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27. 09. 2014

ANEM Held Round Table on Cooperation of Media and Civil Sector on Media Reforms

ANEM round table "Media and Civil Sector as Allies in the Fight for the Implementation of Media Reform", held on September 26, 2014, gathered 36 representatives of civil sector, media and journalists' associations, media outlets, self-regulatory body for print media,competent authorities, international organizations and donors, and media experts.

As ANEM is of opinion that broadening the circle of interested parties is necessary for the implementation of reforms in the media sector, a goal of the event was to initiate a dialogue between the media sector and the civil sector on the issues of importance for the media sector, related to media reforms and the development of the sector. Another goal was to contribute to the establishment of constructive cooperation between the media and the civil sector and the creation of a basis for a more active involvement of civil society organizations in solving specific problems in the media sector and their involvement in the implementation of the media reform.

The round table was organized within the ANEM project "Legal Monitoring of the Media Scene in Serbia", financially supported by the Civil Rights Defenders and the Open Society Foundation, Serbia.

Moderator Boban Tomić, PhD, a member of the ANEM Managing Board, opened the event by presenting the activities and results of the ANEM project, successfully implemented for five years now.

The introductory speakers at the event were: Sonja Licht, president of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence; Slobodan Kremenjak, attorney-at-law, media expert and member of the ANEM legal team; Veran Matić, editor-in-chief of the RTV B92 news program and president of the Managing Board of the B92 Fund; and Davor Glavaš, media expert.

In her introductory address, Sonja Licht expressed her conviction that politicians would be much more accountable toward critical public if the civil sector and the media were more responsible towards themselves and their respective missions. She noted that the decline of media quality and deterioration of the media scene, not only in Serbia, present a very serious problem for the quality of the critical perception of the world and the critical public. She also noted that the media and the civil sector organizations (CSOs) have been failing for a long time to understand their own respective roles in creating a critical public and to be aware of the necessity to create a joint front, which means that the critical public can at any moment be harmed by any government. Licht emphasized that reforms cannot be implemented without a critical public, neither can the state and the society strengthen, and Serbia cannot be a serious negotiator with the EU if it does not use all of its intellectual potential. However, she noted that engaging critical potentials of a country without the media and civil society is not possible. "Thinking about joint work on media reforms, we should send a very serious message from this round table that we must join forces. Either we will work in coalitions or we will cease to exist", said Licht and added that the media and the civil society should find the strength to emphasize the importance of general interest over particular ones, or they will be responsible for what might happen in the future.

Attorney-at-law Slobodan Kremenjak talked about the role of civil society in passing long-awaited new media laws, adopted in August 2014. He said that joint positions and key requests the Media Coalition, comprised of five key media and journalists' associations, brought to the debate on the new Media Strategy four years ago were all built into the new legislation, more precisely into the Law on Public Information and Media. According to Kremenjak, the Coalition insisted on four issues: the transparency of media ownership and the introduction of the media registry, a special regime of media concentration, withdrawal of the state from media ownership and project-based media financing. "With some small deviations, this law is precisely what the media and journalists' associations asked for four years ago", said Kremenjak and added that thus the responsibility for new regulation lies also on the associations. He stressed that the fight for adequate implementation of the laws will be much more difficult than meeting the said requirements. What will also be difficult is achieving that all those who will implement the laws reach the necessary level of knowledge and capacity to apply the regulations adequately. In that respect the media also must raise themselves to the level which will enable them to use the mechanisms provided by the new laws in a proper way.

Media expert Davor Glavaš said that it is exceptionally important to have cooperation between the media and the civil sector in promoting media freedoms and in the oversight and control of the authorities because of a serious failure of politicians to understand media. The latter has been present regardless of the change of government or a country joining the EU. He stated at least two aspects in which this cooperation is absolutely necessary. The first is the influence on legislators to change those provisions in media and other laws which objectively prevent the development of media freedoms. The second is to understand, based on the media practice, what can be done as additional pressure on the politics and politicians to adopt new measures helping the development of the media market. Citing two recent examples from Croatia, Glavaš explained the importance of cooperation between the media and the civil sectors. In one case, a journalist was convicted for so-called "shaming", a new institute in the Croatian criminal code which was a cause for deep concern of the Croatian media community. However, owing to the joint action of the media and the civil society, a pressure was put on the authorities after the court ruling in the first instance, so that the parliament will soon discuss the change of this provision or its annulment. The second example concerns a court ruling holding a media outlet responsible for information conveyed by an interviewee, in this case the Croatian prime minister. The ruling was met by a sharp and prompt reaction of the civil society, including journalists' associations, Glavaš explained.

