Aleksandar Vučić relies a lot on Susan Vasiljević when tailoring media strategies and how to neutralize independent media. Because she has worked in some of them herself, as she has said countless times so far, so I guess that's why she knows how things are in them.
In her official biography, Vasiljević stated that in the early 1990s she worked as a producer and journalist for the world's television stations, including the BBC, German television ARD and Austrian television ORF.
With some foreign houses in Serbia, in one way or another, she has continued cooperation and good relations, of course if they glorify Vučić and criticize everyone who criticizes him. She is the first confirmed that "Juronujz" is coming to Serbia and boasted that foreigners would increase the salaries of Serbian journalists, and some colleagues received personal invitations from her to work in this media company.
War over bathing
Now, all of a sudden, Vasiljević admitted on TV Kurir that she made up news for those same media.
"I worked in the media at one time. We made up stories. We made up the war in Montenegro, that is, the possibility that Milošević would attack Montenegro in 2000, before his last elections, that is, Milo Đukanović, because Milo turned his back on him, so that we would be on Sveti Stefan for three months," Vasiljević said.
This recognition did not come out of nowhere. The adviser to the President of Serbia was a guest on the show "Usijanje", together with the former editor-in-chief of "Politika" Ljiljana Smajlović and her longtime journalist Aleksandar Apostolovski. The conversation "heated up" about how allegedly today numerous media outlets in Serbia draw most of their information from social networks and thus "spread lies".
Vasiljević explained how the state "cleans" it all and then looks at what is correct, and for those "cleaners", she added, there is no sleep. There is so much fake and irrelevant news that "she needs a team of 5.000 people to correct all the misinformation," she says.
Thus, Vasiljević admitted that he is an irresponsible liar, that the state implements censorship at its discretion.
War over dissenters
Providing information via social networks would not be a problem, the trio of virtuous current and former journalists concluded, if fake news were not spreading massively and causing panic. Apostolovski mentioned that "it all started with the floods in Obrenovac, when a series of false and alarming news was published."
Everything really started then. Because then the state started arresting people for publishing fake news and spreading panic on social networks. This method has also proven to be very convenient for dealing with political dissidents this year. Thus, in ten days, they arrested Dejan Ilić, columnist Peščanik, for allegedly causing panic, although he expressed only a political position, and then the influencer Crystal Matt Damon, for allegedly endangering the safety of Ana Brnabić.
They used a part of the Criminal Code, Article 343, which remained from the old Yugoslavia to fight against the political opponents of communism, and which was removed or changed by all other former Yugoslav republics.
The logic is clear - whenever you don't like what someone says or publishes on the networks about politics in Serbia, you arrest him, intimidate him, keep him in custody and harass him. All under the pretext that he was raising panic or spreading fake news. With one blow, you send a message to those who just think of writing something similar.
At the same time, the biggest sowers of panic and spreading lies in the media space are the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, and the boss of Informer, Dragan J. Vučićević.
The war over the new Criminal Code
The proposal of the Criminal Code goes a step further, so the state is trying to adopt a provision according to which it would have the right to prosecute even people who just report some news which the government's "24/7 cleaners" would label as fake.
That is probably why Suzana Vasiljević had to admit that she allegedly "invented wars" as a journalist, because then her "colleagues" from the independent media must still be doing that today. And she, who is on the other side 30 years later, knows how to stop it.
Or she was simply so immersed in spreading lies and misinformation on behalf of the President of the Republic that she didn't even realize the consequences of her confession.
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