Original article (in Serbian) was published on 23/8/2024; Author: Stefan Kosanović
In increased efforts to defend the government against protests against lithium mining, it seems that tabloid journalists more often than usual follow the guest appearances of activists, journalists and experts on N1 and Nova S televisions, whose words they then twist in order to prove that the protests have nothing to do with ecology but with overthrowing Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. In recent weeks, we have repeatedly recorded cases in which the statements of the interlocutors of these televisions were reported on tabloid web portals, but in such a way that they were taken out of context, without the parts in which the government is criticized, or attaching something that they did not say. Yesterday was particularly fruitful for such manipulations – we recorded three of them, after three TV appearances.
Yesterday, the web portals B92, Novosti, Informer, Alo and Lajk.rs incorrectly announced that the guests in the studio of television N1 and Nova S called for bloodshed and threatened that “this will end on the new Fifth of October”.
In the text, the tabloids attached excerpts from the guest appearances of two journalists – Sandra Petrusic from the weekly Radar, who spoke on N1 television and Dejan Ilic from the web portal Pescanik, who was a guest on Nova S television.
Among other things, Petrusic spoke about the protests against the exploitation of lithium, the problems with the lack of sewage in Serbia, the visit of the director of the CIA to Sarajevo and Belgrade, and the conscious process of illiteracy of citizens in Serbia.
Almost at the same time, Dejan Ilic was a guest on the show “Probudi se” (“Wake up”) on Nova S television, where he analyzed headlines from daily newspapers. The journalist from Pescanik focused mostly on the protests against lithium mining, stressing that these protests are directed exclusively against the exploitation of lithium, and not against Aleksandar Vucic, despite his claims.
Both said that the government in Serbia can only be changed on the street because the elections are unfair, but it cannot be said that they were calling for bloodshed. Petrusic did not even mention the fifth of October, but Ilic did, drawing a parallel between the pressure on demonstrators during the lithium protests and the 1999/2000 demonstrations, which then, according to him, did not produce results and ended on the fifth of October. Moreover, Ilic said the following: “Things will be resolved on the street, not in elections. It seems to me that at this moment, unfortunately, it is quite clear”.
A transcription that follows the government’s narrative
These are not the only guest appearances that have been manipulated by the tabloids these days. Law faculty professor and member of Proglas, Miodrag Jovanovic, who, according to the web portals Alo and Informer, allegedly admitted in a guest appearance on N1 that environmental activists are in fact overthrowing Vucic and that the protests have nothing to do with lithium.
Jovanovic’s claims were manipulatively interpreted in the title and the first sentence, since he did not say such a thing, nor can it be concluded from his words during the guest appearance.
Although it was correctly subtitled in the video clip attached to the text, the transcript of that clip was also changed – the guest’s opinion that the protests across Serbia are a novelty was omitted from it, and the criticism that the current regime functions as a “personal” government was not omitted. Instead of Jovanovic’s words that the Proclamation is a kind of “bond and unifying factor”, the term “external unifying factor” was used, thus continuing the government’s narrative that the protests were instigated from outside.
Frequent appearance of edited recordings found on web portals
In addition to these texts, Raskrikavanje caught the tabloids four times in the last month conducting similar video manipulations.
At the end of July, for two days in a row, the tabloids published articles about alleged eulogies from the Croatian television station RTL on the topic of lithium mining in Serbia. In both texts, the attached recordings were selectively edited so that all comments from Croatian television indicating negative aspects of lithium mining were removed.
Last week, within just 16 minutes, the web portals Alo, Novosti and Informer published almost identical texts to prove that they “praise Vucic even on N1”. For this purpose, they used the guest appearance of political marketing expert Igor Avzner on N1, from which they edited a 38-second video, omitting all the critical comments that Avzner made during the guest appearance.
This week, Informer published an edited clip from the N1 television show to prove the “alleged despair” in which the “tycoon N1” found itself, after the guest appearance of Demostat program director Zoran Panovic. All of Panovic’s words that criticized the current government were cut out in the video, while his opinion that “the government has very good positions in the world, both in the East and in the West”, the tabloid interpreted as the claim that “Vucic has good positions in the world, and Russia is with him”.
