The German public service published a big report about Serbia and Vučić will not like it at all: In the center of attention regime tabloids and the war against professional media The report begins with a depiction of the atmosphere where shouts of “pump” and whistling are heard on the street. The German ARD writes that “Pump” is a well-known battle cry of student protests. On March 15, and on the day of the largest protest in Serbia with over 300,000 participants, the independent television station N1 is doing something that is unusual for the circumstances in Serbia – it is reporting live for nine hours.
“Today is the 111th day since the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts occupied their faculty in Belgrade. They were joined by almost all students, from all university centers in Serbia. They walked kilometers across the country for demonstrations in different cities. And they are not alone. The citizens of Serbia stood up and took their side. Now they have arrived in Belgrade and today we expect the biggest protest in the history of Serbia,” ARD reports the opening of the protest program on N1.
N1 reports objectively, sometimes a bit favorably towards students, but in accordance with journalistic standards, reports this media. This is rare in Serbia, it was said in the report.
“According to data from the independent journalist association NUNS in Belgrade, only about three percent of all media critically report on the authoritarian government. N1 and its partner station Nova S are independent from the Serbian state. Their parent company, United Group, is located in Luxembourg. The founder and co-owner is Dragan Šolak, a Serbian businessman residing abroad. For the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, Šolak and his media are state enemies who want to plunge the country into chaos. Vučić is waging a real media war against them, while the public it represents that they are the ones who declared war on him”, states ARD, as reported by N1 .”Their idea is to start a revolution and kill me. For the criminal tycoon, Dragan Šolak and his political minions, this is the only way to come to power. Because they will never defeat me in the elections. The people never wanted them and they never will,” ARD reports what Vučić said about N1 and Nova S.
The demonization of Dragan Šolak has similarities with the campaigns Viktor Orbán led against the American-Hungarian billionaire George Soros, according to the report. For about 97 percent of the Serbian media, Aleksandar Vučić is untouchable or a hero, it says. The pro-government private television Informer TV reported on the big protest in Belgrade like this: it broadcast folklore.
The TV station shows a bizarre performance with Serbian folk music, the text states. The headline reads: “Terrorist gang plans bloodshed in Belgrade today.” Pictures of the arrest of two male students and one female student were shown. It is claimed that together with three other students, they planned to break into the RTS public service building in order to demand the formation of a transitional government through television. A plan that seems completely unrealistic, but became breaking news for Informer TV. Sitting in the studio are two presenters and the editor of Informer, businessman Dragan Vučićević. He raises his hands, claps his hands and celebrates the arrests,” ARD reported.
“God, how beautiful these Serbian songs sound with the arrest of these terrorists, these Ustasha terrorists. Arrest them all, one by one. And we have only just begun,” Vučićević said while watching the show, according to the text.
According to him, the Ustaše were the Croatian fascists who killed many Serbs, Jews and Roma during the Second World War. In the Serbian ruling party SNS, it is a common practice to slander opponents of the regime as Ustasha, it was said in the reportage. Such aggressive attacks wrapped in casual television shows are a new form of propaganda, which, however, takes over a lot of what is already known, says Željko Bodrožić, president of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS).
“This propaganda is a mutant, on the one hand, of the communist propaganda of Yugoslavia, the SPS propaganda of Slobodan Milošević and the propaganda of the Soviet KGB. It is about brainwashing and satanizing the opponent. Then new media and technologies are used to present all this more skillfully. And it gives results – Vučić managed to stay in power for 13 years, despite the obvious corruption and criminalization of the country, which did not exist until then,” said Bodrožić for the German public service. At the end of March in Belgrade in front of the newsroom of the tabloid and TV channel Informer, this radio reports. Almost 10,000 students and other demonstrators stand in front of the fence and demonstrate. One of the banners says “Disinformer”. Aleksa is from the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade, whose students are the organizers of the protest. For security reasons, he gives only his first name. Alexa says that the students declared war on Informer – symbolically, reports this media.
“We declared a media war on Informer because they do not investigate and do not work according to journalistic standards. Informer is a machine created to poison society. When I go to Informer’s portal, I see lies that are so heinous that it is hard to believe,” said student Aleksa, this public service reports.
Aleksa talks to ARD about the specific reason for the protest actions.
“They were spreading horrible lies about the mother of our fellow student. And that was the final straw. We had to react,” he stated.
One Serbian Muslim student criticized the fact that a large part of the political elite in Serbia denies the genocide against Bosniaks in Srebrenica, reports this media. The informer responded with a campaign against the student, calling him a traitor paid from abroad, he writes. The informer also spread information about his mother’s health, according to ARD.
