History

Radio B92 was founded in May, 1989, as an experimental youth station. It began broadcasting in Belgrade on a fifteen-day license. The station quickly grew into an institution with a broad range of activities. While the radio broadcast a mix of news, culture, entertainment and talk shows to the Belgrade audience, B92 also established a film and television production division, a publishing house, an Internet provider, a music label and its own alternative cultural centre, Cinema Rex.

By its tenth anniversary, in 1999, Radio B92 was the highest-rating radio station in Belgrade. The station’s news program also provided the core current affairs programming for the radio network of the Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), a consortium of more than thirty independent broadcasters throughout Yugoslavia.

Radio B92 was shut down a number of times during the Miloševic era. The first two bans were imposed after the station’s full and frank reporting of mass demonstrations against the government and both were lifted within days in response to massive pressure from the domestic public and the international community.

On the day NATO began bombing Belgrade in 1999, Radio B92 shut down again, but continued to produce programs which were broadcast over the Internet and through the ANEM network. Nine days later a government-backed group seized control of the station’s premises and those of ANEM.

Not one of the station’s employees agreed to work for the new, Miloševic-friendly management. Instead they regrouped, fighting a rearguard action in private homes. In this way the B92 team kept up its flow of information through an Internet server in Amsterdam. Many of the company’s journalists continued to work, now as Belgrade correspondents for those member stations of the ANEM network which had managed to escape the wartime suppression of independent media.

In August 1999, the original B92 team, which had survived the months of war intact, returned to the air as Radio B2-92, on a frequency leased from Belgrade’s Studio B. By the end of 1999, Radio B2-92 had restored its full program schedule and the television and film division had again begun producing current affairs programs, covering news in the capital for the ANEM Television Network.

At the same time, the Radio B92 team and ANEM conducted a free media campaign, coordinating media and civil activities to defend the independent media from the ever more harsh interference of the Miloševic government.

In May 2000, B92 was again banned from the Belgrade airwaves when the Serbian Government illegally took over Studio B, the Belgrade broadcaster from which Radio B2-92 leased its frequency and studios. This time the company was prepared: within 24 hours the station was able to resume production of national and international news and current affairs programming and distribute this for rebroadcast, using the Internet and satellite, to ANEM affiliates and other partners in the region. Thanks to the strong solidarity of the ANEM members and other news outlets in the region, B92’s news was available in this way to at least sixty per cent of the population of Yugoslavia.

Television B92 was launched in September 2000, just weeks before the crucial election in which Slobodan Miloševic lost the Yugoslav presidency. The new channel’s current affairs programs were produced in Belgrade and distributed via satellite to ANEM TV Network members and other stations in the region.

After Miloševic was forced to accept his defeat, in the popular uprising of October 5, B92 regained control of its own company, frequency and premises it had used until April 1999.

Over the years, B92 earned an international reputation for the defense of human rights, particularly the right to free expression and free media. Professional achievement of B92, its journalists and associates has over the past years been recognized in a number of important international and local awards