Serbia’s Media Landscape: National TV Stations Keep Most Viewers

Television (Photo: Pixabay)

Television is still the dominant source of information in Serbia and the media landscape is extremely centralized: four commercial broadcasters with national licenses – TV Pink, TV Happy, TV Prva and TV B92, together with the Serbian Broadcasting Corporation (RTS), absorb around 70 percent of the audience, according to the results of an analysis titled “Serbia’s Media Landscape: Analysis of National Television Content.”

The abolishing of the broadcasters’ quantitative obligation to reserve at least one fifth of air time for cultural, artistic, scientific, educational, documentary and children’s shows, coupled with the simultaneous introduction of the imprecise criterion of “diversity,” has paved the way for the additional commercialization of program schemes, the Slavko Curuvija Foundation has stated. At the same time, the years-long absence of effective supervision by REM, particularly since November 2024 when the mandate of the previous Council of REM expired, has contributed to the fact that serious violations of legal and program obligations are not sanctioned, which has enabled the domination of reality formats, infotainment and politically instrumentalized content.

The analysis of the content of news and political shows on TV Prva, TV Pink, TV Happy and TV B92 unveiled the existence of a consistent and systemically maintained propaganda pattern, in which reality is constructed through a binary narrative. On the one side there are the authorities as the only legitimate guardian of the order, stability and national identity, and on the other – the opposition, students, universities, civil initiatives and non-governmental organizations, presented as coordinated instruments of destabilization of the country, mostly connected with foreign factors, foreign intelligence or “anti-Serb” interests, the analysis showed.

Using the strategies of delegitimizing, spreading moral panic, describing political dissent as matters of psychology, using the treason rhetoric and labels from pathology, such shows systematically dehumanize critical voices, strip the people of political autonomy, demonize academic institutions and normalize repression as the desirable response to “threat.”