Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS) celebrates 30 years of work today by presenting the annual review freedom of the media and safety of journalists in Serbia.
At the meeting called "Voices of truth - 30 years of NUNS", the results of the report "Indicators for the level of media freedom and the safety index of journalists 2023" will be presented.
NUNS General Secretary Tamara Filipović told "Vreme" that the results of the report show that we fulfill the forms, but that the essence in reality is constantly eluding us. Last year, the laws on public information and electronic media were changed, and a system of rapid reporting of attacks and threats against journalists was established in the past few years.
However, according to our interlocutor, the numbers say the opposite, that is, that the number of threats and attacks is not decreasing.
We whitewashed for nothing
"Convictions are still around 10 percent annually, and that actually means that we are establishing some mechanisms that are poorly implemented in practice, and the same applies to laws. We have changed the laws, however, when it comes to the REM, it is more passive than ever before, when it comes to the Law on Public Information, we have invested a lot of energy in specifying and better defining the project co-financing of media content of interest to the public, and now we are facing that that municipalities are massively reducing budgets for project co-financing this year and are obviously looking for a new way of financing eligible media," explains Filipović.
He adds that these are some of the first indications that "we whitewashed for nothing".
The state of media freedom in Serbia
Both domestic and international reports show that media freedom has been declining for 10 years.
"Sometime in 2014, we reached a certain level of media freedom and climbed the international lists of Reporters Without Borders and Freedom House, and from then until today we are getting worse and worse every year."
Although, says Filipović, we try to fill out some forms on paper, in practice journalists do not feel safer, independent media have worse conditions for survival and the pluralism of media content is more threatened than ever before.
Our interlocutor also explains that the media landscape has changed not only here, but also globally, the very concept of the media, the way it functions, and that the development of the digital world has created a completely new environment for the functioning of the media in which not only Serbia does not find its way around, but is the level of media freedom globally in decline.
"Some particular interests are scattered more and more, the state is trying in every way to control and capture the media." This is something that we in our country have been dealing with for the last 30 years and more. Somehow we failed to create a base that would allow us to defend the basic postulates of media freedom and that the public interest prevails in the media," Filipović points out.
That is why in the last ten years, she says, we have been recording a decline all the time, even though we are fighting in every possible way to establish a new environment for the work of our colleagues and the functioning of the media in general.
Call for solidarity
Finally, Filipović concludes that the fight is yet to come and calls on "all our colleagues to stand in solidarity and fight together for those values that actually mark our profession, which is the fight for the public interest and for public space".
The Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia was founded on March 26, 1994 in Belgrade's Dom omladine.
The founding assembly was attended by 350 journalists from all over Serbia, and today the association gathers more than 2500 members.
