IJAS: Institutions to protect Nenad Zivkovic

24/08/2022

nenad-zivkovic-1-n1-pd7cxo2u17c3qcufv4w36m9uh16t83wg47dd4ikzms — photo: YT Printscreen

A journalist from Pancevo Nenad Zivkovic was once again the target of an attack by the obscure portal “Banatska istina”. In the latest work of this unregistered website, a number of insults were directed at Zivkovic, and he was labeled as a traitor based on fabricated accusations.

In the controversial text published on the aforementioned website, Zivkovic was attacked with primitive and street insults and was labeled as a traitor and a foreign mercenary. Among other things, it was stated that he “hates the Serbian people” and represents the interests of “pro-Ustasha, Balija, Shiptar and Western leeches… who are hindering the development of our country.”

This website has previously written about Zivkovic in the same manner, and he sees the whole case as a continuation of the campaign against free and critical-thinking journalists.

“From the safety of an anonymous website and an unsigned editorial office, they continue to incite dissenters, at the same time avoiding decent public communication, which would be appropriate for a civilized and democratic society, which Serbia is not. To put it mildly, such toxic media content further lowers the level of communication, widens the scope of hate speech and destroys the presumptions of punishability of hate speech, thereby legitimizing it”, Nenad Zivkovic said for IJAS.

He assumes that the immediate reason for the text on this website was a satirical interview with the Vice-President of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia Sandra Bozic, which was published on the same day on the Pancevo.city portal.

The Independent Journalists Association of Serbia strongly condemns the writing of the “Banatska istina” portal, which in its latest article spreads hatred, calls for lynching, insults and labels the journalist Nenad Zivkovic.

IJAS calls on the institutions to protect Nenad Zivkovic. We also demand from the competent authorities to discover and sanction the creators of hate speech behind this website, who write about critics of the regime in the most primitive way and thus threaten their safety.

Independent Journalists Association of Serbia

August 23, 2022

New initiative pushes for artificial intelligence innovation in newsrooms

IJAS

24/08/2022

vestacka-inteligencija-ptqbeyll5hlbqthk4cmcaz7hs2ib1znvr29wj4dz6s — photo: pixabay

Technology in journalism is always evolving. From smartphone journalism, to reporting the news on Twitter and TikTok, to data journalism, modern reporters rely on new technology to make their jobs easier and their stories more impactful and engaging.

Today, large newsrooms are introducing a new technology, artificial intelligence (AI), to their work. Smaller newsrooms are interested in this tool too, even if they can’t implement it yet. Some predictions say that 90% of news will be written by AI by 2025 – in fact, you’ve likely already read a sports story or election rundown that was at least partially authored by an AI.

AI can be generally understood as any technology that simulates human intelligence: extracting patterns from data, predicting future events and/or adapting performance based on past mistakes. Not all AI is futuristic: transcription software, for example, uses AI to recognize and generate words from an audio file.

AI isn’t meant to replace the work of journalists. Instead, AI takes over repetitive, simple or data-intensive work so that human journalists can focus on stories that require creative insight, multifaceted analysis and good judgment.

In 2019, Polis, the London School of Economics’ media think tank, and the Google News Initiative partnered to create the JournalismAI initiative to promote the use of artificial intelligence among journalists. The JournalismAI Fellowship Program began this year, with the goal of innovating new tools that assist the work of journalists.

To learn more about how AI is influencing journalism, I interviewed initiative manager & team lead Mattia Peretti and fellowship program manager Lakshmi Sivadas on the fellowship, the initiative and what JournalismAI’s projects mean for the future of newsrooms.

A global network

The fellowship originates from a series of “Collab Challenges” that the JournalismAI staff held between 2020 and 2021. According to Peretti, the Collab Challenges arose “organically,” with no application process or formal organization for people interested in participating. Plenty of useful AI-based projects were completed during the challenges, many of which are still available online. The following year the process was formalized and altered to create the fellowship.

