Dragan Šolak had long ago sold a majority stake in United Group, but he stayed on to run the company – quite successfully. This can be seen from the fact that they recently took one and a half billion euros from the sale of cable operator SBB and sports rights alone.
With that fat money - most of which goes to the majority owner, the Belorussian investment fund BC Partners - the Serbian regime practically bought a monopoly on the media in Serbia.
But that was not Sholak's decision. That businessman, known to the public only as Vučić's scarecrow, had only to implement the decision.
It is very possible that there was a rift between him and BC Partners. The news that Sholak is leaving the management was recently published, followed by an appeal by journalists and editors of United Media, from which it is read that Sholak has been dismissed.
In that statement, Sholak presents himself as an atypical businessman. In fact, anyone else would have cashed in on operations in Serbia a long time ago and gone to work in a country where he would not be branded as a traitor and organizer of the "colored revolution".
That's exactly how the BC Partners fund behaved. They only know money language, and they don't care if the bill includes an oil well, chicken slaughterhouses or free journalism in a Balkan country.
Regime or corporation
In Serbia, the critical word can be heard in many places - there are independent weekly magazines, investigative journalists, local media, podcasts, and YouTube shows. There is also Twitter.
But none of those places is nearly as powerful a megaphone as N1 and Nova S, the two televisions of the United group.
In principle, the problem (and not only in Serbia) is that the media are either under the influence of the regime, or they are a chip for the money game of corporations, or they are on a begging stick.
More specifically, the question is what does the departure of Sholak mean for the media scene and informing citizens in a society that has been in rebellion for seven months, and cannot expect the truth from the regime media and RTS?
At first, maybe nothing really changes, as BC Partners claims. In that reading, the removal of Šolak is only a logical continuation of the flight from Serbia to EU markets. Because the United group operates from Slovenia to Greece and nowhere has it had political problems like in Serbia.
After all, the biggest step was already taken when SBB was sold and the sports channels were shut down, and those were the two golden coke companies. Since then, editor Aleksandar Vučić has had almost a monopoly, and his (formally Telekom's) televisions have penetrated into every home.
As sources told us at the time, N1 and Nova S were left hanging on the thin line of the contract according to which SBB had to pay them a certain amount for each connection for some time (they mentioned five years). A sum sufficient to work immune to political pressure.
That contract, like any other, can be terminated, but it carries financial penalties. And the question is whether Vučić needs such a drama.
What kind of media awaits us?
It is more likely that the two major cable TV stations will operate as they have until now, until the contract expires. Then an indecent offer could be waiting for them - to make peace, reduce the criticism to a reasonable level, and somehow survive. Or to shut down.
It is certain that many excellent journalists and editors from those two houses will not agree to such an offer.
But what will the television scene be like in general, if this government survives? They will all be regime-based. You will have nowhere to work honestly. In the situation of a suffocated market - where most advertisers listen to the political wind - it is impossible to independently finance an expensive gaming television.
If so, the public will have to find its way in the jaws of the Internet and the few small and struggling independent media that remain. Without frigates like N1 and Nova S, which are 24/7 personnel for the program, it will be much more difficult.
If there is a lesson for the public, it is that they must finally learn to pay for media that informs them fairly. To go to the newsstand, to subscribe to newspapers, to donate to newsrooms, to support journalism.
Without that, everything will be decided by the regime and the corporations.
