We were used to information smog, rubbish and manipulation
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Pavel Šafr was born on 24 October 1967 in Prague. He grew up in Karlín, in the Catholic family of Jaroslav Šafr and Ludmila, née Bílá. After 1948, his father was expelled from his university studies by the communists for participating in the student march to the Prague Castle and subsequently worked as a galvanizer in Tesla Hloubětín. His mother, the daughter of a dispossessed factory owner, worked in a retirement home and later as a secretary at ČSAD (Czechoslovak Automobile Transport). After primary school in Karlín, Pavel Šafr spent a year in an apprenticeship and then entered a grammar school. However, he did not finish his studies and started working as a storeman at the library in Klementinum. From the second half of the 1980s, he participated in anti-regime demonstrations - including the one on Národní Street on 17 November 1989 - and established contacts and cooperation with people around the newly emerging political party Czechoslovak Democratic Initiative (ČSDI, later renamed Liberal Democratic Party, LDS). From 1990, he worked as secretary of the KDS-LDS (Christian Democratic Party - Liberal Democratic Party) parliamentary club in the Federal Assembly and through this experience he got into journalism. He started as a parliamentary reporter, worked for the Czech Press Agency and the Český deník. In the following years he worked in a number of media and periodicals, usually in managerial positions. In 2015, he founded the news server Svobodné fórum, which has been operating under the name Forum 24 since 2017, and where Pavel Šafr held the post of director until 2026.