While the Journalism AI initiative is focused on educating journalists unfamiliar with artificial intelligence, the fellowship program goes a step further by fostering the skills of journalists already using AI technology in the newsroom.

“What we can do for them, through the fellowship, is connect them with a global network of people at the same level,” said Peretti. “By getting them to collaborate with each other, we can help them accelerate the adoption and implementation of AI, and show everyone in our community what’s possible.”

Forty-six different journalists were selected for the program. In total, 16 countries across six continents are represented in the cohort. With problems already emerging with AI developing racial and gender biases and racially profiling people of color, the JournalismAI staff heavily encouraged diversity when accepting fellows.

“Our idea was that if we bring in people who are representative of major populations around the world, they could recognize the kind of biases that exist in current data sets,” said Sivadas. “Then, in the systems that they are building or developing right now with the fellowship, they would be able to figure out where bias enters the development process, and mitigate that as well.”

Benefits of AI

The main goal of the fellowship is to create a software incorporating AI to benefit the teams’ newsrooms and newsrooms globally. Unlike OpenAI or Google’s DeepMind, whose research focuses on creating artificial general intelligence — software that functions as an independent human brain — JournalismAI’s projects are all tools that require the input or supervision of human journalists.

Most of these projects aim to assist with one of the three areas in news that the 2019 JournalismAI report outlined: gathering information, producing content or distributing the finished content to an audience.

Each of these areas has exciting potentials for journalism. Newsgathering AI can identify trends and monitor the mention of issues or events, and source information, for example by collecting and citing articles from various news outlets that all discuss the same issue. News production AIs, which work in content creation, can write bullet-pointed articles or reformat stories for different audiences in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do so. Finally, news distribution AIs take input from consumers to make news more impactful: finding likely audiences for an organization’s content, tracking readers’ behavior and personalizing newsflow so readers see what they’re most interested in.

“There is not one single journalism student that decided to take this career path because they were dying to sift through PDF documents day after day,” said Peretti. “That’s something machine learning does very well, and I think we should be excited that we can have the support of software doing all these things for us.”

Some of the mentors for the teams this year include Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of the software company Explosion; David Caswell, former BBC News Labs product manager; and various members of the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. The mentors fill needs for fact-checking, advanced technical skill and more.

“We didn’t prepare a roster of mentors and tell [the fellows], ‘These are your mentors, work with them,’ because there would have been no point when we didn’t know yet what the teams would want to work on. So we tried to find subject matter experts that could help them for the specific case that they are exploring,” said Peretti. “We start from the needs of our teams.”

Ensuring responsibility

Ten projects are coming out of the fellowship this year. Among them are Attack Detector, which aims to detect hate speech towards journalists and environmental activists in Spanish and Portuguese, and Parrot, which identifies and measures the spread of state-manufactured media. These two, along with all the other projects, will be showcased at the JournalismAI festival in early December.

Peretti said that all of these projects are made with ethical AI use in mind. None of them are meant to run without human supervision, adding that it would be “extremely dangerous” to allow for unsupervised use at this time.

“The word we use again and again is ‘responsible’,” said Peretti. “I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing in the industry and I want to presume that a little bit of that is due to the work we do. But we need to continue to stress [responsible use of AI] if we really want AI to be a force of good for journalism.”

Sivadas believes that AI is becoming more prevalent in global newsrooms, and soon it will be inescapable. She quoted previous 2020 Collab Challenge participant Michaëla Cancela in saying, “You can either choose to be a part of the people who are making decisions about how it’s going to be used, or you can sit back and watch it destroy the systems and ethical practices that journalism was built on.”

