"Progress in world rankings masks media's misery"

"Progress in world rankings masks media's misery"

However, last year only B92 and the Belgrade-based broadcaster Studio B joined the campaign and publish the proclamations of journalist associations.

"Serbia's progress in world rankings of political and media freedoms (Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders) masks the material misery of journalists who have fallen to the bottom of the wage scale, although they are on average among those with the highest education," according to the proclamation.

Some research suggests that journalists in Serbia earn as much as railway workers, and less than bus drivers, it said.

"For that reason this year once again, on World Press Freedom Day, we reiterate that there is no free press under conditions of poverty, corruption and fear," said the UNS.

Under pressure of poverty and fear of losing their jobs or temporary employment status in which media owners keep them for years, journalists and media workers have been subjected to censorship and self-censorship.

According to a survey UNS conducted in March this year, 35 percent of its members said they were "occasionally" subjected to censorship, while 44 percent resorted to self-censorship. At the same time, seven percent said they experienced censorship "to a high degree," and 28 percent said the same about self-censorship.

The UNS supports the implementation of the media strategy and adoption of new media laws, but warns that the "wild privatization of the last decade that caused a real pestilence among the media in Serbia" must not be repeated, as it would disenfranchise journalists when it comes to freedom of expression, as well as their labor and economic rights and freedoms.

The association is therefore demanding the withdrawal of the state from media ownership and legal guarantees that the taxpayers' money which the state is now using to fund public media companies will continue to be available through independent media project financing - "at least in the amount of two percent of budgets of local governments."

At the same time, the government is urged to at last put on its agenda the report of late Verica Barać and the Anti-Corruption Council on the situation in the Serbian media - that is, about "the mechanism of the influence of the controller of the advertising market on the editorial content of the media," and to prove that it will "not simply take over the lever of influence over the media from the previous government."

It is essential, said the UNS, that court practices consolidated to avoid cases of the media being penalized drastically for publishing accurate information, and that the Special Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes finally starts doing its job when it comes to 39 journalists and workers of Serbian media outlets that have been killed during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in Kosovo, and during the NATO aggression.

"The UNS supports the efforts of the authorities to finally find the killers of our colleagues Slavko Ćuruvija, Milan Pantić, and Dada Vujasinović," the organization said.