13. 01. 2016

MONITORING PUBLICATION XII PRESENTED!

ANEM presented its Monitoring publication XII at the 12th monitoring round table, held on 23 December 2015 in Belgrade. The round table was organized within ANEM project "Legal Monitoring of the Serbian Media Scene", successfully implemented for six and a half years now. In 2015 the project is supported by the Swiss Cooperation Office Serbia within the Small Projects Fund. The event gathered some 40 representatives of media and media/journalists' associations, NGOs, responsible authorities, international organizations and donors, and other interested parties.

Milorad Tadic, the President of ANEM, was the moderator of the round table. He has briefly presented the said project of ANEM and its results so far, as well as the content of the Monitoring Publication XII.

The Publication was presented by the authors of its texts - docent Jovo Bakić, PhD (the text: The Role of the Media in the Development of Freedom of Expression and Creation of a Responsible  Public);  prof. Snježana Milivojević, PhD (the text: The Public Interest in the Area of Public Information); Slobodan Kremenjak, attorney at law (the text: Project Co-Financing Rulebook: One Year After); Miloš Stojković, attorney at law (the text: Integrative Processes in the Serbian Media Sector: Is Media Concentration the new Value of the Media Scene?).  After the presentation of the Publication, the event participants discussed the issues relevant for the topics covered in the Publication.

The Role of the Media in the Development of Freedom of Expression and Creation of a Responsible  Public

Docent Jovo Bakic, PhD, spoke about the importance of the role of the media in a democratic society. According to him, the role of the media is to act in public interest, to be agents of the citizens, to reveal all the secret, special and private interests that are realized against the interest of citizens and public. The media are intermediaries between the public and various social actors. In an ideal democratic society interactions between different social actors, media and the public would flow freely, so that citizens, thanks to responsible action of the media, could get an insight into everything that is happening in society, everything would be public, every citizen would have all the elements for conclusion on what is in his/her interest and how to realize it. However, democracy today is closer to the oligarchies, in the ancient sense of the word, even in the USA - interests of corporations are most important and the politicians and the media are largely in their service. In the semi-periphery of the capitalism, where we belong, the situation is even worse - there is strong connection between authoritarian government and oligarchic structures, which means that you have a simulation of democracy, where multiparty system actually serves as ikebana, Bakic said. Citizens "enjoy" in "happy" and "pink" televisions, they are being brain washed by reality programs and becoming intellectually and morally numb. Tabloids are reporting on occurrences in reality shows, journalists are dealing with the private lives of public figures, not the issues that the public needs to know. However, in every society there are Journalists who work in public interest (thus with large J), and in Serbia such Journalists are: Brankica Stankovic, Olja Beckovic and Danica Vučenić. Unfortunately, the public did not recognize and did not protect them when they were threatened due to the responsible exercise of their profession in public interest. This means that the public is not responsible to itself and that is not mature, as it does not defend those who defend the public interest, Bakic said.

If there are no professional journalists and courageous media, there will be intellectually and morally numb public, and without mature and responsible public, as well as without professional journalists and courageous media, you cannot have a democratic society, concluded Bakic.

The Public Interest in the Area of Public Information

Prof. Milivojevic, PhD, spoke about two important issues that are related to the public interest in the field of public information.

The first question concerns the paradox - that laws are better than ever, while the media are never lower-rated, which is indicated by numerous international reports. These estimations on a drastic drop in media freedom and media quality came from the same circles that praised media laws, which made everything much more dramatic. Milivojevic said that the latest European Commission progress report indicates that all the compliments to the media are related to Chapter 10 - to the media as commercial institutions (copyright, digitization etc.), while all the critics concern the Chapter 23, which, among other things, deals with media freedom and media quality. From this it can be concluded that the media keep getting better as an industry, in favor to its owners, and getting worse when it comes to us, the citizens, in the area where they operate as a social institutions, which is not good, warned Milivojevic. Set of media laws has announced the "second wave" of media transition that is focused on building media market, where politically liberated media should function as independent and self-sustaining institutions. To this the media privatization, relaxation of rules on media concentration, namely the rules on media consolidation should serve. However, the privatization of the media was scandalously conducted and devastated the media landscape, assessed Milivojevic. The goal of this process was the ownership transformation, the process of change in the ownership and transformation - a different way of functioning of the media; here, it came down to who's buying what and who owns what, how to divide interest-territory along party lines and save clientalistic structure, so that these new owners could have easy access to state aid and other public resources that are then channeled politically. Everything indicates that the outcome of the ownership transformation will not benefit the citizens and that Serbia joined the group of Central European countries in which the belief that "free market" equals "free media" has proven to be an illusion. Therefore the central issue in discussion about public interest is how it is possible that these good laws have produced this bad situation. It is obvious that something is wrong with these laws. We got the media system that resembles to the "Mediterranean system" that is characterized by non-autonomous media, politicized broadcast media, a low level of readership of print media, the high degree of clientelism and very strong state role in the functioning of the media, this time through the funding that is not controlled, said Milivojevic. She pointed out that the first wave of distribution of state aid showed that there is so much wrong here.