Source: IJNET/MEDIA INNOVATION, AMARAH ENNIS

BH Journalists: Journalists must separate their political involvement from their profession

BHJA

24/08/2022

Sarajevo/Banja Luka, 24.08.2022. – On the eve of the official start of the election campaign on September 2, the Steering Committee of the BH Journalists Association (BHJA) calls on all editors, journalists and media owners in Bosnia and Herzegovina to respect the provisions of the Election Law of BiH and the standards of the applicable media codes and the rules of the Communications Regulatory Agency (CRA). The activities of political parties and candidates are to be followed objectively, truthfully and in accordance with the norms set by the journalistic profession.

The Steering Committee of BHJA draws the attention of editors and journalists in BiH to the provisions of the rules and codes for the media, which state that the political engagement of journalists is not prohibited, but highlighting it in any way in media content, i.e. the bias of journalist towards certain political options or candidates, regardless of his/her personal beliefs and attitudes is not allowed.

The rules of the CRA stipulate that “persons authorized to represent and persons performing the duties of editor-in-chief of a public radio/television station shall not be elected public officials or members of bodies of political entities, which by definition include a political party, independent candidate, coalition or a list of independent candidates certified for participation in the elections, as well as organizations founded by the aforementioned political subjects”. However, the aforementioned provision applies exclusively to directors and editors-in-chief of public RTV stations, who are obliged to submit to the CRA a statement on fulfillment of the aforementioned condition, that is, on their separation from political entities.

As for the political engagement of journalists, the rules of the Agency do not contain any provisions in this sense. At the same time, Chapter 16 of the Election Law of BiH stipulates that “journalists and presenters in the electronic media may not express their possible party affiliation or preference in regular and special broadcasts”.

“Journalists and editors must not engage in work that could jeopardize their independence, objectivity, freedom of critical thinking and freedom of speech. Working in political parties, state bodies and institutions, in marketing, lobbying and PR agencies is incompatible with the journalistic profession”, states Article 11 of the Code for Print and Online Media of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The code also defines that “advertising content of companies, political parties and other subjects, as well as sponsored content, must be separated from media content or marked as advertising content”. It is unethical to present covert advertising, as well as commissioned or paid texts as original journalistic content and all sponsored materials must clearly indicate the source of the sponsorship.

Finally, the Steering Committee of BH Journalists reminds of the provisions of the Code of Honor of BH Journalists, which state that “a journalist, like every other citizen, has the right to his political and other commitment and engagement”. However, in their work, journalists must respect professional distance from current events, which is one of the conditions for objective and professional reporting on events, including pre-election activities of political entities during the campaign for the 2022 General Elections.

Why collaboration is vital in the fight against disinformation

IJAS

24/08/2022

fake-news-gc3a87135a_1280 — photo: pixabay

Disinformation remains a global problem knowing no borders — that isn’t news. The key tactic for countering its harmful spread is collaboration among fact-checkers.

Take a case that occurred during our first few months running Factchequeado, a new initiative launched by Chequeado, from Argentina, and Maldita, from Spain, to counter disinformation circulating in Hispanic and Latino communities in the U.S. — which we’re so excited about!

On April 11, we published in Factchequeado the story of Ana, a Maldita reader, who matched on Tinder with 46-year-old Thomas Paul, a sergeant in the U.S. army currently abroad on a peace mission. Or so he claimed. “We started talking on WhatsApp and he showed me a kind of love beyond any logic because of its immediacy,” said Ana.

There was one major obstacle preventing them from being together: Paul said he was being sent to Ukraine and he would need more than 6,000 euros to return home. It was then that Ana realized she was being scammed. In reality, Paul’s Tinder profile featured photos belonging to American soldier Tyler Thomas, who has over 40,000 followers on Instagram.

This isn’t the first case of a fake Tinder profile. The tactic is known as catfishing: a scammer uses a false identity to approach a person and emotionally bond with them. They then request money to solve an “urgent” financial issue they’re up against. There’s a Netflix documentary about one of these prolific swindlers.

