In January, Sabina Slonkova got the job of a lifetime: Editor in Chief of Mlada fronta Dnes, one of Prague’s leading newspapers. While the daily had just been bought by the Czech Republic’s second-wealthiest man, Slonkova insisted she could maintain an independent voice. Six months later, she quit.

“I declared that at the moment I wasn’t able to guarantee the paper’s independence, I would leave,” Slonkova said in an e-mail. “That happened. I believe that just to pretend to be independent is a fatal game for a newspaper.”

The sale last year of Mlada fronta by a German company fits a pattern of changing media ownership across central Europe 25 years after the end of communism. When the Iron Curtain opened a generation ago, western Europeans rushed in to buy newspapers and TV stations, aiming to profit from new press freedom.

As the region’s economies have faltered in recent years, ad revenue has fallen, spurring the western companies to sell out. The buyers are often titans of domestic business -- such as Andrej Babis, owner of Mlada fronta and since January the Czech finance minister -- who critics say push their own agendas.

“In many of the countries today we have two or three big local media tycoons controlling the market,” said Oliver Vujovic, executive director at the South East Europe Media Organization in Vienna. “They own media not for the profits -- because most are not profitable -- but only for the influence.”

Drunk Celebrities

Babis last November beefed up his portfolio with the Czech Republic’s No. 1 commercial radio station, Impuls, purchased from a German owner. In April, a pair of Czech electric power moguls bought Blesk -- a Prague tabloid brimming with sex tips and news of drunk celebrities -- from Switzerland’s Ringier Axel Springer Media AG. And in 2011, Mecom Group in the U.K. sold its stake in Rzeczpospolita, a conservative daily in Warsaw, to a Polish corporate raider.

Freedom House, a non-profit media monitoring group, says its annual analysis of economic, legal, and political conditions in 197 countries worldwide shows press freedom in central Europe declining. In this year’s survey, the average ranking of the six former Soviet bloc countries tumbled 27 places from 2013, to 58, about the same as Mauritius, Ghana and Uruguay.

“We’re not seeing official censorship returning, but there’s a serious decline in professionalism,” said Freedom House analyst Sylvana Habdank-Kolaczkowska, who said the trend could compromise journalistic investigations of the region’s endemic corruption.

Journalists Attacked

Hungary (No. 71), Bulgaria (78) and Romania (84) all have what Freedom House calls “partly free” media environments because of government interference, powerful owners, and attacks on journalists. In western Europe, Italy and Greece are also considered to have a partly free press.

Eastern Europe’s “new media proprietors are usually the richest people in the country,” said Vaclav Stetka, a researcher at Prague’s Charles University. “We need to be concerned about the real reasons they invested.”

Babis, a billionaire who has become the Czech Republic’s top media mogul, made his fortune with fertilizer and pesticide producer Agrofert a.s., the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest company. Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka in April said Babis has used his media to influence government decisions on health-care funding and the expansion of a state-owned mine.

Babis declined to comment. Stepan Kosik, head of the board of directors at Mafra AS, the holding company for Mlada fronta, said the group “aims to develop the quality of all publications in our portfolio.” The newspapers will continue to uphold “ethical media standards,” he said.

Plane Crash

Poland, which fell 23 places to 49th in the Freedom House ranking, was singled out in the press freedom survey over a 2012 report by Rzeczpospolita that said TNT was found in the wreckage of the 2010 plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski -- an assertion denied by investigators.

Freedom House cited the case as an example of “highly partisan” journalism in Poland. Grzegorz Hajdarowicz, the wealthy investor who bought Rzeczpospolita from Mecom and the Polish Treasury Ministry, fired several journalists including the editor-in-chief. The European Federation of Journalists criticized the dismissals as a violation of the rights of media workers.

Hajdarowicz, 48, said in an interview that he fired the journalists because they couldn’t back up the story. “It was absolutely ridiculous and it demolished the credibility of the daily,” he said. “Of course if it’s true we will publish, but it was fake information served by some secret group.”

Distressed Companies

Hajdarowicz said his background as a journalist and businessman who made his name restructuring distressed companies qualifies him to be Rzeczpospolita’s publisher -- and he insists it’s better that the paper remain in Polish hands.

“We’ve had big problems with our neighbors for many, many years,” Hajdarowicz said. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea that they own the media.”

Jan Urban, 63, a key figure in the Czech Republic’s 1989 Velvet Revolution and a reporter for Radio Free Europe and the BBC during communism, said media ownership by businessmen like Daniel Kretinsky and Patrik Tkac -- the new publishers of Blesk -- isn’t much different from Rupert Murdoch at the Wall Street Journal or Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post.

“I would have great difficulty finding anything positive to say about Kretinsky and Tkac, and I’m worried about them targeting ownership of the media,” Urban said. “But in the end they are still entrepreneurs.”

Bully Pulpit

Jiri Pehe, a top adviser to former president Vaclav Havel who now serves as director of New York University in Prague, said the Czech media scene remains far better off than it was under communism. Some tycoons, he said, simply see the media as “a good business deal.”

Zdenek Bakala, a coal-mining billionaire who owns economic daily Hospodarske Noviny and liberal weekly Respekt, falls into that category and has done little with his publications to influence politics, Pehe said. But he said others -- for instance Babis -- use their papers as a bully pulpit.

“You can feel that the newspapers aren’t as critical about Babis,” Pehe said. “They avoid certain stories about his business empire, sometimes serving his agenda quite openly.”