Media in the Western Balkans: who controls the past controls the future

ABSTRACT

The contribution assesses the role of the media in respect to democratization and EU accession in the countries of the Western Balkans (WB) and the development of press freedom over the long run. The author closely analyses the legislative framework and its implementation in practice and focuses in particular on the economic and political pressure on the media in the region. The article offers three arguments to explain the bad shape of media freedom in the Balkans: structural factors (state advertisements as the main source of income, economic tycoons close to incumbents as media owners), proximate or external factors (the deteriorating level of media freedom in some EU countries and the whole WB region, with an accent on stability rather than democracy) and political-societal dynamics (defamation and libel as means to punish journalists, verbal and physical assaults on journalists). The media in the WB region do not serve as the watchdog of democracy but are instead used as a means to reinforce illiberal regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• Media freedom
• Western Balkans
• media financing
• captured state
• illiberal politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For comparison of defamation laws see OSCE (2017). Out of 28 EU counties, 25 treat defamation as a criminal offence. Of those 25, 21 impose imprisonment as a sanction. In the vast majority of those 21 countries, imprisonment is imposed on the offender when the defamed person is a public figure. The paradox is then that the EU asks for decriminalization of defamation, but in most of its countries, defamation has not been decriminalized and can be punishable by imprisonment (Spaic et al. 2016).

2. Balkan Barometer is annual public opinion survey commissioned by the Regional Cooperation Council to gather and interpret data spanning a number of thematic areas and topics.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research project: ‘Current Issues in Political Science III’ undertaken at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University.

Notes on contributors

Věra Stojarová

Věra Stojarová works as an Academic Researcher and Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Her entire professional career has been focused on security and politics in the Western Balkans. Věra Stojarová has published many texts dealing with political and party systems and security in broader terms in the Western Balkan region and has also cooperated with the NGO sector, giving lectures on the security problems that societies in transition face.