Since launching, Factchequeado has published fact checks on its website, social media and WhatsApp channel. It republishes its findings in other outlets, as well, through partnerships with dozens of fact-checking and media organizations in Hispanic and Latino communities throughout the U.S. This is how Enlace Latino NC, a partner media outlet in North Carolina, published Ana’s story on April 23.

Upon seeing the article, another reader, Alejandra, from Venezuela, contacted the Enlace Latino NC team: learning about Ana’s scam had helped her avoid one herself.

The case was almost identical. The man she was speaking with on the dating app MeetME told Alejandra that he lived in Syria, where he had been sent on a military mission. Distance was not the issue for her: relationships that start online can withstand this. There was something in the man’s tale that gave her pause. Also claiming to be an American army sergeant named Thomas, this seemed suspicious to Alejandra. Her gut was right: her match was not who he claimed to be.

“Since I had my suspicions, I started searching for this alleged sergeant online. That’s how I found the article that explained that the same profile of the man that was talking to me had tried to scam another woman,” Alejandra explained to Enlace Latino NC, with a mix of relief for having avoided a scam and worry for how similar ones may dupe other women. Her story was published last June in both Enlace Latino NC and fellow Factchequeado partner, El Detector de Univision, among other outlets.

Academic research papers, like this one and this one, have proven that fact-checking works: People are less likely to share content that a fact-checker has marked false or misleading.

These studies also warned that time matters. A lot. The sooner one reacts to false or misleading content, the higher the chances of stopping its harmful consequences.

Collaboration is not just an alternative approach —it’s a necessity in the fight against disinformation. Sharing verified content between countries, regions and continents is useful. There is value in building communities and trust.

We must work with others to better, more immediately serve and look after our communities when it comes to the vast amounts of mis- and disinformation circulating online.

Source: IJNET, Laura Zommer

Tips to make your visual journalism more accessible

IJAS

24/08/2022

In early 2022, the New York Times started looking for an accessibility visuals editor. As typically happens with other positions, new roles at the internationally renowned newsroom signal areas that are becoming increasingly relevant for the media industry. Accessibility is no exception.

The Times announced recently that Jaime Tanner will lead these efforts. She will be tasked with the goal of making “the breadth and vibrancy” of its news reporting “available to every curious reader,” Deputy Managing Editor Steve Duenes said.

With her appointment, the Times also wants “to adopt additional formal processes to ensure best practices become a bigger part” of its everyday operations. “Much of our visual report is very accessible, but there are challenges with features like data visualization, including maps and charts,” Duenes said in an email.

As content on the Internet becomes increasingly visual — from amusing short videos and recurring memes to groundbreaking images — what can journalists around the world do to make their visual journalism available to everyone?

The answer is a lot. Whether you are a reporter, a writer, or a social media editor, there are many steps you can take to improve your audiences’ experience.

Common issues

Patrick Garvin, web accessibility advocate and creator of the Twitter account @A11yAwareness, shared some prevalent issues when it comes to accessibility in news reporting:

“The way a reporter or editor writes link text can be confusing to screen reader users if the link text is not able to stand on its own.”
“Links that open up in new tabs or download PDFs can be jarring for users who weren’t expecting that behavior.”
“A PDF of a news page might be hard to read or understand depending on how the designer set up and formatted [their] page.”
“The colors in a chart might be too hard to distinguish.”
“A beautiful interactive might sound like gibberish on a screen reader, or be unusable to someone who uses a keyboard.”

These are just a few areas for improvement.

The need for more training

“News organizations have started to become more aware of accessibility. Many newsrooms are in the early stages in thinking about accessibility as a priority and figuring out how to make things accessible,” Garvin said.

As Garvin pointed out, however, there are still news sites that don’t have alternative text for images. That is, a short written description of a picture. Others, he said, use content management systems that “just duplicate the caption text and use that for the alt text.”

In an industry that relies on data visualization and infographics, he explained, many interactives published by newsrooms wouldn’t be fully usable or accessible using screen readers or keyboards.

