(2002-2003 TV4)

We produce the television journal TV probe (Lit. TV zondas) to the order of the national channel TV4. Just dig this site for exhaustive information on the "TV probe", as well as other projects we run.

TV zondas is a weekly one-hour television journal broadcast on Wednesdays starting quarter past eight in the evening, on the TV4 channel. The journal covers a variety of relevant social subjects and events. Our reporters deliver journalistic enquiries into important events, reflecting social problems of Lithuania and the issues of integration of Lithuania in the European Union. Our accounts also cover the life abroad in a number of countries we have been used to call "foreign". Our journalistic "experiments" shot with a hidden camera give zest to the "TV probe" you would not like to miss.

According to the survey data of SIC Gallup Institute, the most of the TV zondas viewers are city inhabitants aged 25 to 50. Their education is mostly higher than high school and the income is over average level. So we focus our material on, and make the choice of topics so as to address this kind of audience.

Let us introduce some of the TV zondas reportage stories:

1. A journalistic experiment with Lithuanian taxi drivers. A British tourist and a TV zondas reporter who pretended he was a foreigner took part in the experiment. We tested the range of prices a tourist with no Lithuanian language skills would be offered to pay for a ride by different taxi drivers with the travelling distance being the same in every instance. The range we found did surprise us - the prices differed more than twice.

2. Is it possible for a disabled to feel he or she is equal to others in the capital city of Lithuania? We had a fully capable person take a place in a wheelchair and attempt to attend places frequented by those who are fully capable. What we found out was that those who are physically unable to move have very few chances to cross a street, and none to get inside the municipality or the National Library building without being assisted.

3. There is a town in Lithuania where rumours fly on a Russian army captain Nikolaj Armand buried in war-time being actually a son of Vladimir Lenin. Thus TV zondas and quite a bunch of Russian journalists made an attempt to make it clear if this person might have had any chance of being an offspring of Inessa Armand and the Great Chief of the Proletariat.

4. A reportage story from a German town Hannover. TV zondas brought to light the fact that was far from being ordinary for the most of Lithuanians. In Hannover, a social aid project was launched that incorporated distributing pure heroin to drug abusers. We invited a number of German and Lithuanian experts to comment on this strange curing approach.

5. American copyright organisation IFPI said Lithuania had one of the highest levels of piracy in intellectual products. TV zondas used a hidden camera to bring on your screens the underground traders of illegal CDs and investigated how easy it was in Lithuania to buy a copy of illegal record of the Western music.