In addition to Informer, two television channels with national frequency, Pink and Happy, as well as tabloids Alo, Kurir, Večernje novosti and Srpski telegraf are among the most aggressive Provučić media. According to the president of the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS), Željko Bodrožić, the Serbian media scene is largely an apparatus for maintaining power, tailored to Vučić’s measurements.
“Vučić came to favorable ground. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, we failed to fully reform the media system. Vučić and his party simply built their own media. Starting from hundreds of portals at the local level to a dozen television channels that can be viewed throughout the country through the state provider Telekom. These channels are the most important source of news for about 85 percent of Serbs. The informer shows a new level of recklessness and brutality towards opponents of the regime. And it is clear that they receive instructions from the president’s office and from SNS party headquarters. There is a coordination of spins and attacks on opponents of the regime,” Bodrožić pointed out for N1 .
Such thorough media manipulation hardly exists in any other country in Europe, writes ARD. According to Bodrožić, it also has something to do with Vučić’s biography. Before the Serbian president became a politician, he was a reporter himself – in the 90s during the war in Bosnia, for the Bosnian Serb propaganda media.
“Vučić joined Vojislav Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party in 1993. Vučić’s mentor Šešelj was considered a political leader of the Chetnik movement and spent 12 years in prison for war crimes. In 1998, during the Kosovo War, Vučić became the Minister of Information in the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Among other things, Vučić attracted attention for censoring media critical of the regime and imposing draconian sentences on them. During this period, the critical-oriented newspaper publisher, Slavko Ćuruvija, was killed in front of his home in Belgrade. There are suspicions that the Serbian security service is behind the murder,” the report states.
“Vučić’s political development took place in an extremely nationalist world, where it is legitimate to lie and cheat for a higher goal – the defense of Serbia and Serbia. And the Serbian Radical Party has always been against media freedom and for rule with a firm hand. They controlled the media and conceived their media,” Bodrožić told the German Public Service.
After the fall of the Milošević regime in 2000, Serbia initially experienced democratization. Until in 2003, the then Prime Minister Zoran Đindic was killed by a sniper. With Aleksandar Vučić, a man from the old Milosevic regime has been in power for 13 years, the report stated. Vučić captured the Serbian state, say some experts. He has built an apparatus of power tailored for him, it is said.
ARD also conveyed the atmosphere of the protest in front of Informer, where the participants shouted “return the horse’s head Dragana”.During the student protests, many demanded a new media system in Serbia. This also applies to Teodora, who studies German at the University of Belgrade and participates in the blockade of more than 60 of the 80 faculties in Serbia. During a conversation at her busy Faculty of Philology, she complains about the Serbian public broadcaster RTS. Admittedly, he does not incite protesting students like Informer, Pink, Happy and others, but he is also under the control of the authorities. Teodora believes that RTS largely ignores the protests and barely engages in conversation with students, reports ARD.
“In the first three months, we only got one call for an interview as students, and I think that’s terrible. Then people couldn’t see us,” she told the German public service.
The large protest on March 15, when more than 300,000 people came to Belgrade, was reported by the media around the world. But the Serbian public broadcaster initially refrained for hours, and later reported only briefly in the news, this media reports.
“At 4 p.m., when the city was full of people, they broadcast a concert, and then a series or something like that. This shows that the protests are not that important to them or that they don’t want to show how many people are in Belgrade,” she told this media. Another protest in front of a media house. This time in front of the independent television N1. About a hundred demonstrators, almost all men, stand and shout: “Serbia, Serbia” and “traitors”. They are separated by a police cordon, because hundreds of counter-demonstrators are standing in front of them – reports ARD.
“Among the demonstrators who are protesting against the N1 channel, there are also officials of the Movement of Socialists party, the pro-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin. He is currently leaving his post, because during the protest the entire government cabinet resigned. Critics say that Vučić has replaced his ‘chess pieces,'” it was stated.
The Socialist Movement is a coalition partner of Vučić’s SNS party. Therefore, it is anything but a citizen’s protest, says program director of N1 Igor Božić for ARD.
“We have been drawing attention to the fact that we are under pressure from the authorities for a long time. But since the big protest in Belgrade, we have noticed radicalization. Now, for the first time, a party from the government openly protested against the free media. They brought their officials to us on buses and blocked our entrance. They wanted to distract attention from the protest against the media loyal to the local regime. They simply twist everything by doing something similar to us,” Božić told ARD.