In this context, Garvin believes that journalists must be trained on the basics, as well as the specific tasks they will need to perform for their jobs. “Many will probably admit that ‘assistive technology’ or ‘screen reader’ or ‘keyboard navigation’ were not part of any training they did get,” Garvin said.

He added that journalists should treat accessibility errors the way other mistakes are handled in newsrooms. He suggested, for instance, that newsrooms monitor how often their official accounts tweet images without alt text: “Make it a point to openly discuss ways to stop doing that.”

He is doing just this himself with news organizations’ Twitter accounts, already: “My hope is that at least one person will see one of the tweets on A11yAwareness and make a small change based on that. Maybe they make an effort to start adding alt text. They might not remember every time, but the bot reminded them to make an effort.”

Why alt text matters

Alexa Heinrich, director of Accessible Social, thinks that accessibility has improved significantly in recent years. The platforms that journalists use to share news stories online, she said, have prioritized accessibility. Yet there still is “a gap in the education” on accessibility tools, she said: “When it comes to the news and journalism, I see a lot of reporters and journalists doing the whole ‘screenshot of part of an article’ and sharing it, but there’s no alt text. That part definitely needs to improve.”

This is what inspired her to found Accessible Social, a comprehensive website where people on the Internet can visit to learn about best practices in accessibility for social media.

One of the best recent examples Heinrich highlighted is NASA’s work to distribute the first images from the James Webb space telescope. Delivering “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far,” as the space agency describes it, is predominantly a visual work. In doing so, it strove to make the images accessible to a wide audience. “They write some very descriptive alt text for their images, which is impressive because they’re writing about the vastness of space and stars and constellations,” she noted.

Historic images such as these are just some of the pieces that journalists may need to provide alt text for in their reporting. Infographics, meanwhile, present their own set of challenges as they are created primarily to convey information in a visual way. For these, Heinrich has some advice: Break data down in a written format.

Memes, too, can be difficult. “Some memes are really hard to wrap my head around and write alt text for,” she acknowledged.

Final tips

Know your readers: Tanner, the new accessibility visuals editor at The Times, encouraged journalists to spend time familiarizing themselves with their audiences with disabilities, to learn how they engage and interact with the news. “Testing your work by using a screen reader or by keyboard navigating a data visualization, for example, can help you to better understand and improve the user experience,” she said.

Follow those who work in the accessibility space: “I’ve created a Twitter list of people who talk at length about accessibility for people who want to just follow that and jump in. I encourage folks to look at resources from the companies who focus on accessibility training, testing and services,” Garvin recommended.

Talk to people who rely on accessibility features: “I can only teach so much from my perspective, but I’m a sighted woman. I don’t need alt text. Talking to people who actually rely on accessible practices to access digital content is vital to making our world, whether it’s online or in person, completely accessible for everyone,” said Heinrich.

Source: IJNET, Aldana Vales

Court fines Online Media Solutions for insulting N1 journalist

IJAS

18/08/2022

A Belgrade court ordered Pressonline.rs (Online Media Solutions doo Beograd) to pay a fine of 120,000 Dinars for offending N1 journalist Adam Santovac in an article published in 2019.

The Higher Court ruled that Online Media Solutions damaged the reputation of the N1 reporter in articles titled Adam Santovac – The Biggest Liar Among Journalists on November 24, 2019 and Adam Santovac Liar on November 27, 2019. The articles were published prior to and just after the airing of Santovac’s documentary Mega Graduate which investigated the validity of Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic’s university diploma.

The court ruled that Santovac’s rights, honor and reputation were harmed because the information in both articles was not true and was insulting because it presented him in a very negative context. “Portraying the plaintiff in that way cannot be justified with freedom of expression nor the public interest,” the ruling said.

Online Media Solutions doo Beograd also has to pay court costs

Santovac sued Pressonline.rs in May 2020. The ruling was made in June 2022. Pressonline.rs received two public warnings from the Press Council in 2020 for multiple violations of the Serbian journalists code in stories about the N1 journalist. The portal has been shut down in the meantime.

