Report: Discrediting Campaigns Indicate External Influence on Media Editorial Policy

Bojan Cvejic (BETAPHOTO/Press-centar UNS)

The discrediting campaigns in domestic media are characterized by identical or almost identical content, full of disinformation and manipulative claims that appear on several portals in a brief period and, as a rule, target individuals who criticize the authorities, reads a report about monitoring of honoring the Code of Journalists of Serbia in printed media in the second half of last year.

According to the report, such content has become “almost a daily occurrence,” particularly since the start of protests over the collapse of the concrete overhang at the Novi Sad railway station on Nov. 1, 2024, when 16 people were killed a one seriously injured, the Independent Journalists Association of Serbia (IJAS) stated on Feb. 19. “Identical content appears in several media at the same time, which indicates the influence of one external center on the editorial policy,” it was stated in the report.

The author of the report and former member of the Commission for Complaints of the Press Council, Bojan Cvejic, told IJAS that a characteristic of such texts was that they are mainly without collocutors or sources, they are not signed and cannot be classified as any journalistic form that is studied in journalism theory.

IJAS also stated that, due to the increasingly frequent campaigns against individuals in the media, a new item has been introduced in the Code of Journalists (item 3 of Chapter 5), which reads that journalists are obligated to “abide by the principle of not harming the reputation and dignity of a person and not participating in the spreading of lies or in the continuous malicious undermining of the reputation of persons they report about.”