Veran Matić: Out of 2,300 media outlets in Serbia, at least 2,000 are pro-government.

He reminded that Serbia was ranked 54th on the World Press Freedom Index in 2014, and this year it has dropped to 104th place.

“In the 12 years of Aleksandar Vučić's rule, we have fallen by half on the list, even though at the outset the government and all those who won the elections back then promised much greater media freedoms. Therefore, we find ourselves in a situation where we have crossed the psychological barrier of the hundredth position, and that is truly an incredibly tragic situation. We are the worst in Europe, and this is something that should concern all of us so much that it should be the most important issue in the country today,” Matić assessed.

According to him, hate speech and hostility and violence against journalists come from the president, the speaker of the assembly, the government, ministers, and so on, and the Slavko Ćuruvija Foundation speaks about this very often and provides data on this rhetoric every month.

“We have not had a single local election without violence, and it has been very drastic. The latest case was the elections in Bor, where there was truly an attempted murder of journalist Lazar Dinić. This is something that is really an alarm that we need to take as seriously as possible, because after an attempted murder comes murder, and unfortunately, we have that in our past. Slavko Ćuruvija was killed after a campaign that ran from 1998 to 1999, culminating in his murder. At that time, the Minister of Information was Aleksandar Vučić, the current president, and Ivica Dačić, the current Minister of Police, was in power, and we have a situation that is déjà vu, repeating itself in a much more drastic form than we experienced back then,” emphasized the president of the ANEM Management Board.

As he added, out of 2,300 media outlets in Serbia, at least 2,000 are pro-government. All of them, Matić pointed out, work for the government and for the propaganda of Aleksandar Vučić and his party, while on the other hand, there are about a hundred media outlets that are barely surviving, and they absolutely need assistance, with the question of what will happen in the next year.