At the beginning of the year, we hosted Samantha Power in the Oslobođenja newsroom. Today, she is the head of USAID, but for journalists who stick to their craft, a much more important part of her biography relates to her career as a war reporter, which she completed with the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." For the sake of all those who don't remember: her craft was burning in the hell of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and she never hid that the experience of these areas changed her life and directed her to the dedication to the fight for human rights, the basic condition of which is the existence of media freedom. Asked about them - today and in Bosnia and Herzegovina like this - I gave the guest a plastic answer: It was easier to do journalism during the war.
I know that my colleagues will say that I'm exaggerating - It's good until it's shot! - and offer me a barrage of arguments from the latest reports on the state of media freedom according to which Bosnia and Herzegovina - watch out now - is better than Serbia. And I will not protest, I will accept as a fact that the media in Bosnia and Herzegovina are freer than those in Serbia, where, according to the latest report of the Council of Europe, there is no readiness for the government to deal with death threats against journalists, but it is also noted that in the Balkans, in throughout the region, therefore, a tendency to deal with the media and journalists on the part of state officials has been noticed. And that's when I recognized us! I don't know how and who determines the tendencies, not to mention the accompanying degree of concern, I know for sure that in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is a long-standing practice for the highest political officials to insult journalists, spit on and name-call the media, publicly forbid media houses from attending events in official institutions and on top of everything they reach for all available state mechanisms to deal with journalists and the media for the sake of personal and party goals. To shut us up.
I'm not saying, of course, that the media are sinless, and I have no arguments to defend the entire mass of media employees on indisputable political missions. If there is any consolation - they are easy to recognize, even in the deafening noise of social networks and the flood of portals that spring up faster than mushrooms after the rain in the seasons of hunting for votes. And they have not been ashamed of their work for a long time, so they often brag about their shameful achievements. Actually, I'm frustrated by the acceptance that such media rampage is called journalism. I want to say: is it really possible that we, whose job it is to recognize deviations, are unable to draw a line between the profession we practice and those who, for the sake of their political bosses, are destroying it with only one goal - to silence us?
And not only us. I recently wrote about another in a series of disgusting confrontations with Dino Mustafić directed by the Turkish-Bosniak media conglomerate in Sarajevo. The hated citizen Mustafić is guilty of being a leftist, even more guilty of bringing the National Theater from Belgrade to Sarajevo, and his unforgivable sin is that he believes that Bosniaks have no greater right to Bosnia and Herzegovina than Serbs, Croats and others. In other words, they resent him for existing, and especially for not shying away from saying out loud what he thinks about their political bosses.
A few days ago, Srđan Puhalo noted Banja Luka's contribution to journalistic dishonesty: the promotion of a magazine devoted to the analysis of the crisis in Ukraine, which (of course) was also noted on RTRS. In short, a whole collection of university professors is harnessed to explain how "the West has decided on an immediate military attack on Donbass and Belarus. However, the Russians have overtaken NATO". Puhalo reveals that the magazine is financed by the SNSD and distributed free of charge (that's why, he says, the time has come to take care whether children read party literature), so he quotes the most horrible parts of which - with apologies to the readers - I will still convey one, only sentence: "Reporter major network media was going to release a documentary, still on his desk today, that the government was connected to orphanages across the country and paying them to bring orphans to Washington so that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and other pedophiles could choose those with whom they wanted to have sex", which is signed, as I said, by a university professor (Branimir Kuljanin, Faculty of Philosophy).
If, therefore, the freedom of the media is for party stormtroopers to persecute dissenters, and to pack evil and perverted lies of university professors to the people, what should journalists do? Are we silenced yet? In the war, it was really much simpler. We reported on what we see, today we seem to be racing not to see and report on what is expected from loyal patriots, religiously and nationally divided into folds, not shying away from helping a new war. In which - as things stand now - the first victims will be freethinkers in their own ranks. Therefore, if we are up to celebrating media freedom, it is high time to return to the profession. And we play keyboards.
The author is the main and responsible editor Releases
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