The Machinery of Lies: Three Million Euros for Pro-Regime Tabloids During a Decade of Co-Financing

For a decade of project co-financing of media in Serbia, these five tabloids received at least 337.4 million dinars (€2.8 million) through companies that are their publishers and affiliated firms.

The largest amount was awarded to Informer – around 82 million dinars (over €690,000), followed by Večernje novosti and Radio Novosti, which received more than 77 million dinars (approximately €654,000). Alo follows with just under 73 million dinars (around €613,000), while Kurir and Espreso received around 61 million dinars (€514,000), while Srpski telegraf and the Republika portal received a total of about 44 million dinars (€370,000).

This is, by the way, only a part of the money from public budgets that has been redirected to the coffers of state tabloids in recent years, as these are media outlets into which millions flow, also through advertising tenders.

The largest portion of money was allocated by the City of Belgrade – over 177 million dinars, or about €1.5 million. For the same amount, it could have built a small kindergarten, purchased eight mammography machines, or financed nearly 700,000 meals for socially vulnerable users of the Public Kitchen.

In addition to Belgrade, significant amounts were also allocated by the City of Novi Sad, Pančevo, Šabac, Niš, and other cities and municipalities, as well as the Ministry of Information and the Provincial Secretariat for Information.

In the chart below, you can see which budgets (on the left) allocated the most money to these tabloids (on the right). By clicking on each link, you will see the individual amounts.

You can find even more detailed data in the following chart: at the first level are listed all donors (cities, municipalities, the Provincial Secretariat, and the Ministry) and the total amounts they allocated to the tabloids. By clicking on each of these fields, you receive other levels, with data on which tabloids received how much money, and further clicking on individual tabloids provides the names of the projects, monetary amounts for individual projects, as well as the years of the competitions.

Instead of being exclusively placed in the hands of responsible media, which publish verified information, the money has gone to a national propaganda machine, media that have been the most frequent violators of the code for years, and that have been publishing misinformation and manipulations for years.

Thousands and thousands of violations and lies

These media outlets have collectively violated the Journalists' Code of Serbia in more than 28,000 articles over the past decade, as shown by monitoring from the Press Council. This is a conservative figure, given that monitoring is conducted over periods of a few months, not throughout the entire year.

The champion is Alo, which has violated the Code in at least 7,368 articles from 2016 to 2025. It is followed by Srpski telegraf with 6,617 articles over ten years, and similarly, Informer with 6,114 such publications. Analysts from the Council have recorded Code violations in Kurir – 5,148 controversial articles, and 2,985 articles in Večernje novosti.

This is problematic in that the first Rulebook on Media Co-Financing, which was in effect from 2014 to 2024, stipulated that commissions would particularly consider whether the media had received penalties from self-regulatory bodies for Code violations. However, since no sanctions were prescribed if a city or municipality still allocated money to violators, the Rulebook was sufficiently "loose" to allow everything to pass.

This issue was also noted by the Press Council – in a report on co-financing media that violate the code from 2020. The Council cites the example of the City of Belgrade, which allocated 5.5 million dinars to the tabloid Alo in 2019, completely ignoring the fact that it had four Code violations in proceedings before the Appeals Commission, or four imposed measures.

That these are some of the most unprofessional media in the country is confirmed by the annual monitoring of the Raskrikavanje portal. From 2018 to 2024, journalists from Raskrikavanje found over 7,300 manipulations and disinformation on the front pages of these five tabloids.

Source: Cenzolovka