Another issue is the definition and protection of the public interest in the field of public information. It is true that the Law on Public Information and the media defined for the first time the public interest, but it has only been focused on the public interest in media content and not in the sphere of public policy, which is not good. The Law did not provide for instruments that protect and promote the public interest; but, that was important to be done because after the ownership transformation we have a situation that the media, as the institutions in private ownership, produce information that is a public good, and that the media are of fundamental importance for democracy and decision-making process and civic participation. Due to lack of these instruments, we are witnessing the formation of the system in which the critical role of the media is paralyzed, the media lose their control function as institutions of public, while a public space, in which they are supposed to serve the public interest and to protect it, is privatized and blocked, and we should be worried about that, Milivojevic said. This time all these happen with the help of the laws, which are expected to bring the order, but they cannot do it because they did not envisage institutes for the prevention of such occurrences, Milivojevic concluded.

Implementation of the rules on project co-financing of the media

Attorney at law Slobodan Kremenjak said that now, at the end of the first year of implementation of the model of project co-financing of the media, we have an opportunity to reconsider the process, to see if it is what we are expected or it turned into something else. The same information on many shortcomings in implementation of these rules comes from different sources. The basic question is where is this new content, what is innovative and different that citizens got. The money is given for the same, not qualitatively different, said Kremenjak. He added that there is no magic rulebook that would solve all the problems of the media sector. So we should talk about the ways and mechanisms for overcoming all that we have perceived to be wrong in the practice, whether we have the instruments to remedy shortcomings and also for solutions, said Kremenjak. He pointed out that others order studies, monitor the effects of the implementations of regulations, while identified shortcomings are used for defining new public policies. We lack the mechanisms to identify shortcomings, which should be the basis for overcoming the problems and improvement of regulations. Did our ministry order a study on whether the adopted regulations are applied, and what are the mechanisms for the elimination of flaws, Kremenjak asked. He reminded that creation of new media strategy should be started in 2015, but that there were no sign of it.  

The integration of the media on Serbian media scene

Attorney at law Milos Stojkovic said that the free market is a prerequisite for positive consequences of media concentration, but that it does not yet exist in Serbia, because we do not have large resources on this market (about 155 million euros). For these small funds a large number of media (about 1400) is fighting, which raises the question of how these media survive; the answer is - because of other funding sources (advertising by public authorities - about 800 million euros). The aim of media concentration is to set the optimal rules that will ensure pluralism of sources and pluralism of information, ie. media content. It is difficult to know whether some progress in this area has been achieved in 2015. He pointed out that certain integration processes on the media scene in Serbia were noticed, that the liberalization of the rules of concentration, free media networking and digitization would inevitably lead to reduction in the number of media, but it was not known whether it would be a new quality.

In the discussion that followed the presentation of Publication participants discussed the following issues: media concentration, and if these rules are in public interest, as well as how they actually favor large media that lead to tabloidization; the results and irregularities of the privatization process that led to the strengthening of clientelism; the neglected role of citizens / public in the media sector; the lack of public reactions to anything that happens in the media sector, and the reasons for that; the problems in the project co-financing of the media and the need to remedy shortcomings in the relevant legislation; the importance of monitoring and evaluation of public funds spending; the lack of standards that oblige commercial media when it comes to quality; responsibilities and the limited powers of the Regulator for control and enhancement of the quality of content; the debate that is now being waged in Europe about the fate of the public media, what state aid is and how it is regulated; the necessity of systemic solutions to the problems identified in the media sector, which involves amendments to the existing regulations.

This round table is supported by the Swiss Cooperation Office Serbia within the Small Projects Fund.

The views presented at the round table are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Swiss Cooperation Office Serbia.  

ROUND TABLE AGENDA IS AVAILABLE HERE.