Veran Matić perceived as a serious problem the fact that both the media and the civil sector are in a deep crisis in defining their respective identities and positions in the society and on the market. Additionally, media commercialization eliminates the media space that should belong to the civil sector, even more so because we do not have strong and reformed public service broadcasters (PSBs). Other media, forced to become commercial, do not have the obligation to air program of public interest, and they turn to entertainment and irrelevant content in the race for higher ratings, thus distancing themselves from the authentic role of the media, Matić explained. His opinion is that civil society will, due to closing of the space in traditional media, increasingly migrate to the space of the new media and social networks that will quickly find a way to replace the need for traditional media. What is needed is the articulation of public interest and the pressure for changes to come about, as well as the reform of the PSBs. The PSBs should have obligations towards civil sector and its daily outputs, not only in the news program, but in other types of program as well, Matić said. He stressed that the civil society has a passive relation towards media as it thinks that its activities should be presented in the media by default. He also noted that there is a room for cooperation between the media and the civil sector, for instance regarding charity projects or civil sector activities dealing with the oversight of the government and its transparency.

DISCUSSION

Đorđe Krivokapić from the SHARE Foundation said that the question is who the civil sector organizations (CSOs) can cooperate with in the media sector; the room for cooperation is fairly limited regarding serious societal issues. According to Krivokapić, cooperation of the civil sector and the media is possible when their business models are the same or similar - for instance if both are financed by the state, corporate sector or donors. In the opposite case it cannot be said that there is cooperation between them. Krivokapić is of opinion that key decisions that future cooperation of the media and the CSOs depends on are up to the relevant ministry because project-based financing is a possibility for cooperation, but also for future conflicts. CSOs possess expertise that can help media in the competition for projects and in producing certain types of content. That is where the media can try to forge partnerships as they lack expertise for specific topics of public interest. Furthermore, the media landscape is changing as it is easy for CSOs to register as media outlets, and by using new and social media they do not need traditional media any longer. Whether free market and competition among these organizations will be stimulated, or their cooperation and joint participation in calls for proposals, will depend on bylaws and other rules, Krivokapić concluded.

Professor Miroljub Radojković from the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade pointed out that the law foresees founding of so-called civil society media. According to him, this type of media is the link connecting both sectors. However, the problem is in the lack of organizations that are prepared to establish civil society media with the help of cheap digital technologies, Radojković said and added that this legal possibility has so far been used by the church and the Roma ethnic community, totaling the number of such media at seven. Why is there persistent silence regarding this type of media, asked prof. Radojković.

Davor Glavaš said that the Croatian legislation also foresees the establishment of non-profit media and that a way was found for a part of the public service broadcaster's income to be allocated for financing such media, which principle functions well. However, Glavaš said the key question is how quality media content is to be ensured and legal solutions be found that will help that through cooperation between the media and the civil society. In the opposite case, by leaving the content to the market conditions, not much will be achieved and the legislature will certainly not on its own take initiative toward positive solutions in that respect, Glavaš noted. Owing to the cooperation between civil sector and the media in Croatia, VAT on print media was reduced to 5% last year, which will, at least temporarily, halt the erosion of the print media market, said Glavaš and added that the work is ongoing in close cooperation of the civil sector and the media in Croatia on certain solutions that will enable positive changes for the media and media professionals' work rights. He concluded by saying that none of the above mentioned measures in Croatia could have been introduced without the cooperation of the media and the civil sector because the authorities, preoccupied by other issues, would not have initiated them. 

Professor Dubravka Valić Nedeljković from the Novi Sad School of Journalism said there used to be hope that the media in the languages of national minorities would use the legal opportunity for establishing civil society media; however, Nedeljković thinks that such media cannot survive as they cannot rely solely on project-based financing for covering necessary expenses.
 
