State television has largely ignored student blockades, as reported by the New York Times, against President Aleksandar Vučić, but has now turned its spotlight on the protests.
When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges over the Danube River in Novi Sad this weekend, paralyzing Serbia's second-largest city, the ruling party issued a stark warning — not to students and citizens, but to the public service broadcaster that reports on them.
“After largely ignoring three months of student-led street demonstrations across the country, Radio Television of Serbia, long the propaganda megaphone of President Aleksandar Vučić, suddenly changed tack and put the protests in Novi Sad on the front page of the news,” the New York Times describes.
Worse still, at least for the ruling party, it reported factually without condemning the protesters as intelligence agents or opposition puppets, as it had done in the past, the American media outlet added, N1 reports.
President Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party complained in an unusual statement late on Saturday about the television station's "scandalous reporting", stating that it had "grossly abused the journalistic profession, siding with politicians who want to destroy the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia".
Media control was a central pillar of the Serbian system under Vučić, enabling him to withstand multiple rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting protesters and to maintain a firm grip on power for more than 12 years, the New York Times estimates.
Many, however, are now wondering whether his control over the media is waning, and with it perhaps the president's increasingly authoritarian rule.
"This is a small but probably revolutionary change," said Jasmina Paunović, a state prosecutor with many years of experience.
She added that long-time royalists are wavering throughout the system, as they “let go of fear” of losing government jobs or facing disciplinary action.
She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, even though they all depend on the state for business, are now supporting students, at least privately.
The Serbian Bar Association voted on Sunday to suspend lawyers' work for a month, in solidarity with students who have barricaded campuses across the country.
Weekend protests in Novi Sad, held three months after a canopy collapsed and killed 15 people, attracted not only students from local universities and Belgrade, but also crowds of older people, furious at what they say is a system riddled with corruption.
The collapse of a concrete canopy on November 1, suspended above the entrance to the Railway Station, crushed people beneath it and sparked a protest movement driven by the belief that official negligence and corruption were responsible for the tragedy.
The station was renovated by a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies, and work on the canopy was carried out by private Serbian contractors selected by officials.
The recent protests represent the largest outpouring of discontent since the street demonstrations of the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, writes the New York Times.
Svetlana Bistrović (43), a nurse and mother of two, said she decided to cheer on the students who blocked the main railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic show up to a basketball game on Friday night wearing a T-shirt reading "Students are champions."
She waved a sign, adorned with protest slogans, and a plastic tennis racket.
The fact that Djokovic, whose family has openly supported President Vučić in the past, has sided with the protesters, she says, shows that "change is coming in this country," the American media outlet adds.
"Vučić rejected his loyal ally"
But Aleksandar Vučić shows no signs of giving up, writes the New York Times.
Last week, he dismissed his Prime Minister Miloš Vučević, a loyal ally, former mayor of Novi Sad and president of the ruling party, known as the SNS, leaving the country without a government.
Vučić, confident that his party can defeat divided opposition parties in any new elections, given the uneven electoral terrain, has since promised to launch an offensive against his political opponents and call general elections if parliament does not approve a new government to his liking.
"I'm not going to hand this country to anyone on a platter. I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight," he told supporters on Saturday.
Nebojša Vladisavljević, a professor at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship,” which, like other post-communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, is “less repressive, but much more manipulative.”
He said the sudden change in messaging by state broadcaster RTS was "just part of the game that shows there is little fair media reporting."
Even without state television and radio firmly on the president's side, he added, Vučić still controls a battery of powerful media weapons, such as the private Pink TV, which remains steadfastly loyal.
And a string of fierce tabloids show no signs of wavering in their support for the president, according to the New York Times.
Growing protests, such as those in Novi Sad over the weekend, are driven by the belief that official negligence and corruption are responsible for the tragedy at the train station in November.
Tabloids like Informer, a particularly fierce attacker in favor of the government, described student activists as traitors serving neighboring Croatia, Serbia's main enemy during the wars of the early 1990s over the ruins of Yugoslavia, the American media outlet writes.
Mila Pajić, a student at the University of Novi Sad who is active in organizing protests, said that the government-oriented media portrayed her as "mentally unstable."
She was demonized as “anti-Serbian,” and Informer published a video of her arguing with a boy, claiming the couple were arguing over secret funding from abroad. They accused her of “colluding with Croatia.”
The tabloid story, she said, was “completely fabricated” and turned “a simple argument between two people in their 20s into a national scandal.”
She said the state broadcaster's move to more compassionate coverage of the protests was "not a big step forward, but a small step in the right direction."
Vladisavljević, a Belgrade political scientist, interpreted the ruling party’s condemnation of RTS journalists for their neutral reporting on the events in Novi Sad as a “preventive move to keep them in line” and as a message to the party’s predominantly rural base that “nothing has really changed.”
"They are worried that the media could turn around. They are worried about the military, about the prosecutors, about everyone, but we are not at the turning point yet," he said.
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