The Whining of Journalism

**The Squeal of Journalism**

I remember how he squealed. I have no other word for that sound. With one hand, a police officer held him, the photographer, a colleague, in a narrow passage from Terazije to Čumićevo Sokače, while with the other, he struck him with a baton on the head and neck, again and again, producing an unmistakably disgusting, dull sound of the hard stick against the skull covered with skin and a bit of hair—a mechanical sound more suited to a trade or manual labor.

I was pulling him from the other side by the hand that held the camera, stretching it as far away from the baton as possible to prevent it from breaking. Better a head than the camera. But he got caught with his bag of lenses and other equipment on some wire doors in that narrow throat and didn't want to leave it with the policeman. Blood started to flow, splattering me; he looked at me like a frantic animal fighting for its life.

The policeman was groaning with the expression of someone who is working hard. And every time he "did" his thing, my colleague, despite his heroic restraint, let out a barely audible, thin, agonizing little squeak.

I know that it was a gesture from a man trying to protect his (uninsured, of course) expensive tools. But I also know that he didn't capture the images. The frozen, two-dimensional, black-and-white fragments of history that will never repeat themselves, he did not preserve. If the policeman destroys that, he has destroyed the photographer's mission, his reason for existence in the world.

Do you know what the problem is here? That I and the women who wiped his blood with handkerchiefs after everything remember the beating of my colleague during the winter protests against the stolen elections in 1996—and no one else. Aside from his surroundings, both personal and professional, no one cares about his skull, blood, and photographs.

No one has given (adequate) recognition to our journalists for the torch of freedom they defended, sometimes with their bodies, in three cases with their lives, from the dark horde that (this society is the worst repeat offender in class, believe me) rules again.

The new authorities have not protected the media, journalists, or media freedoms. They have left that to the will of the state. That brief pause of eleven years in our lives, during which we did not live under one dictatorship or another or a one-party system, has remained just that. A brief pause. And no one thought that we could slip back into that centuries-old darkness if, among other things, we do not canonize the freedom of journalists to do their jobs properly.

### Alpac is Coming

Yesterday, the investment fund Alpac Capital came for the popular independent media of Serbia (and Montenegro, but they are somehow defending themselves). The news from N1 and Nova TV carries a quiet squeal between the lines. Alpac has bought Euronews, founded as a European response to CNN, established by state broadcasters of the EU. It has changed private hands a couple of times, sustained by support from Brussels, and then began to "multiply."

From Azerbaijan to Serbia, the trail of cooperation with authoritarian regimes and their money follows them. Euronews in Serbia has been "brought into line" under Alpac by the light hand of Minja Miletić; journalists tried to protect the profession on the wings of a then-budding protest against the regime, but with the mass exodus of professionals, it ultimately became yet another regime apparatus for hiding shame and disgrace. Alpac's business strategy, from the outside, appears to be providing services to authoritarian regimes and individuals for lucrative contracts with the authorities. Informational journalism never pays off anyway.

In the 1990s, we journalists were killed when we got in the way, but that was just the tip of the madness. Arrests, prison sentences, media closures, censorship, kidnappings, beatings, general public contempt, intrusions by criminals and paramilitaries into newsrooms… Brave colleagues endured horrific things so that at least someone would know what was happening here, for God's sake, what was happening in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo.

After Milošević, the new authorities (much better than the previous ones, far better than the current ones) coldly passed a scandalous law to take down one media outlet and somehow “couldn't succeed,” poor things, despite their good intentions, to uncover anything about the detonated bomb in front of **Dejan Anastasijević’s** window, just as they couldn't regarding the death of **Milan Pantić**.

In the coming weeks and months, unless we rely on some regulatory body in Luxembourg, independent media with a reach greater than marginal will quickly deform—and no one will care. The student movement—nothing. The parties—mostly nothing.

Citizens spontaneously gathered in front of N1 last year when some group linked to Vulin came to disrupt them; rallies this year called for gatherings in front of the television building, drawing a thousand or two people. But there is no organized defense of the media in any sense.

At no support gathering for N1 did a single student flag appear, except perhaps as an incident. The only serious opposition force simply does not consider N1 worth their support. Their reasons for that are solely their own and can be entirely legitimate. But it is not about reasons here. It is about the final effect that can be summarized in the popular phrase “media desert.” And that seems to be okay.

### Death at an Opportune Moment

Perhaps it is time for us, independent journalists, to thank this society and its citizens, students, and others for their attention, apologize “if something was wrong,” and begin looking for retraining for some less dangerous and exciting jobs. It seems we are no longer needed.

