Unprofessional and misleading

I am grateful to readers of peacefare.net for pointing out that the Serbian media has published accounts of my post on Serbia: media and government | peacefare.net., clearly attributed to a “knowledgeable friend,” as my own view. This is unprofessional and misleading.

Worse: the Serbian press is suggesting that I said “Mediji nisu u službi premijera Vučića” (D. Serwer: the media is not in the service of Prime Minister Vucic). That attributes to me views that are not mine and is at best a distortion of my friend’s views. The author never said there is no censorship. The piece tries to explain how and why the media is pro-Vucic, not that it isn’t. The author gives several reasons: most people, including in the media, think the prime minister is doing the right things, and some people in the press are sychophantic towards the government because of opportunism or cowardice, including fear of losing government advertising. He also says media conditions are nowhere near as bad as they were under Milosevic.

You are entitled to wonder, what do I think? Do I agree with my friend?

One of the reasons I asked my friend’s opinion is the difficulty in forming my own. Beyond “kako ste” and “dobro dan,” I am not a Serbian speaker. I read the Serbian press mostly through Googletranslate and on B92’s English service, which is an eclectic mix that I find useful but not necessarily representative. My friend’s response was more nuanced and interesting than a lot of the commentary on press freedom in Serbia that I see in English-language media, so I thought it interesting enough to put in the public domain, even though it had to be published anonymously. It tried to explain the several mechanisms that make the press pro-government, rather than simply blaming ill-defined censorship. Whether I agreed or not was not an issue in deciding to publish it.

The Serbian press reaction and abuse of this blogpost is a true reflection of the state of the Serbian media, as one of my correspondents suggested today. It was unprofessional to attribute the views in the post to me personally. It is also inaccurate to suggest that the post exonerates the Serbian government.

As I see it, there is a tendency in Serbia, as in other transition countries, for the authorities to attack the messenger rather than respond to the message. This happens occasionally in mature democracies–President Obama a year or so ago was sharply critical of Fox News–but it is relatively rare. The press is doing its job in a democratic society when it reports unsavory facts or uncovers what it thinks is malfeasance. The right response 98% of the time is to the facts or the allegations, not to attack the media.

The situation is complicated in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans because some of the media more critical of the government and more willing to report what it regards as malfeasance is supported internationally. This can be unsettling to politicians, who are too often inclined to think the money is explicitly aimed at discrediting them. The “Sanader effect” (Ivo Sanader was a pro-EU prime minister of Croatia who has gone to prison for malfeasance) makes politicians in the Balkans particularly sensitive.

I can’t speak for the European Union, but I know that when US government money goes to support foreign media it is intended to support professional and accurate reporting, as well as a wide range of views. Even government-owned Voice of America aims for professionalism and accuracy. In my hundreds of interviews with VOA, RFE/RL and other government-supported outlets no one has ever tried to tell me what to say. Years ago I was present when Vice President George H.W. Bush, upset with something VOA had published about him, ordered a US embassy official to fire the correspondent. The diplomat had to tell the vice president that could not be done.

Of course this doesn’t mean that either I or the outlets that carry my interviews are 100% correct or in some absolute sense unbiased. I have colleagues who believe they are not asked to give interviews by VOA because their views diverge too much from those of the US government. There is no absolute purity in the media business. Influence is exercised in many different ways, not only in Serbia but also in the United States.

That said, there is a big gap between the relatively independent press in mature democracies and the kind of shabby and sycophantic coverage my blogpost on the Serbian government and media got this week. There will always be some media that toe government lines. But I like to hope that things will evolve in a more professional and mature direction. I’ll be amused to see if the Serbian press publishes an accurate account of this, my followup post.

And no, I don’t think things are worse today than under Milosevic. Nor do I think things were better in the Balkans in Tito’s time, as so many in the seven countries derived from Yugoslavia like to say. These invidious comparisons fail to give credit where it is due: things have improved and I hope will continue to improve, even if I am among those who would like improvement to come faster.