If the Council of the Regulatory Body for Electronic Media was an independent body and worked according to the law, the anomalies on the Serbian media scene on which the regime of Aleksandar Vučić rests would be removed. It’s no wonder that the candidate for the Council of the REM in the National Assembly is breaking spears
Deputies of the Assembly of Serbia finished the discussion on the candidates for members on Monday evening Regulatory body for electronic media (REM), which will continue on Wednesday at 10 am.
For the progressive parliamentary majority, everything is “clean as a tear”, said Nebojša Bakarec, and that, he says, is confirmed by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the head of the European Union Delegation, Andreas von Beckerat, who admittedly did not confirm anything, because the candidates have not yet been chosen.
Bakarec assessed that “most of the media belong to the opposition”, “led by the media conglomerate RTS”, which is a bit too imaginative even for him.
Then, of course, he lashed out at the N1 and Nova S televisions, which, Bakarec claims, are “untouchable” for the competent authorities in Serbia, even though they constantly lie, and “the opposition, blockaders, N1 and Nova S want to control all the media through REM in order to gain power without elections.”
So their even more sinister goal is for REM to “assign national frequencies to two Luxembourgish television stations”.
In a similar tone, the other MPs of the parties of the SNS-SPS axis spoke.
Undermining the government
The deputy of the Green-Left Front (ZLF), Robert Kozma, said, on the other hand, that the government does not care at all about a functional REM, but wants either to keep that body under control or to make it non-functional.
Kozma said that 90 percent of the time in the central broadcasts of television with a national frequency, representatives of the government are represented, that those televisions break all the rules, and that the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, addressed them 354 times in 2024.
He emphasized that televisions with national frequencies “serve and misinform citizens”, that in those media, for example, there is nothing about the hunger strike of Dijana Hrka, the mother of Stefan Hrka who died in the fall of the canopy at the Railway Station in Novi Sad, nor about the hunger strike of transporter Jaćimović, about attacks on students, about corruption, about the fact that Serbia is a country with the greatest social and economic inequalities.
At the same time, the government “intended pressure” on real free and independent journalists, Kozma said, recalling that this year the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia recorded 33 attacks on journalists, and that five of the six physical attacks were committed by the police.
If there is any doubt that a functional and independent REM is necessary for Serbia’s exit from the deep social crisis into which the government is pushing it and the return of democracy, it is enough to watch any five minutes of the Informer television program, for example.
Source: Vreme
