We live in a world in which the phrase "war against journalists" - who largely lead governments all over the planet - is quite appropriate. That is exactly the title of the new book Aleksandra Krstic, professor of journalism at Faculty of Political Sciences War against journalists mechanisms of violence and political control over the media. This study, published by "Archipelago" and the Faculty of Political Sciences, studies the global phenomenon of hatred towards the media and journalists in modern times, revealing its causes, ways of manifestation, direct and perfidious mechanisms of pressure, but also the ways in which journalists fight against it (or give up the fight). Also, the book is very important as a document, a contribution to the culture of memory about the history of pressure on the media in Serbia. We start the conversation with a question about the roots of that hatred.
ALEKSANDRA KRSTIC: It is about the evolution of the hostile relationship between the government and the media. In earlier times this relationship could be characterized as conflict or tension, in the last twenty years it has been described as hatred. It also includes hate speech and violence, all those elements directed against a group with the aim of discrediting it or, ultimately, eliminating it. Many authors conclude that journalists are precisely in the position of an oppressed group that suffers multiple violence, not only verbal but also physical, through the most diverse mechanisms used against them by the government, but also by politics in general.
"WEATHER: While we are talking about hatred on the field we are emotions. One of the newer words of this age is posttruth, a state of society in which objective facts have less influence than emotions on shaping public opinion. How much do we owe the existing relationship to the media to the fact that emotions prevail at the expense of the rational and reasoned??
That's right, today politics has turned into an almost exclusively emotional phenomenon. Our public space, as well as the global one, is occupied by the emotional reactions of politicians and various social groups, which is also published in the media. The space of facts has been usurped by emotions, some very extreme. We have normalized public threats and labeling in the assembly, in the media... All over the world, without any brakes, politicians express their hatred towards professional journalists and we can only guess what the ultimate goal is: the complete humiliation of a public profession that reports in the public interest.
How all journalists react to it?
In the numerous interviews and analyzes I read for the purposes of the book, I found that self-censorship is much worse than any other resistance mechanism. Because - if you don't have an institutional protection mechanism at the state level, or at the level of some working groups that deal with the safety of journalists and their mental health, you ultimately have journalists who silence themselves. There are closings, sweeping things under the carpet, decisions by editors to no longer deal with certain issues in order to protect their editorial office or the health of young colleagues.
Another type of response to the mechanisms of violence is to completely ignore it. It's simply that journalistic attitude: "Okay, that's in my job description, so what if I put up with the pressure." The reporting of attacks is abandoned - this is a very pronounced trend - which clearly shows that violence is normalized, and it should not be. The problem is that, even when the attack is reported, we see that the investigations have not been initiated, that the court processes have never been completed, or that they are, but not favorably for the journalists and editors.
Journalists and editors told me in interviews how much their families suffer; their fear does not concern themselves, but concern for the lives of mothers, spouses, children. No child is comfortable with a mother or father who is engaged in journalism, especially in a small environment, investigating corruption or other abuse of power, because they know that they can be attacked, that someone will knock on their door at night...
You write about the captivity of the media when they become part of the power structure they need to question, structures that encourage hatred towards professional media. But when the media is part of the propaganda, then they "is forgiven". How it works?
To put it simply, populists around the world say: "We are the people, the people elected us to be leaders, and the media is part of the elite born from the people." They survive on the binary divisions they create, such as the elite, where they have placed the media, vs. the people. This is absurd, because the media, by its very definition, should report in the interest of the public, inform the public and serve it. Therefore, this division is extremely paradoxical and today's global polarization is based on it, in which the media unfortunately also participates.
On the other hand, if you look at how the professional media look at themselves - those who report critically and do their job watchdog role in democratic countries - you will see that they consider themselves part of the people, because they serve the citizens, not politicians and other powerful people.
If we are talking about media that do not respect the code, rules of the profession, they do not work in the public interest, They very openly represent the government., spreading misinformation... Could we even call them media while at the same time, as you mention somewhere in the book, "degrade the essence of the media"?
We can be guided by some definitions of what a medium is. We know the essence and how a media organization works. Today, the three of us can create a portal, call ourselves media, and have that portal be inciting, label all dissenters and serve certain interests. Then it cannot be a medium.
