24. 06. 2003

Latest Pink attempt to smear B92

BELGRADE, 24 June, 2003 – Responding to TV Pink's latest smear campaign against B92, which happens to have been launched three days before the scheduled privatisation of RTV B92, the management wish to alert the public that announcements made by RTV Pink's Executive Board during their evening news broadcasts of 22 and 23 June are filled with various fabrications and wrongly presented information. B92 consider it wholly inappropriate to be accused of associations with jailed former Radio Television Serbia director Dragoljub Milanovic, particularly by a company whose owner, from 1996 onwards, was a senior official of Mirjana Markovic's Yugoslav Left Party. Sasa Mirkovic, director of RTV B92, draws attention to the fact that the antenna-sharing contract signed with RTS was followed by the forced mysterious shut down of B92 – allegedly due to water in our transmission cables – which was only restored thanks to the application of pressure by 100,000 demonstrators on the streets of Belgrade and the international community. Mirkovic said: "Our listeners will probably remember that we were off the air for 51 hours and it was only the pressure of demonstrators passing below our offices daily, huge international pressure and the arrival of Ms. Kathy Martin – senior representative of the American Committee for the Protection of Journalists – that our 92.5 frequency was restored". He continued: "In the middle of that month, during the signing of the contract, B92's legal representative and I never even met or had any physical contact with Mr. Milanovic and actually, we were in totally different rooms. So these details will shed light on the whole picture and the mystery of how B92 signed a contract with RTS for that frequency in the middle of December 1996". B92 feel that the notion of close relations between Milanovic and B92, and the idea that they are equivalent to the relations of some other pro-regime media companies with RTS, is highly cynical. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that such a false notion has been propagated deliberately to further the myth that "they are all the same". As testimony to the fact that all medias are not the same, B92 point to the fact that while Radio B92 was struggling to broadcast with one old and irreparably damaged transmitter, which could only be heard in half of Belgrade, RTV Pink used its contract with RTS in the period from 1994 to 1997 to build a national TV network. Mirkovic belatedly reacted to Pink's attack in October of last year, launched prior to a B92 privatisation auction that was subsequently postponed thanks to false accusations, which saw the publishing of a peculiar anonymous letter of disgruntled B92 employees, saying: "Before that attack last autumn, after it and even today, there isn't a single employee of our house who has publicly supported any so-called letters. "The authorities reacted twice to these anonymous charges, dismissing them as unreasonable on 4 March and 8 May this year". Finally, B92 reject yet more accusations of wrongdoing, this time relating to alleged pre-determined auction results. The management call on the Serbian Economy and Privatisation Agency to publicly state what they have found from such attacks without further delay, in order to prevent the destruction of B92's reputation and also that of the Serbian Government and the state authorities.