Say A Before - B

News of the attack and hijacking of Studio B found me at a certain international gathering in Budapest where, oh the irony of it, a fairly intellectual discussion was underway on the future of media in Serbia. On the way to Budapest I heard about the troubles of Blic daily, followed by news which came from Prague that police had entered the premises of Vreme's editorial office which turned out to be false, which still doesn't mean that such an event is impossible. If, esteemed readership, you believe that I am suggesting and heading towards the conclusion that there is no future for the media in Serbia, you are very mistaken. That future is uncertain in one regard only: how long a road awaits us before we reach it. However, to return to the subject of this text - the hijack of Studio B, in which Radio B2-92 fell as collateral damage. Word is of a relatively powerful electronic system (multi-channel television and radio production) which covers an imposing part of Serbia and is a potentially powerful media house or "the most powerful independent" house as one of SPO's leaders termed it. True, that very person, by classifying Studio B in such a manner had disqualified everything when, at the beginning of April of this year at the Second Segedin Conference dedicated to the Stability Pact in South-East Europe, he literally said: "My party controls the most powerful independent media house in Serbia." Which is where the plot of this story thickens. Following news of the first protest following the police raid on Studio B, those present in Budapest asked me to assess whether that repressive government act could incite mass protests in Belgrade. Yes, I said, if the citizens feel as though they have been robbed. The very next day it was clear that they didn't and that is apparent to all today. I don't know how much scenes of coffee and scotch drinking politicians on the balcony of the City Assembly had an impact on the citizens while they were being beaten up two blocks down the road, yet I do believe that TV Studio B was in its essence non-defendable since it had never been the public property of all Belgrade citizens and therefore they never felt it as their TV station, and during its certain phases and editorial concepts it irritated the viewers only slightly less that the state-owned television station does.

Studio B is a public company in the monstrous meaning of such a word here, and just as it was easy to guess where the RTS newsreel would be "open", it was equally certain that we would come face to face with Spasoje Krunic between the seventh and the fifteenth minute of their newsreel and that SPO party announcements would be primetime news surpassing, say, news that the world has stopped turning. There isn't a single traditional celebration which we, the viewers, didn't participate in with the workers and directors of the Green Market Boards, Waterworks, Sewage System... and until January 10th of this year when an agreement was reached between certain opposition parties in Serbia, censorship of news of the political activities of certain parties, especially the Democratic Party, was more than evident, rules of professional reporting were broken, silence followed what all of Belgrade was talking about, pre-determined guests were brought into the studio, high quality programs of numerous production television houses couldn't be aired and it is absolutely logical why the majority of the citizens viewed this program as  the reverse side of that program. Such a political distribution of frequencies initiated, however, a serious social problem: it disabled any kind of social debate on the role and obligations of publicly-owned media and its management, i.e. a certain kind of unspoken agreement was achieved between the political actors that all is allowed on ones own frequency.

The original, mass rebellion of the Serbian citizenship at the end of the eighties and all the way up to March 9th, 1991 were initiated by the state monopoly of the electronic media, with the predomination of a single party electronic tyrannical regime, and following the success of the opposition at the local elections in 1996 that potential rebellious energy was repressed because both sides were satisfied with the partition of the electronic loot.

Absurd but totally accurate: in places where the main actors believed they had gained - they were losing! Their unnatural influence over the media which were under their control was only used to convince those who were already convinced. Those who "lost their heads" at the sight of Milutin Mrkonjic cannot bear to regard Spasoje Krunic, just like those who were ecstatic with Spasoje's allegedly spontaneous walk down Knez Mihajlova street believe that Mrkonjic is opening all those bridges in RTS's studio in Takovska street where scenographers are building them out of cardboard. What I want to say is that parties which control the media in such a fashion and are overestimating the significance of propaganda over information are creating a negative outcome for themselves in the long run, and that no one has successfully pronounced B who hadn't previously learned A. Anyway, the sole already mentioned success of the Serbian opposition, the slight victory at the local elections, was achieved when Studio B was in the hands of the socialists who had also overvalued propaganda and humiliated the common sense of the citizens of Belgrade, which was reflected in the election results.

That unspoken agreement that nothing should be seriously disrupted in the political life and work concerning the (mis)use of public media has thwarted the creation of a critical public in Serbia for a long time. It isn't difficult to ascertain what public interest is and what the mechanisms of government control are, and in a series of such created damage another phenomenon appeared on the media scene: all of a sudden truly independent media found itself in the center of political and social attention (when I term them so, I mean privately-owned media) which, owing to their very nature, are disrupting the makeshift harmony created by the political partition of the loot. Therefore, up to the moment of the Studio B raid, the political battle was waged against and for the independent media while the parties were demonstrating an obsessive desire to stick their fingers into that pie too, regardless of whether the government was criticizing and the opposition defending them by writing futile announcements, or whether they were trying, and still are, to infiltrate them, or even when they felt that they had the right to harass them and to pass sentences on them in a wide range - from suing them on the basis of the monstrous law to drawing up filthy accusations concerning the influence of family ties in information, as soon as someone had the impression that more people attended the rally in Ravna Gora than the agencies stated.

Which is how a social and political dialogue was excluded on media which is financed from the budget or electricity tax, or from both at the same time, and which should, at least on account of that, have to serve the overall community, while extremely devious "sieges" and "defences" of the media which were slipping away from party control and where the editors were not appointed by politburos were organized. The media debate exhausted itself on the "mistakes in the system", which independent media objectively are, while no one spoke about the "systematic mistakes" since the parties were under the impression that they had huge benefits from it, and all they expected was to periodically give them a superficial makeover. When no one has posed the serious question why RTS is lying and keeping quiet as much as it is lying and holding its tongue and using our money to do so for years, when no one posed the same question with regards to Studio B, then the stronger devil had to come and collect his due. And collect it he did.

In the final outcome it might even turn out that the best thing that could have happened to SPO was to lose Studio B, having failed to use it in a better manner. Milosevic doesn't know what to do with it anyway. Those who had watched Studio B thus far won't vote for Milosevic, who won't be able to take over CNN too, and the majority of the identical nonsense which is being produced on state-run channels won't influence those who, up until now, still haven't been electionally convinced that they should be giving their vote to the one who is publicly stating what he is stating. Milosevic is most probably aware of this, and by approving a raid on Studio B he only wanted to demonstrate his power, and since I hear that a Serbian opposition delegation wishes to travel to Moscow to complain about this, they should be reminded that Putin, only a week prior to these Belgrade events, authorized a special police force raid on Moscow's independent television station so I would conclude that they shouldn't waste their time with this story.

Some future battle for Studio B shall have to be waged from the very beginning. The recipe is very simple: more programs, less program announcements. Yet, try convincing those who believe that by amassing more votes they had taken all of our money with them as well and that that money is there, by default, for their personal media promotion.