While Vučić's assorted thugs and his entire regime have been harassing exclusives and investigative journalists and suffocating media that disturb them for over a decade, it could perhaps be said that the whole society is in apathy. But now more than half of Serbia's citizens realize the chasm we are in. They know that precisely thanks to journalists, due to the efforts of those same media, which now follow them in millions. Not politicians, not social workers, engineers, bakers, police officers, prosecutors, athletes, traders, artists, or students (honor to all, that’s simply not their job). But journalists. Because of those hard-earned insights that journalists paid dearly for, hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets to risk beatings and arrests. Now there is an idea, or at least a movement that most of those citizens are following… And again—no one cares.

Now, to a large extent, this is a clear signal, at least to me, that this is a marriage in which one of the two spouses is taken “for granted,” that the majority feels that it will probably be harder without that person, but not so much that they feel compelled to act, that life will somehow go on, and ultimately it is a question of who was truly faithful, where the dowry is and what the neighbors think about it.

That’s okay, a perfectly legitimate relationship to which everyone has a right in life. But you know, it’s not a relationship worth engaging in journalism at all. Let alone putting your head under the bus. There will be no need for an unpleasant divorce proceeding. One of the spouses (independent journalism with significant reach) will simply, to everyone’s relief, pass away.

### The Myth of a Free Internet

Well, now everyone who has decided not to react, or at least not to react specifically and in accordance with the importance of the process of suppressing truth and blinding society, will be able to try a little how it is to inform themselves (only) through social networks. There are just a few problems with that. Minor, evidently considered, but let’s list at least some, just off the top of my head:

1. On networks, you get information from other users, or if they share something from professional media. If there are no professional media—there is nothing unambiguously to share. Four-fifths of all queries on Google related to important news yielded results from professional media, and artificial intelligence is reliable only when it cites professional media as sources. Of which there will be no more here. Good luck with “confidential information from well-informed” Telegram users.

2. On networks, any informing is in competition with reality trash, pornography, car prices, puppies, kittens, jackasses, grandchildren, selfies, and Temu. Do you have something unpleasant to share with users? Well, they are just a click away from laughter or erotic excitement. Who will choose what?

3. What you read, you won’t be able to verify, because those are not professionally collected, verified, confirmed, and proven information, with cited sources you can contact for verification. Anyone can lie to you however they want, as long as they do it attractively. And you will like it. For a while. You already like it. Admit it.

4. All those influencers, let me tell you a secret, work to make you like the content, not to inform you. And they won’t. To inform you. They don’t even know how. But they love your money. And they look unbelievably serious while talking.

5. Now the regime will have four televisions with national licenses, hundreds of local ones, all national newspapers in the country, and all national radio stations, plus an army of bots on social media and several portals at the top of readership in Serbia. We will be left with Facebook, Instagram, and a little TikTok, plus a few still-living local media.

6. What have we prepared for this increasingly evident situation for the past year? Nothing. Maybe this is the moment to congratulate someone?

7. You may love Vuk Cvijić, maybe some other journalists, but now Miloš Medenica will inform you, since none of us have a mafia or a rogue secret service to hide us while we talk.

8. As the public is the only defense for journalists against the state, especially a rogue one, what do you think the regime will do to journalists now? Kindly? Does that even concern you?

9. Let’s repeat once more, while we still can: journalists pay attention not only to the accuracy of information but also to the context, the ethics of obtaining it, the ethics of presentation, and your esteemed capacity for concentration and understanding of news. On networks, no one bothers with such trivialities. And that is as dangerous as complete ignorance.

10. Does anyone really think that the internet cannot be controlled? Have we heard of China, Russia, or Turkey? It works quite well there, you know.

In any case, while I half-privately whimper over the obvious absence of the necessity of my profession, over the fates of friends and journalist comrades, as well as the media that I will no longer be able to follow without a vomit bag, it is actually harder for me to think about this whole society, and so tragically immature, unprepared even for minor tremors from the total suppression of truth in public.

You know, we should weep over every citizen who, instead of choosing where to go on vacation, dies without treatment and medicine. We should scream in rage over every neighbor whose business has been crushed, beaten, arrested, and condemned by the law of God.

But we should fear every group of people, especially a group of several million, that lacks a reliable source of information.

Goodbye, and thank you for all the fish.

*(Farewell message of dolphins who, in Douglas Adams' science fiction novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," left Earth before the inevitable catastrophe.)*

**Author: Branko Čečen**
**Source: [Cenzolovka](https://www.cenzolovka.rs/etika/cviljenje-novinarstva/)**