Panel: Media Literacy and State Reaction Necessary in Combating Disinformation 

BETAPHOTO/MILAN ILIC

Improving media literacy and ensuring state accountability were crucial in fighting disinformation and Russian propaganda on the war in Ukraine in the media outlets in Serbia, it was said at a panel titled “Media in Serbia on the War in Ukraine,” held in the EU Info Center on Feb. 22. 

“Pro-Russia and anti-West media reporting has a fertile soil in Serbia, where there exists accumulated anti-Western sentiment. The perception of citizens is that during the ‘90s, the international order established by the West in the world has acted against Serbia’s interest, and any revisionist, who opposes that order, is appealing to them, such as (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, (Chinese President Xi Jinping, or (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor) Orban,” Dimitrije Milic, program director of multidisciplinary organization New Third Way, said at the panel. 

Milic said that based on two-year monitoring of reporting by media outlets in Serbia on the aggression on Ukraine, the organization had concluded that the narrative was predominantly pro-Russian, but when Ukraine was doing well in the battlefield, when it tended to be neutral. “Russian media outlets are not as popular among the citizen as they serve as the source of information for the mainstream media for generating topics, narratives and stories,” Milic stressed.

Natasa Ivanovski, the foreign desk editor at Belgrade daily Blic, who has visited Ukraine on three occasions, including before and after the war started, that combating disinformation was difficult as it was hard to verify the information coming from the field, while only news pieces provided by the two conflicting sides were available. “Media in Serbia do not have sufficient funds or logistics to travel to Ukraine frequently. Also, I have noticed that Russia has been often arranging travels for bloggers and reporters from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro every two to three months, which goes to their advantage, because it is different from reporting from away, in Belgrade,” she said.