The author of the Mega Graduate documentary was not sued and none of the claims made in it were denied.

Source: N1

International effort to support journalists in Ukraine

IJAS

15/08/2022

Gleb Golovchenko runs the Ukrainian television company TAK TV, in the Black Sea city of Mykolaiv. In February, Russian forces attempted to invade the city. Despite heavy bombardment, the attack was repulsed. The front line today is scarcely ten kilometres away, but Golovchenko has continued to broadcast – something that has only been possible, he says, because of help from the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists (IFJ/EFJ).

“The bulletproof vest I was given has saved my life,” he says. “We see missiles and shooting every day, so all our reporters need extra protection. I have seen first hand artillery fire landing right next to fellow journalists. If they had no means of protection, it could have ended tragically”.

Golovchenko was one of several Ukrainian journalists, and officials of their union who met over Zoom with the EFJ’s steering committee. They were reporting on the impact of help provided by the IFJ/EFJ to keep the country’s media functioning.

The funds have been collected via a dedicated section of the IFJ’s safety fund, to which donations have been made by affiliate unions and individual journalists from around the world. While the response to date has been significant, the escalating needs are all too evident.

Support from the IFJ/EFJ Ukraine Safety Fund to the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) has allowed it to establish three solidarity centres in the cities of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Chernivtsi. This network has recently been expanded to include three further offices in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro and Kyiv. All six provide journalists with safety equipment (more than 200 have now been kitted out), training, in some cases a desk from which to work, and help finding emergency accommodation, when needed.

Their stories give a flavour of the pressure under which the Ukrainian media is operating.

Tetiana Pisareva, is a TV journalist from Mariupol. She fled to Lviv when her home city was besieged, leaving in haste without her computer or other professional equipment. Until she received help from the IFJ/EFJ she was preparing her scripts longhand.

Maryna Zhyvotkova is a reporter on the local newspaper in Troitske, in the Ukrainian region of Luhansk – which is currently occupied by Russia. The only way get to Ukrainian-controlled territory is the way through Russia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It takes three days and nights and costs at least €350. The NUJU has provided emergency financial support to make this possible.

“I managed to go to the territory under the control of Ukraine thanks to the support of sponsors, journalistic solidarity and the NUJU,” said Zhyvotkova. “Without assistance, it is almost impossible to make such a journey. Your help has not only saved my life but given me the opportunity to feel at home.”

Radio journalist Roman Kryvko, from Kharkiv said: “I have been working at the hub in Ivano-Frankivsk for over two months preparing daily broadcasts. The Solidarity centre helps not only with a work place, but also provides technical support, thanks to which I can continue to work remotely.”

Alina Kravchenko, a TV journalist from Severodonetsk, moved to Ivano-Frankivsk when the Russian army won control of her city. It is the second time that she has been displaced by a Russian invasion – she lived in Luhansk, that was captured by Russian-backed separatists in 2014 . “It was dangerous for me to leave in the city,” she says. “Now Severodonetsk is occupied, the TV station where I worked is controlled by Russian troops. The Journalists’ Solidarity centre has helped me and cameraman from our TV channel to find the contacts and new job. The support from our colleagues helps us not to be overwhelmed by the horrors of evacuation”.

Sergiy Tomilenko, the President of the NUJU, thanked IFJ/EFJ, and their affiliated unions for their solidarity and said that it was facilitating a vital flow of news an information through trusted sources.

His hope is to create a dedicated Ukrainian Media Support Fund to provide long-term support once the process of reconstruction begins.

To date the IFJ/EFJ has provided €85,130 to fund the centres, and €30,000 to provide safety training. A further €20,000 will go to the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine (IMTUU) to fund a solidarity centre in Lutsk. This funding has also allowed the projects to access €500,000 from UNESCO.

