Serbia’s Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) records the appearances of state officials on TVs’ programmes during the election campaign but does not publish the results in its reports, the Center for Investigative Journalism in Serbia (CINS) has said on Tuesday.
Zoran Gavrilovic from BIRODI agrees. “REM doesn’t publish the tone of messages, i.e., whether the participants in the election campaign are presented in a negative or positive or neutral tone.
That is one of the reasons why REM reports can create a wrong impression that the opposition is equally present on TV channels as is the regime.”
“REM also doesn’t publish all data which they collect during monitoring. The Body records TVs’ appearances of the parties and their representatives during the campaign in which the air time is mostly equally divided. That is marked red in REM’s weekly reports,” CINS says.
Though according to CINS, REM records all appearances of President Aleksandar Vucic and other high-ranked officials from news to entertainment programmes which are marked blue, that air time is not shown in REM reports.