20 Years On, New Threats Worsen Outlook for Free Media in Balkans

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic, featuring comments by Tim Judah, Fletcher Alum and Special Correspondent for The Economist

When BIRN was founded in 2005 to promote a strong, independent and free media in the Balkans, media freedom reports on the region’s aspiring democracies painted a grim picture.

Political and economic pressures on the free press, illicit state subsidies, often disguised as government advertising, poor working conditions for journalists, lawsuits and verbal and physical attacks filled reports compiled by media watchdogs.

Yet, hopes were also high – that the internet era would bring more pluralism in to the media space, and that as the region was trod its path towards the EU, European funds and policies to strengthen and protect free media would bear fruit.

Two decades later, the types of pressures listed in media freedom reports may be different, but most of the core challenges that plagued the media landscape back then persist.

The internet brought more media outlets; it did not bring true pluralism. And while laws and strategies intended to safeguard media independence are now usually in place, they have largely hit a brick wall when it comes to implementation.

In a sea of fake news, AI and copy-paste journalism, handfuls of investigative teams still hold the torch for proper journalism that serves the public interest and has an impact.

But, as funds for these outlets dwindle, the question of their sustainability and survival is more pressing than ever.

“Technology has changed and the people who want to influence the media have just adapted to the new technology, that’s all,” observes Tim Judah of The Economist, who has been covering the Balkans for decades and is also president of the BIRN Assembly

“A lot of the issues we have today are pretty much the same as before,” Judah says.

More media, not more pluralism

In the early 2000s, when big and established electronic and printed outlets dominated the Balkan media landscape, and when their websites drew by far the most traffic, BIRN’s Balkan Insight was launched as one of the first primarily online media in the region.

The shift towards online was already visible, but many traditional outlets failed to see the writing on the wall.

“They ignored the fact that their websites were the most visited and were afraid that if they invested more in online production, their circulation or viewership would decrease,” explains Goran Rizaov, journalist and project manager at Metamorphosis, a non-profit from North Macedonia focused on democracy and digital media.

Many of these once prominent outlets are now history, and with them vanished their biggest potential value – their “big newsrooms, with many professionals and editorial teams that are unimaginable today”, Rizaov says.

In their place, Balkan readers and viewers now have a slew of new, smaller online outlets that lack the capacity of big newsrooms to produce original content and hold those in power accountable.

“Now we have hundreds if not thousands of online media but pluralism remains only a mirage. In fact, we only have a few narratives that everyone obeys because journalism has been reduced to copy-paste,” Rizaov comments.

These outlets are “struggling to survive, their sustainability is shaky and the salaries of journalists, workers’ rights and job safety are exceptionally low”, he adds, so “they make themselves available and subservient to anyone who sends them a ready-made text, a finished product”.

These ready-made products often come from state institutions and politicians, as well as private firms, who now hire more journalists, photographers and cameramen than media outlets, to maintain their PR image on social networks, Rizaov argues. This slew of small media simply amplify their patrons’ narratives without critical filtering.

“That’s where we come to a paradox – where media workers are hired to create PR for them and real newsrooms don’t have the resources to put this PR under scrutiny. In other words, it’s unfair competition,” he continues.

Competing with algorithms

Over the past two decades, the advent of largely unfiltered social media and of algorithms picking and ranking news based on their shock factor and potential for clicks and profits have diminished the role and capacity of media desks and of editorial teams. These are now playing catch-up with these faster and flashier competitors.

Media outlets struggle to compete, be more “likable” to the algorithms and publish news based on unchecked social media posts at high speed, media experts say.

Croatian journalist and editor Maja Sever, also president of the European Federation of Journalists, told BIRN that she still believes that people are interested in quality reporting.

But quality news has become harder to produce and promote, as “it is hard to penetrate the algorithms that impose profits”, she says.

She laments a chronic lack of political will in Balkan countries to educate audiences on. how to recognise original content.

“Unfortunately, readers have learned that they can get anything they want online for free – and most of them are not asking who the journalists who made that content are, what their working conditions are, and so on,” she says.

Sever adds that, by working in smaller and weaker newsrooms, over time, “workers have lost the power to unite and organise themselves to advocate for all they need”.

Another big problem, she says, is that employers increasingly hire freelancers whose rights are completely unprotected, “and so we are weakening the position and strength of the profession”.

Fears that ‘Hungarian model’ could spread

The remaining relatively big and well-staffed newsrooms are mainly concentrated within prominent private TV stations and national broadcasters.

Things have not changed there much over the past decades in Balkan countries, experts and journalists say.

Political control over electronic media remains a pervasive and deeply entrenched issue, they note.

Despite formal legal frameworks often aligning with EU standards, their implementation is consistently undermined by political influence and “media capture”.

Control exerted through financial leverage, by pouring state money into advertisements remains a well-practised way to exert pressure. National advertisement markets are small and TV stations are expensive to operate. Starved for money, they are susceptible to the lure of state funds.

Weak and sometimes politically appointed regulatory bodies as well as obscure ownership structures exacerbate the problem, experts and media freedom reports indicate.

When it comes to state-funded public broadcasters, Judah says, they “have always to an extent been under government or political control” in Balkan states.

But, unlike the situation some 20 years ago, Judah is less optimistic now about positive change in them, and in the Balkan media sphere in general.

Developments even within the EU, as in Hungary, where Viktor Orban’s regime has obtained a tight grip on the media, he notes, “provide a model for the Western Balkans that many Balkan political leaders try to emulate”.

Reporters Without Borders’ latest media Freedom Index confirms those concerns.

Its latest index assesses that press freedom has continued a downward slide in most Balkan countries.

Maja Sever says that with their secure funding, public broadcasters are in theory in best position to be “the focal point of public-interest-based journalism – a hub and a backbone of the media system when it comes to journalism”.

But that is if only they turn to true, professional journalism, while keeping people’s interest with their good reporting, she adds.

Dwindling funds threaten free media’s survival

It is not all doom and gloom, though, Rizaov from Metamorphosis points out, as each country has at least a few persistent outlets that act as hubs for real investigative journalism, which can strike the nerves of politicians or power groups and have a societal impact.

However, the question for their survival is finding sustainable funds. “So far, they have mainly survived thanks to project funding from abroad – but with dwindling funds, this is no longer an option,” he warns.

“The sustainability model of these investigative media no longer works. They cannot go fully commercial either,” he adds.

“We must explore the crowdfunding model, or form some national public fund, as finding a way for these serious media to be financed and continue their work is imperative, because the public interest lies there,” Rizaov says.

Sever agrees that “lack of thought about the sustainable financing of public-interest journalism is one of the key problems”, adding that while the European Commission has allocated funds in the last two or three cycles, “that is not enough”.

In the end, Sever says, if media freedom and professional journalism continue on their downward spiral, “the greatest damage will be suffered by citizens – because journalists will find other jobs, as they are often resourceful people.

“Citizens are finding it increasingly difficult to navigate the flood of disinformation, AI and what not,” she concludes.

(This post is republished from Balkan Insight.)