BETA Agency Condemns Attacks on Journalist Dinko Gruhonjic

Dinko Gruhonjic (BETAPHOTO/Milos Miskov)

BETA News Agency condemns the media attacks and insults against its correspondent Dinko Gruhonjic, a journalist and professor at the Department of Media Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, by the portal NS Uzivo.

The claims and insults against Gruhonjic, declared in an unsigned text on the NS portal, accusing him of being on foreign payroll and disputing his journalistic and academic expertise, are completely unacceptable. Besides them being unacceptable in a modern and democratic society, they are also very dangerous because, by targeting the victim of the attack, they make the victim an enemy in the minds of superficially informed people.

BETA maintains that political and personal disqualifications should be a thing of the past and that the fight against such treatment of those who think differently had to be joined by the University, the professional public and state organs, primarily the prosecution and police.

It is the stance of BETA that an absence of an unambiguous reaction of the prosecution would represent a "green light" for an increase in the number of such attacks, which would negatively affect the degree of media freedom in Serbia and additionally undermine the already jeopardized freedom of speech in the media and the University. The editorial collegium of BETA assesses that the background of the attack on Gruhonjic was political in nature and had nothing to do with his engagement at the Faculty – solely with his work as a journalist.

Gruhonjic has already been the target of a number of verbal and written attacks and disqualifications in the public space and, at the end of 2020, unknown perpetrators wrote hate graffiti on the entrance of the residence building in Novi Sad where he lives.