Reporters Without Borders (RSF) official Pavol Szalai condemned what he called groundless accusations against N1 voiced by Serbian Parliament Speaker Ana Branbic.
The media can’t be accused over something that the opposition says because they aren’t the enemy, he said adding that the role of the media is to check facts independently. We should never get used to attacks like these, he said.
According to him, the Serbian authorities seem to have learned how to attack the media from their counterparts in Hungary and Slovakia. That is not the standard in Europe, more the exception that we should not get used to, he added.
Szalai said that the lack of comments from European Union officials on the pressure and attacks on Serbian independent media is not a good thing. The RSF is in constant communication with national governments in the EU telling them that they can’t sacrifice democracy for the sake of stability. He said the RSF knows that Serbia is strategically important but added that democracy is a condition for economic cooperation. We are here to recall that economic cooperation with Serbia is good but that it’s not alright to ignore violations of freedom of the media.
Source: N1