Concluding the meeting, EFJ president Maya Sever said: “The problems of Ukrainian journalists are clearly bigger than we imagined. We have to redouble our efforts help sustain Ukraine’s independent media so that they can survive. These journalists on on the side of truth and I want them to know that we are sending them our strength, courage and love, during this war, as well as whatever financial assistance we can provide.”

Golovchenko, meanwhile said that he was just happy to be able to continue documenting the conflict. His only complaint is the weight of his bullet-proof vest. “I was in the first wave to receive one and mine is one of the older, heavy versions, it weighs in at 16 kilos, which it quite a load to carry round all day. Hopefully when a fresh supply of lighter ones arrives, I will be able to shed a few kilos”.

Source: EFJ

Turkish extremist group threatens BIRN journalists

BHJA

15/08/2022

SARAJEVO, 15.08.2022. – Journalists of Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) Nermina Kuloglija and Hamdi Fırat Buyuk have received threats via phone calls, text messages and on social media from the Turkish far-right Grey Wolves organization’s Bosnian branch.

The threats were sent from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from Turkey, on June 28, and since then, after BIRN published an investigation into the Grey Wolves organisation’s branch and its activities in Bosnia.

Kuloglija and Buyuk continued to receive messages on their phones with intimidating content after the publication of the article.

The European Centre for Press and Media Freedom on its Mapping Media Freedom Platform reported on the incidents of harassment, psychological abuse, intimidation and threats against the two BIRN journalists.

“Threats against journalists are unacceptable. In this case it has an international element to it which must be handled not only in the country where the journalists are based,” said Gürkan Özturan, Coordinator of Media Freedom Rapid Response at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, a nonprofit that promotes and defends media freedom.

The Grey Wolves is an international Turkish ultra-nationalist and pan-Turkic organization that rose to prominence in the late-1970s. In 2021, the European Parliament called on the EU to add the Grey Wolves to its list of terrorist organisations. The Grey Wolves in Turkey have been involved in multiple acts of harassment for decades, Özturan told BIRN.

“These threats [against BIRN journalists] cannot be overlooked and authorities in both Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as other regional and international organizations must be involved in investigations,” he concluded.

Threats to journalists are growing, the UN rights chief, Michelle Bachele, warned in an event marking World Press Freedom Day 2022. Journalism remains a dangerous and even deadly profession.

Worldwide, threats against journalists, online and off-line, imprisonments continue are rising, while online violence and harassment spur self-censorship and, in some cases, physical attacks, said UNESCO’s 2021/2022 online report, “World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development”.

(Source: Balkan Insight)

Electronic media regulator chief denies pressure from Serbian authorities

IJAS

11/08/2022

The head of the Serbian electronic media regulator Olivera Zekic told the Beta news agency on Wednesday that she would never allow the authorities to pressure the body which has the last word on TV broadcasting licenses.

Zekic denied claims that the authorities interfered with the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media (REM) while it decided which stations would get four of the five available TV licenses. The licenses went to four pro-regime stations which already had national coverage permits (TV Pink, Happy TV, TV Prva and B92 TV).

She said that she expects the authorities to refrain from interfering in the decision on the fifth national frequency license, adding that the tender for that frequency will be decided by majority vote by the REM Council. According to Zekic, each of the 9 Council members votes independently for the station that they think meets the criteria for a license with the permit going to the station which gets at least five votes.

REM Council member Judita Popovic said she believes the fifth national frequency will got to N1 TV or Nova S. “I honestly believe that alongside myself, at least four other REM Council members will vote for N1 or Nova S. I believe common sense will prevail in the Council and that the will to move from the place where there is no media pluralism will be there. That is the key reason I am still a member of REM,” she said.

The recent tender was for four national TV frequencies because those licenses expired on August 4 and had to be decided by then while the fifth was free after a failed tended in 2019.

Source: Beta/N1

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