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14. 03. 2014

PARTY CAMERAS IN THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN

14.3.2014 (Beta, RTV) - The Republic Broadcasting Agency (RBA) should address the phenomenon of "party cameras" in the election campaign, it was said today at a conference of the Bureau for Social Research (BIRODI).

Political parties have asked the television stations to broadcast their video material without modification, and denounced those who failed to do so, said chief analyst of BIRODI Zoran Gavrilovic while presenting the results of monitoring of TV stations in Belgrade.

"There was material with no credit to journalists or cameraman, and similar material appears on a number of TV stations. It seems that the parties delivered their video materials to television stations which then broadcasted the material", Gavrilović said.

He said that the phenomenon, which he dubbed "party camera", was noticed also in the last election in 2012.

The monitoring conducted by BIRODI covered news programs and talk-show programs of Radio Television of Serbia, Radio Television of Vojvodina, B92 and TV Prva during first two weeks of the election campaign, from February 26 to March 11.

"Central news programs which we observed and the material broadcast in the election slots were nothing but means of propaganda", Gavrilović said.

The research results showed that the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) dominated when it comes to the representation of political actors and the positive tone of reporting.

The campaign was focused on party officials, with an above average number of positive reports on public officials. The main actor of the campaign was the first deputy prime minister of the Serbian Government and the leader of SNS Aleksandar Vučić.

Equal representation on TV stations was given to the coalition SPS-PUPS-JS, Democratic Party (DS), New Democratic Party (NDS), United Regions of Serbia (URS) and Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), while other parties were in an unequal position.

Executive director of BIRODI Pavle Dimitrijević assessed that during this election campaign the citizens were more ready than before to report irregularities they spotted, but the media did not report on such abuses.

BIRODI researcher Dražen Pavlica talked about an interesting phenomenon during the campaign - the use of metaphors which were mainly "from the domain of medicine and zoology".

"The most frequently used metaphor was ‘cancer' and everything related with this malignant disease", and this was done by all political actors, he said.

The research was conducted with the support of the Slovak organization MEMO 98, with the aim to point out the divergence from professional standards in reporting.