot7 is a perfect example of the genre, a story that cannot be audited, about EBT, about Albanians in New York, built to provoke disgust and not to inform. It does not matter whether the message is real, the effect is the same, it trains the audience to accept insinuation as evidence.
The most damning part is how avoidable this is. A real newsroom could have done the basics in the same afternoon. It could have explained that public assistance in the United States is a broad bucket that can include health coverage and food support as well as targeted cash support, and that immigrant household measurements can be tricky and often include citizens in the household, especially children. It could have demanded the underlying source. It could have refused to publish until the methodology was clear. Koha did none of that.
That is why this deserves contempt, not polite media criticism. Because the public cost is not abstract. In Kosovo the information space is part of national security. When big outlets normalise the habit of treating political posts as evidence, they do not just misinform, they weaken the country. They train citizens to distrust institutions, to distrust one another, and to distrust the very idea that facts exist. In a region where hostile influence feeds on cynicism, that is not a small mistake, it is an enabling condition.
And Nacionale has form too. In October 2025 multiple Kosovo outlets amplified a single German source while presenting it as a broader German media consensus, creating the illusion of Western judgement to push a domestic political line8. That tactic, import a framing, multiply it through local outlets, then pretend it is an external verdict, is the same trick dressed in different clothes. It is narrative laundering.
So yes, you can draw a straight line from this welfare headline to a wider political project, even without pretending you have a prosecutor s file on your desk. A post election Kosovo will always attract actors who cannot win power cleanly and therefore try to poison the legitimacy of everyone else. When elections do not deliver the restoration they want, they reach for the tools that still work, panic, stigma, manufactured outrage, and the slow drip of delegitimisation. They do not need to prove anything, they only need to keep the public furious and confused.
If Koha Ditore and Nacionale want to be treated as journalism, they can start acting like it. Show the dataset. Define the terms. Publish the method. Correct the framing. Stop turning partisan propaganda into social fact. Stop treating a number as a verdict and a screenshot as a source.
Until then, call it what it is, powerful outlets using their platforms to manufacture a mood, not to report reality. And in a country that has already paid in blood and fear for the collapse of truth into faction, that behaviour is not just irresponsible, it is reckless.
Social assistance in the United States is not a single pot of cash handed out to anyone with a foreign passport, it is a broad set of programmes and services that include food support such as SNAP, health coverage such as Medicaid and CHIP, and limited cash support such as SSI for older people and people with disabilities, each with strict eligibility rules and heavy documentation. It often measures households, not individual migrants, which means a figure can include benefits received by US citizen children living in a household where parents were born abroad. In other words, a post that screams 46 per cent tells you almost nothing on its own, unless it also tells you what year, what dataset, what definition of family, and what list of programmes were counted. Without that, it is not a statistic, it is a smear with a number taped to it.
And that is precisely why the Trump post9, whatever its source, is political theatre not public information. Its purpose is not to educate readers about policy, it is to manufacture suspicion, to compress complex eligibility systems into a crude morality play, and to invite one lazy conclusion, they are taking from you. Koha Ditore, Nacionale, Telegrafi, BalkanWeb and other copy/paste outlets did not simply report that theatre, they staged it again in Albanian, with louder speakers and fewer footnotes, turning a partisan prop into a headline and a headline into a social weapon. They did not ask the basic questions because the unanswered questions are the product. Confusion is the accelerant, stigma is the outcome, and the diaspora is the convenient target.
So the ending is simple and brutal. Kosovan based outlets are not just failing their readers, they are sabotaging them. By laundering a politician’s post into supposed fact, then allowing it to metastasise through insinuation and fabricated screenshots, they poison the very space where citizens are meant to think clearly about their country. That is a direct threat to national security, because an information environment trained to swallow claims without sources is an information environment ready to be captured by anyone with money, malice, or a foreign agenda. And it is a direct assault on people’s right to make informed choices, because a public fed on percentages without definitions cannot vote, judge, or debate intelligently. If these outlets want to keep calling themselves journalism, they can start doing the one thing propaganda cannot do, prove it, publish the method, or shut up.
Trumpi publikon të dhëna, 46 për qind të familjeve kosovare në SHBA marrin ndihma sociale — KOHA Ditore.
Trump publikon statistikat: 46% e emigrantëve nga Kosova në ShBA varen nga ndihmat sociale — Nacionale.
When the Media Becomes the Messenger of Misinformation: The KOHA Ditore Debacle
KOHA Ditore’s portrayal of Grenell and Trump Jr. as voices of the ‘international community’ is a blatant distortion, undermining journalistic integrity and factual accuracy. — The GPC Media Watch.
See Berat Buzhala’s false screenshot of a fabricated text message posted on Facebook on Monday, Jan 5, 2026.
Fake German Media Consensus in Kosovo Exposed
Kosovo outlets amplify Berliner Zeitung’s pro-Russian framing, creating a false German media consensus that manipulates narratives, undermining journalistic independence & shaping pro-Serbian agenda. — The GPC Media Watch.
President Trump’s Truth Social Post.
BerarBuzhala is a TrumPutinist, he keeps proving it on daily basis with his lies and propaganda to please Serbian narrative in its hybrid war against Albanians.