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Bosnian Serbs Cut Ties with "Biased" State TV

19 01 2007  While Banja Luka says it has no choice, critics say the RS leader is trying to blackmail the media into submission.

By Gordana Katana in Banja Luka (Balkan Insight, 19 Jan 07)

The Bosnian Serb government has cut off communication with the country’s state television, prompting claims that Prime Minister Milorad Dodik is trying to tighten his grip on the media.

Critics allege that in the past six months Dodik has drawn most of the Bosnian Serb media into promoting his own party, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD.

The Republika Srpska, RS, announced that its officials would no longer give statements to journalists from the state network, BHT1 on January 12.

The deputy prime minister, Anton Kasipovic, said they took the step because of "the attitude that BHT1’s editors and reporters have shown when covering the activities of RS government".
Kasipovic criticised BHT1 for waiting until the 20th minute of its prime time news show to broadcast footage of a celebration marking the RS National Day on January 9.
He also said that the channel showed no respect to Dodik and the Serbian chair of the country’s Council of Ministers, Nikola Spiric, also a member of the SNSD.

This referred to Dodik’s appearance on the live current affairs programme "Posteno govoreci" on January 9, which featured a report on the terrible living standards of Bosniak returnees in Zvornik, in the eastern RS.

On air, Dodik accused the presenter, Duska Jurisic, of deliberately selecting the Zvornik footage over somewhere else where "the return process was more successful", to which Jurisic replied that Dodik had no right to try to meddle with the programme’s editorial policy.

Amir Zukic, editor-in-chief of BHT1’s current affairs programmes, rejected Dodik’s complaints and said he was trying to discredit the channel because its ratings had risen in the RS.
BHT1 is the only Sarajevo-based channel that can be viewed in the RS. While RS television stations can be viewed in Sarajevo through cable operators, its Federation counterpart cannot be viewed in Banja Luka.

Some journalists and media analysts have interpreted the RS government’s move as only the latest example of Dodik’s attempts to interfere with editorial policies.

They say Dodik started tightening his grip on the RS media last July, when the government replaced the managing director and supervisory board of the official SRNA news agency, installing a party colleague, the SNSD general secretary, Rajko Vasic, as chief.

Many SRNA reporters were soon fired. Some said Vasic had usurped an editorial role, removing journalists and interfering with stories. One who spoke to Balkan Insight anonymously said news items had been withdrawn from the wire and rewritten to suit the SNSD, especially during last year’s election campaign.

A new team of editors was also installed at the government’s behest in July at the daily Glas Srpske, which is also a semi-official outlet, founded by the RS parliament, though Glas Srpske’s new editor, Tomo Maric, denied that his newspaper had succumbed to political pressure, or was becoming a mouthpiece for the SNSD.

Jovo Labus, made editor in chief of SRNA last November, also said neither the government nor the SNSD had meddled with the agency’s editorial policy.

The director of RS state television and radio, RTRS, Dragan Davidovic also denied coming under any political pressure, although the opposition Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, has accused the RTRS of siding with Dodik’s party. "RTRS editors and I never came under any pressure from the authorities regarding editorial policy,"said Davidovic.

Tanja Topic, an analyst for the Friedrich Ebert foundation, said the RS media had inherited the old communist habit of currying favour with the authorities.

"The present political authorities are trying to use the same model in their efforts to control the media, turning them into obedient servants, confined to glorifying them," she said.

Topic added that the authorities used subtler methods nowadays, especially various forms of economic pressure.

"It’s not surprising the RS media has shown a complete lack of solidarity with BHT1 and kept utterly silent regarding the government’s campaign against the television station," she added.

The RS media has indeed given no support to BHT1 in the dispute, though journalists’ associations from the Federation have predictably condemned the RS government.
Borka Rudic, secretary of the BH Journalists Association, which covers the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, deplored the move as an "undemocratic act, putting the media under political pressure".