Today, the question of what is media, what is journalism, what is PR, and what is propaganda is very blurred. This also applies to many "media" in some countries, which we know were founded with the tendency to humiliate a certain group of people or violate regulations. If they violate the regulations in democratically governed countries, there are prescribed penalties, including shutting down and banning broadcasts.
Professional media must respect laws and codes, have highly transparent ownership, submitted financial and all other regular reports. Professional media should not depend on any political authority, nor on party narratives, nor have non-transparent financiers who propagate their interests. In our country, we see, as shown by the latest data, that the state pours millions into the coffers of certain tabloid media, which exist only to propagate what it wants or to participate in the reckoning of the regime with people who think critically.
photo: lenka pavlović...
Speaking of blurred borders, what is your view on the line between activism and journalism? Can one be an objective observer in dark times?
I am often asked by students who have a dilemma: am I allowed to go to the protest and report as a participant, do I have to stand out exclusively as a journalist who is objective towards both sides?
In Serbia, in the last ten years - take for example the protests against violence, when the demonstrators demanded the cancellation of certain televisions and the disbanding of Remo because people were fed up with the amount of violence - it was seen that at the protests we had journalists who were carried away by the atmosphere, carried away by their personal attitudes. Then you lose touch with journalism and you become more of an activist. But I think that at the local level, that activism is sometimes crucial to solving problems. Part of my research with local media showed exactly that: if you have a local government that is not solving a pressing problem - patching potholes, heating problems, connecting a hospital to a heating plant - and the media pressures them to solve it, then that media activism is key. There, the media worked in the interest of the citizens; they initiated action there to achieve something for the community, they did not just convey the event according to the principle of five questions.
In this case, the struggle for the interests of the citizens is clearly visible, but what is it, let's say, with that dilemma at the protest?
There are different schools of thought and different answers to that question. But is activism in any way even if I fight for democracy and freedom of the media? If the fight for the quality of the profession is key to me and that's why I act critically, is that activism?
On the other hand, what to do when the propaganda, tabloid media that work for the regime are kind of "activists" - they fight for the survival of that regime and participate in propaganda from a position of power? What would have happened to the public's right to know what was happening if some TV stations, like N1, had not decided to cover those protests with dedication? Part of the public would not know what was happening at all, because other media did not report on it.
Let's go back to the position of the journalist. You present devastating information about the impunity of violence against journalists and that no more female journalists have ever been sentenced to long prison sentences.
The most important fact is that at the global level, impunity for violence and crimes against journalists amounts to as much as 90 percent. And that is a huge percentage when you take the data that from 1993 to August 2025, which is the last data I entered in the book, 1805 journalists were killed. And when I went to the UNESCO website again two weeks ago, I saw that it was about 1850 journalists. Therefore, only in that period, from August 2025 to March 2026, close to 50 journalists were killed. More journalists have been killed in the conflict in Gaza since 2023 than in all the wars we had in the 20th century, including Vietnam, the Korean conflict, World War II...
And let's not talk about the arrests of journalists, which happen on a daily basis. Women journalists are especially at risk, suffering incredible violence - not only discrediting on digital media but also physical violence. Data from UNESCO show that female journalists are currently under the greatest pressure from fines. The method of arrest is also indicative. Many well-known female journalists in India, Pakistan or some African countries have been arrested while reporting live. Simply, if a journalist is reporting in front of a politician's house, the police come, pick her up, put her in a van, take her to prison, and those punishments are extreme and are pronounced very quickly.
In Turkey, in the Criminal Code, you have an article that stipulates that if you insult the president of the republic, which was introduced during the time of the previous president, you can be arrested and imprisoned. During Erdogan's time, I think over 1500 journalists were swiftly prosecuted under that sentence. On the other hand, there is a huge increase in SLAPP lawsuits, especially here and in the surrounding states. Croatia has the largest number of SLAPP lawsuits against journalists in Europe, and there is also a very large increase in our country. Especially small newsrooms and their journalists are under attack, if they deal with investigative journalism and tricky topics, such as abuse of position, corruption and non-transparent spending of money.
The mechanisms of violence that you explore actually have several main directions, which?