On the channels of television stations loyal to Vučić, a campaign against N1 and Nova S is conducted by the Center for Social Stability, an organization probably supported by the Government of Serbia, it is said. The video clip shows excerpts from the programs of television N1 and partner Nova S and represents a frontal attack on these two broadcasters, according to ARD.
“Every day new lies: ‘Vučić attacks, Vučić hires thugs, Vučić protects criminals. He is a shame for Europe.’ Each of their lies is short-lived, but they sowed hatred. So wake up! Soon to Belgrade – peacefully, democratically!”
It is President Vučić’s invitation to a demonstration against student protests. But that hasn’t happened yet, because it has been postponed. The government itself constantly uses harsh words against N1 and its partner station Nova S. Vučić describes critical media creators as part of a network that targeted him and Serbia – the report states.
“Maybe they can kill me. They want to win in Serbia and bring about a revolution here, with lies and deception. They want to abolish Serbia as a state. But they will never be able to do that,” Vučić said, according to the public service.
Vučić’s party colleague, Parliament Speaker Ana Brnabić, joins the attacks. When United Group, the Luxembourg-based parent company of N1, had to sell its Serbian cable operator SBB, Brnabić was happy. Because she believed that it would push N1 out of the Serbian market – states ARD.
“Mordor has fallen,” says Brnabić, according to the German media.
But the United group, which Brnabić compares to the evil empire from The Lord of the Rings, remains in Serbia, the report said. It has an agreement with the new owner of its cable provider that channels N1 and Nova S will be permanently broadcast in the cable network. However, in the meantime, the Government of Serbia has already taken care to prevent the expansion of SBB’s cable network in many cities of Serbia, it was stated. N1 can only be watched in about 40 percent of the entire Serbian network. There is also a great deal of support from the state to Telekom in order to make life difficult for N1 on the Serbian market, the report says.
Government campaigns produce results. N1 journalists feel it on the street, says N1 director Igor Božić.
“In the last four months, we have reported three serious incidents. One of our colleagues was attacked and hit by a masked assailant during a counter-protest against the student protests. Another reporter was followed and insulted for more than an hour during the live broadcast. And another reporter was threatened with death on the sidelines of Vučić’s rally,” said the director of N1. The attacks can be seen on the Internet. The N1 reporter was asked to get lost and the worst sexual insults were directed at her, it is reported.
On TV Informer, President Vučić was once again portrayed as a hero. The title reads: “Vučić is trying everything to save the year for students.”
The video actually shows Vučić giving a speech surrounded by students who are waving flags, it is stated. The students look at him in awe. Has he perhaps reconciled with them, this media asks.
“We are trying to help as much as we can. Let’s at least adopt the Lex Specialis in order to extend the academic year. We are doing this for you, because you just want to study. Those who caused the anarchy will have to explain. Someone who is decent and rational and who loves young people would never do such a thing to them,” Vučić pointed out. make a good news
“Students together with the president for the continuation of studies, for the end of protests and against anarchists – media loyal to Vučić are spreading this narrative. However, if you look closely, you will notice that Vučić is standing there with only ten students. And these are very special students, loyal to the government, whom in Serbia they call “boys” with contempt. Vučić stands with them in the so-called “ćaciland”, a protest camp in the park in front of the president’s office. It was established as a counterweight to the large protest in Belgrade. Critical journalists quickly discovered that this camp was a simulation organized by the SNS party and that some party officials and fake students participated in it. For Željko Bodrožić from the journalist association NUNS, this is a typical action of the ruling party,” states ARD.
“That is their modus operandi, to turn everything upside down. If there is an action, then they create a counterpart to it in their own way. The protest camp against student protests is a theater in which a parallel reality takes place,” adds Bodrožić.
Željko Bodrožić is particularly annoyed that all these manipulations are taking place in front of the eyes of the EU, without the EU reacting.
“The EU is not doing anything to fix things. It is not really helping Serbian society to get out of this media darkness. That is why, unfortunately, the EU is not a partner for change for us,” he pointed out.
From the beginning of the protest, it was noticeable that the students were not holding EU flags. The disappointment is obviously too great. And yet, Željko Bodrožić is sure that the real democratic future of Serbia can only be in the EU and only without the authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić, this media reports.
“Serbia has definitely changed in these months and there is no going back. Vučić can now ensure peace only with an open dictatorship. But he does not have the capacity for that. That’s why I think that, as far as he is concerned, this situation will be resolved by autumn,” Bodrožić told ARD.
In fact, Serbia is in a state of permanent protest these days, but there are still no concrete signs that Vučić and his party could fall from power after 13 years, it was concluded.