But the association failed to issue a strong statement as a whole. Rudic said this was because the managing board had decided to recommend members to declare their views individually.
Dragan Jerinic, a member of the board of the association and editor of the Banja Luka daily Nezavisne Novine, declined to condemn the RS government.

On the contrary, while appearing on BHT1 this week Jerinic said he hoped the channel’s reporters would "reconsider why the [Dodik] government made this well-intended decision".
He said RS government had been "forced to make such a move because of the unbalanced editorial policy of BHT1".

Jerinic added that when BHT1 reported fully from the scene of a mass grave in Bratunac, for example, where Bosniak victims had been found, on the same day a similar story about Serb victims found in Sanski Most was relegated to a news item.

He added that when reporting from last year's foodball game between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro in Belgrade, "BHT1 pictured supporters from the RS cheering for Serbia but failed to show supporters from the Federation carrying Turkish flags".

Vasic, who remains-general secretary of the SNSD, despite holding his new function in SRNA, also denied the RS government was trying to put pressure on BHT1.

He told Balkan Insight that the RS’s aim "was not political pressure but to point out to BHT1 its catastrophic editorial policy, which favours only the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina but not the RS as an entity within it".

Vasic freely admitted that most major media outlets in the RS supported the Dodik government, however.

"We live in surroundings in which journalists and editors, no matter whether we are we talking about RTRS or Glas Srpske or other private media, want to flatter the government," Vasic told Balkan Insight. "Their self-censorship is wrongly seen as political pressure."

Srdjan Blagovcanin, a representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the organisation Transparency International, said the media seldom came under direct pressure these days.

"The routine of someone picking up the telephone and ordering the media what to do is history," he told Balkan Insight.

"But the fact that reporters refrain from asking the prime minister and government key questions, even when it’s essential for their work, shows indirect pressures exist."

He noted the lack of any reaction to the RS government’s ban on the publication of transcripts of its sessions, and the decision to hold parliamentary sessions behind closed doors when decisions on selling strategic state-owned companies are being made.

Stanko Smoljanovic, editor of Banja Luka’s Kontakt radio, said fear of the consequences of standing up to the government was paralysing the media.

"Faced with exposure to direct pressure or economic reprisals against the media they work for, the reporters back down," said Smoljanovic.

He said RS journalists had got used to self-censorship and were selective about the information and topics they were prepared to publish.

Slobodan Vaskovic, owner and editor of Banja Luka’s Patriot magazine, says his experience was illustrative of this trend.

"After we published articles on the involvement of the RS president Milan Jelic in… dealings over Modrica oil refinery, with information on the wartime activities of the prime minister’s aides, my family and I faced serious threats," said Vaskovic.

Economic pressures followed, he said, as sponsors backed off for fear of falling victim to pressures if they continued to advertise in the magazine, "As a result, we have had to close down the magazine temporarily."

Meanwhile, Blagovcanin believes that the fact that entity and state parliaments have the final say in the naming of managing boards of entity and state televisions leaves plenty of room for political interference in the media’s work.

On January 16, the managing board of BHT1 sacked the general director, Drago Maric, accusing him of having "lost control of managing the media and of generating undesirable results in relations within the media" - an apparent reference to the row with Dodik.

Board members also asked BHT1 director Milan Trivic and news editor Amir Zukic to resign, criticising the station’s leadership over the conflict with the RS government.
Both Trivic and Zukic remained in position at the time of writing.

The board also ordered Zukic to refrain from making any statements to the media, criticising him for having claimed earlier this week that Dodik aimed to influence the nomination of a new BHT1 leadership this month.

Mehmed Halilovic, a former editor of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, criticised the managing board for apparently giving into RS government pressure.
"The board’s decision to side with the RS government is ill-judged and catastrophic," he said. "It is choosing daily politics over professionalism."

Halilovic added, "It shows the managing board is happy to let the government interfere with the media’s editorial policy, and that is a disaster for which the board must be held accountable."

Gordana Katana is a regular Balkan Insight correspondent from Banja Luka. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.