Public broadcasters rarely open the evening news by admitting they have failed their audience. On Monday the regional public station in Novi Sad, known as RTV, did just that. Its bulletin began with footage of crowds celebrating the Student List’s win in Sunday’s parliamentary election, scenes the channel had left off air on election night itself, before anchor Goran Eror read a remarkable statement to camera.
For many years, he said, the broadcaster had kept quiet, looked away and reported without asking the questions that mattered. “We owe viewers an apology for that,” Eror said. Some staff had fought for editorial freedom, he added, but they had not won that battle in time.
Heads rolled within hours. Nenad Čačić, who had been running the first channel’s newsroom on an interim basis, quit after staff and director general Goran Karadžić asked him to. His successor is Blažo Popović; Predrag Novković becomes the new head of programming. The Nezavisnost union had been calling for Čačić to go for a year.
Attention is now turning to RTS, the national broadcaster in Belgrade, which cut its live coverage of the capital once Aleksandar Vučić conceded, even as crowds partied into the small hours. Students want its director general, his deputy and every senior news editor to step down. Elsewhere, roughly thirty demonstrators marched into the studios of the pro-Vučić outlet Informer TV while it was live on Monday night and crowded around its owner Dragan Vučićević.
According to preliminary results, the Student List took close to 53 percent and about 140 of parliament’s 250 seats, enough to govern without partners. It has promised to overhaul the media regulator and public broadcasting. The task is large: Reporters Without Borders ranked Serbia 104th of 180 countries this year, its worst placing so far.