Saša Mirković, state secretary at the Ministry for Culture and Information, stated his opinion that the alliance between the media and the civil sector regarding media reforms exists. Many issues have been moved forward with regard to media legislation and reforms by the effort of the Media Coalition and the media community, their joining forces and defining requests, he noted. The result of this cooperation and the acknowledgment of the active role of the non-governmental and the media sector, including media and journalists' associations, was confirmed at a recent closed meeting at the Ministry where as many as 13 media and journalists' associations took part discussing the issues regarding the beginning of the new media laws' implementation. Mirković added that his opinion is that the principle of inclusion where the Ministry of Culture and Information truly wishes to interact with NGOs, syndicates, media and journalists' associations is a quality that is not noticed enough.
 
Dragan Kremer from the Open Society Foundation Serbia pointed out that it is good that the ANEM round table initiated the discussion about whether we are ready and capable to implement the benefits and improvements the new media laws brought. He also spoke about the lack of civil sector activity in proposing members from its own ranks for positions in managing and controlling bodies of PSBs and regulatory bodies for electronic media. He reminded the event participants that the civil society is authorized by law to propose such members, while in the case of open competition for the positions nothing prevents them from delegating their own members. However, almost without exception, civil society has never had its own candidates, but it has been providing support to the candidates of media associations. "It is as if the civil society is not able to articulate its own interest and use the powers it has", Kremer noted. He illustrated this with the example of the lack of activity of the civil society in lodging complaints with the Press Council or the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media and its failure to appeal regarding the absence of response to its complaints, despite its readiness to often and generally criticize media content. "I think that the civil society is inert and insufficiently informed; it has much more opportunity and power to cooperate with the media through regulation and self-regulation of the media, and not only with individual media outlets", Kremer said.
 
One of the discussion topics was media privatization. Speaking about the deterioration of the media scene, and a serious problem of the lack of critical public, Sonja Licht stated her opinion that it would be wrong to claim that media privatization can solve all the problems in the media sphere, and that many problems were caused by its implementation without prior existence of relevant legal framework, institutions, maturity of the society and the understanding of media ethics and the way it can be preserved. Replying to this, Saša Mirković, Vukašin Obradović (president of the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia - NUNS), Dragan Kremer and several other participants in their discussions stressed that the privatization of the remaining publicly owned media is needed as it creates equal starting conditions for all the media on the market and protects the competition, which are the basic prerequisites for establishment of functional media market, and provides the opportunity for significant public finances that have been allocated to a small number of non-privatized media (6% of the total number of media) to directly finance their existence, to be directed at fulfillment of public interest in the area of public information, stimulating diversity of content and ideas and satisfying citizens' need for information in a better quality and professional manner for which the application of the state aid control rules is needed. All these should lead to decreased political influence on media, Obradovic said.
 
After the discussion, in the final part of the round table, conclusions were formulated: 

• The activities of the media and the civil sector regarding social changes have produced results that were built into a part of the legal framework for the media.

• The cooperation between the media and the civil society should be significantly firmer and more stable, not only with regard to the implementation of media reforms, but also in terms of forging longer lasting alliances and synergies for the fulfillment of the societal democratic reforms, where the media and the civil society can have a key role.

• Media reform should be on the civil society agenda, and the experiences from previous years should be an example that will broaden the circle of participants in the partnership of the media and the civil society, which partnership should define its own goals more precisely and with greater determination, i.e. define an agenda to be presented to the authorities.

• A new, i.e. efficient legal framework is needed that will valorize the work of non-profit media, and the latter should be subject to a greater interest of the state.

 

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This project is financially supported by the Civil Rights Defenders. 

 

 

The views expressed in this report are the sole responsibility of the event participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Civil Rights Defenders.

 

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This project is financially supported by the Open Society Foundation, Serbia.

 

 

The views expressed in this report are the sole responsibility of the event participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Open Society Foundation, Serbia.

AGENDA IS AVAILABLE HERE.

  • Photo: UNS Press Centre

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