text: One evening during the Christmas holiday, viewers in the Czech Republic who had tuned in to the regular evening news broadcast noticed it was being jammed and interrupted by Jana Bobošíková, a familiar face at Czech TV and the newly-appointed head of the news department, sitting next to Jiří Hodač, a former BBC employee who had been appointed general manager of Czech TV amid accusations by critics that he was close to Václav Klaus' Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the then director of private TV Nova, Vladimír Železný, and would undermine the editorial independence of the TV network.