Under one, institutional capture, means the capture of institutions that should support free journalism and democratization. Then, the capture of the media in terms of their political and economic instrumentalization, not to mention the complete colonization of media systems so that they serve the interests of one group, whether it is the government or some other current actor. Finally, there is the impotence of the resistance front - independent institutions, associations, media associations and the journalists themselves are so tortured and in such darkness that they themselves no longer have an answer. They try to fight on other levels, but if the institutions do not work, they remain in a system where there is simply no help for them.
I always mention the example of South Korea, where there are websites funded by people interested only in discrediting journalists on a daily basis, writing the worst about them, mentioning their family members, and there is no response from the institutions. But that's why you have an interesting response from South Korean journalists, some of them say: antifandom, that anti-narrative against the media, can help us be popular. I'm not going to qualify what the consequences of that are, but don't you see that at work the way hatred towards the media is justified from within, from within the profession itself? It is simply normalized and it is said: "They can hate me, as long as I am popular and someone reads me." It is no longer a question of journalism, but a question of perception of it - do you want to be popular or do you want to be a good, real journalist?
This is intertwined with the field of psychology. In the book, you also mention another aspect that has to do with psychology and that is that modern rulers do not tolerate criticism. What are all the consequences of that??
Yes, modern authoritarian rulers cannot stand criticism and then try to completely suspend it and make it impossible for critical voices to be present in the media or on digital platforms. This leads to the creation of an authoritarian public sphere, where you, as an audience that receives information exclusively from the mainstream media, become accustomed to a narrative in which there is no criticism. And professional journalists criticize the government by exposing aspects of that government and processing the news in a quality way, investigating it.
Control is not only carried out through the mechanisms of economic pressure, threats, attacks... A much more perfidious mechanism is the prevention of criticism, while media close to the authorities propagate a narrative that the authorities say is "acceptable to everyone", such as the so-called patriotic narratives in Russia or Belarus. In Serbia, you also have media that prevent any other form of reporting, propagating what is allowed and what is not. The graffiti on the buildings say the same thing - who is a hero and who is a traitor. During that time, professional media have been completely discredited in our country, they cannot be part of the main narrative and will always be a target of the government. Professional media that report critically have thus become the opposition. The authorities in Serbia treat them not even as media that support the opposition, but as if they themselves are the opposition. And they are just doing their job.
You are dealing with the history of pressure on the media in Serbia. What were the turning points of 2000?. till today?
The turning points began in early democratization. Then we had the first RRA (today's REM), in 2002, the Press Council, the first Code of Journalists (2006), good examples, but insufficiently strong institutions that could complete that work. The second turning point is after the change of government in 2012, and especially after 2017, when that government begins to capture the media even more strongly, to discredit journalists and create an atmosphere of hatred and pressure.
Was such an attitude of the authorities towards the media an expected evolution or a change for the worse that could not have been predicted?
This government started "with gloves", it founded working groups to improve the media situation, but fundamentally it never understood what freedom of the media is. From the first announcements of talks with the media, the confrontation with independent journalists very quickly moved on. A polarized division into "ours and yours" has been created, where it is completely normalized to call a journalist a traitor, terrorist, Ustasha - sometimes from the assembly, sometimes through the tabloids. But I would never call this an expected evolution, this was a serious decline.
Today, we are at a moment in which, in addition to everything I have listed, the media are being captured through corporate ownership takeovers, then new local media are springing up that will serve pre-election propaganda tomorrow. It is institutional, professional and personal entrapment on all levels.
One day when this government falls, do you foresee the possibility of dismantling this and building a healthier media system?
It is very difficult to predict whether the media system, which is currently in complete darkness, will manage to get the support of the relevant institutions, which would have to be built from scratch. Will these media be able to serve the citizens and respect ethical rules? First of all, the regulatory body (REM) must have an independent council that will quickly sanction hate speech, especially for broadcasters with a national frequency. Then, do we need 2500 media, how to solve the poverty of the media market...?
We have no guarantee that everything will be rosy after the change of this government. Journalism has eroded too much to recover quickly. A different media policy will be needed, then a ministry that supports professional journalism and independent institutions like the Press Council. You will always have tabloids and yellow press, but it must be placed within the framework of respect for the law, where you cannot insult someone in the most terrible way and the next day receive money from the state at a competition. It will be very difficult to free the media. Whoever comes to power will have to understand that things cannot be solved by just appointing "our people" and continuing on the same path.
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