06. 03. 2006

JOURNALISTS AND POLICE

BELGRADE, March 6, 2006 – Belgrade lawyer Bozo Prelevic claims some less acclaimed journalists used to offer him anything in return for police identifications. Former Police co-Minister in the transitory Government after October 2000 also says that journalists told them that some former police ministers used to provide them with official police IDs. Not wanting to state any names, Prelevic said that those journalists had never become important names in the profession. Speaking at the seminar “Challenges in reporting on police and crime”, Prelevic noted that in some situations journalists and press had most definitely been used as instruments for destruction in hands of certain political groups and tycoons. “There are ‘clairvoyants’ among journalists, the ones who know beforehand who is going to be arrested. Rather interesting information appear very often in the media, even if they have never been recorded in court’s reports”, said Prelevic. Noting that media had often been used for threatening witnesses and that some reports were a good ground for some witnesses or suspects’ escape, Prelevic used the example of the warrant being published only two hours after the murder of the Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Prelevic claimed the warrant for murder suspects had not been proclaimed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that is, Police Minister Dusan Mihajlovic. The relationship of media and police has not changed much since the period before October 2000. According to the research carried out by the Association of Serbian Journalists (UNS), 40 surveyed journalists from electronic and print media that cover the work of police said that important information was still being withheld or was obtained mainly unofficially. 34 percent of the respondents said the attitude of police toward the media in Serbia had not changed, 5 percent thought it had worsened, 28 percent said it had changed a bit, whereas 20 percent believed it had improved at some extent. More than 50 percent of respondents said the information was refused by the police almost every time (18 percent) or many times (36 percent), rarely (15 percent) and 10 percent of them said they always received the requested information. 41 percent of surveyed journalists said they obtained unofficial information from the police, mostly from the chiefs or other police officers (31 percent) or from their contacts working in the police force (10 percent). 28 percent of journalists were physically harassed for the articles they wrote, while 72 percent said they had never been harassed. In 36 percent of cases, journalists’ families were harassed. Three percent of journalists responded that their editors told them “not to make waves” or to stop their investigation, while the personal interest of editors was stated as the reason in 5 percent of the cases.