14. 06. 2011

LOCAL MEDIA AGAINST PRIVATIZATION

Journalists not in favor of the government's proposal  

City media seek to become public service broadcasters because the hitherto privatization has led a great number of TV, newspaper and radio stations to disaster.  

Kragujevac, June 14, 2011 (Blic) - Local media have opposed the mandatory privatization envisaged by the Draft Strategy for Development of the Public Information System in Serbia until 2016. Representatives of city radio and TV stations financed by city budgets say that privatization will lead them to disaster, as it was the case with the majority of media outlets that were privatized up to now.  

As Slavisa Popovic, Director of TV Nis, says, "the Draft is a big step back because its adoption would mean that the citizens' will has been infringed". "We are not satisfied, since 35.000 citizens have signed the petition with a request to transform Niska TV in a public service broadcaster, which was submitted to the Serbian Parliament back in 2007. The City Assembly brought the same decision unanimously. What we advocate for is a mutual interest. The working group that drafted this document did not include representatives of another side, namely from Kragujevac, Nis, Pancevo, Novi Pazar, Krusevac, Vranje and others. It appears that nothing south from Belgrade is noticed. This is not a good solution and it appears that we are on a way towards destroying everything we have in order to build the same thing again afterwards", Popovic said.  

Jovanka Marovic, Director of RTV Kragujevac, said that hitherto media privatization had led to their closing and destruction.  

"There is not a single example of successful privatization of an electronic media outlet in Serbia. We agree with the existence of national public service broadcaster, but we are also supporting the concept of maintaining regional ones as well. In EU countries, there are models that Serbia could look up to and hence there is no need to invent new things but to apply what has already been successfully applied by others. Czech Republic joined the EU with 85 percent non-privatized public media outlets. All in Serbia know too well which televisions are the most popular, which ones are under political pressures and which are not. The EU rules anticipate the possibility of financing regional TV outlets from public sources, but also the possibility to acquire money in other ways", Marovic says.  

Director of RTV Novi Pazar Denis Mavric said that 500.000 EUR was provided annually from the public budget.  

"Five million dinars are earned per year, while monthly television's work costs 3.5 million dinars. Therefore, the question is who is going to finance this TV station, when a certain interest group in Sandzak owns one regional and one local TV station, two newspapers and one radio station. Everyone who comes to Sandzak will become more than clear who would be the one owning all media in this region if this trend continues, and this would not be good at all", Mavric says.  

Half of privatizations invalid  

Dragana Cabarkapa, President of the Serbiam Journalists' Union, claims that she has requested the releasing of analysis of hitherto privatized media, since "one half out of 5o privatization cases has been annulled, because journalists have not received salaries, their pension and insurance taxes have not been paid and they have been working without honoraria and collective contracts". According to her, this is not the future of journalism in Serbia. As an example, she explained that in Kragujevac "Svetlost" employees had not received salaries for 14 months, while the newspapers were still regularly issued without explicit reactions of journalists' associations.