The only two places you are allowed to smoke in the Belgrade headquarters of B92 are the dining room of the canteen, and outside. The television and radio station’s offices are new, and the smoking ban seems to fit with the spare design and the bustling activity of a lot of good-looking young reporters. Sasa Mirkovic, B92’s general manager, says that when they moved to the new premises in December 2003, he thought the ban would be much harder on his employees than it actually was. “We had to do it, because of the air conditioning,” he explained.
In a country where people who smoke are almost as common as people who wear shoes, the B92 smoking ban is a tell-tale sign of deep change at one of the country’s most influential news outlets. B92 started as a student radio station in 1989, and for much of its life it operated out of a couple of rented floors in the grubby downtown skyscraper Dom Omladine, or House of Youth, a municipal building dedicated to student cultural activities. It was from there that B92 became one of the loudest voices for a democratic Serbia, making it the darling of the democracy tub-thumpers in the West and eventually playing an instrumental role in the effort to topple Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator who presided over the collapse of Yugoslavia. The Dom Omladine offices always seemed to be part of the package, evoking a youthful revolutionary force. And judging from the ashtrays strewn about, it was a revolution that, like many before it, smoked.
In the years since a popular uprising forced Milosevic to give up the presidency of Yugoslavia in October 2000, B92 has refashioned itself as a public service broadcaster, one that would lead the country down the road to catharsis through rigorous excavation of past sins and a rational nudge toward reform and integration with Europe. In the process, the station has been forced to clean its own house, too. It is weaning itself from the stream of foreign aid that sustained it through the Milosevic years and struggling to translate its moral authority into commercial success in Serbia’s new market-driven media world. These days Mirkovic and Veran Matic, B92’s editor-in-chief, are less worried about getting shut down or having their reporters disappeared than they are about market share and balance sheets.
When Mirkovic described the decision to gather all of B92’s operations — which now include radio, TV, online, music promotion, and book publishing — under one roof, he used words like “synergy,” “cost-cutting,” and “restructure.” B92’s new neighbors include the Serbian head office of the French bank Société Générale. And even though the new street still carries a clunky socialist name, Mirkovic assures me that a new name — Bulevar Europa, perhaps, or something honoring Zoran Djindjic, Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister, who was assassinated in March 2003 — is on the way.
These are names from a modern, pro-Western era that has not yet, in all certainty, arrived. But it is an era that B92 helped fight for. And while its journalists are still young, hungry, and strung out on Marlboro Lights, the erstwhile student radio station has been busy becoming a media institution. It has grown up, moved out of the House of Youth, and, officially at least, quit smoking.
It is tempting to explain these changes as the direct result of the victory of the forces of democracy over Milosevic, who is now standing trial for war crimes at the international court in the Hague. And that is true, up to a point.
But the post-Milosevic era has been difficult for Serbian media in unexpected ways. The failure of reformers to quickly establish a set of laws and principles to guide the press out of its authoritarian past and into a democratic future created a frontier-like landscape, where those with the means did what they wanted without waiting for the regulators to tell them it was okay. Even before the war, TV was the country’s dominant source of news and information. But in recent years, the number of television stations on the air has mushroomed to the point where no one — not even the putative government regulators — knows how many there are.
Into this regulatory void stepped TV Pink and its thirty-eight-year-old owner, Zeljko Mitrovic. Mitrovic, who has been shrewdly building his media empire since the late 1980s, absorbed a different lesson about the role of media in a free society. It is a lesson that owes more to Rupert Murdoch than to the BBC: a steady diet of cheaply produced programming that offers manufactured drama, titillation, and sensational news will bring the viewers and make you rich. Top-rated Pink’s philosophy not only stands opposed to B92’s public service approach, but is actually driving the evolution of the media in Serbia and forcing B92 — and everyone else — to either adapt or die.
TV Pink reaches over 90 percent of Serbian homes and has subsidiaries in neighboring countries. Its domestic advertising revenue accounts for about a third of Serbia’s overall advertising spending, which is estimated to have reached $85 million in 2003. The station is dedicated to high ratings, which it achieves through a mix of American movies, Serbian pop music, and scantily clad women. Its journalism is sensational and thin, particularly in comparison to B92’s probing coverage. And Pink’s hypermodern glass-and-steel headquarters, set down like an alien spaceship in the elite residential neighborhood of Dedinje, makes the sort of ostentatious statement that B92’s spare new digs never could. And of course, at Pink you can smoke.
Pink’s dominance has ramifications well beyond the competitive media environment. If ever there was a country in need of an honest and aggressively free press, it is Serbia. Since the end of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, the world has largely turned its attention to other crises, like Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile Serbia has struggled to establish international legitimacy while dealing with the sharp social divides created during the Milosevic era and the economic fallout from a decade of war, corruption, and mismanagement. Sixteen thousand people remain missing from the first Bosnian war alone. The indictment of suspected Serbian war criminals is seen by some as proof of the West’s anti-Serb agenda, while corruption and political insiderism have tainted many efforts to privatize state-run industries. Under Milosevic, organized crime had its hand on many of the levers of state power, and it is still assumed to be influential in politics, law, and business. These are the sorts of problems that the press could force the nation to confront. First, though, the press needs to confront its own past, and Mitrovic and TV Pink are unlikely to lead that charge.
Before his overthrow, Milosevic relied on Radio-Television Serbia, the state broadcaster, which had a monopoly on national broadcasting, was the keeper of local frequencies, and became the regime’s terrifyingly effective propaganda machine. But he also permitted local opposition stations. “Milosevic tolerated free media, as long as it didn’t get too powerful,” says Snjezana Milivojevic, a journalism professor at the University of Belgrade and one of the leaders of a small but vocal coterie of liberal media reformers, many of whom are linked to B92. In fact, throughout the 1990s B92 was technically a “socially owned” property — the Yugoslav variant of a communist-style state firm — and it remained so until it was partially privatized in 2003. For the authorities, what mattered was that the station was preaching to a choir of Belgrade’s educated urban elite but not to the population at large. Until it went onto the Internet in 1996, you couldn’t hear B92 outside of Belgrade.
Milosevic played his cards with RTS masterfully, using its news to create and disseminate national myths — of the warrior-hero, of Serbs as victims, and of the new world order’s conspiracy against the Serbs. “We witnessed the spectacularization of the war,” says Milivojevic. “It was done largely by the media, and people here took it literally.” Any private broadcaster that wanted to get big also had to be benign. They “were given the opportunity to do their commercial programming, in exchange for withdrawing from criticism of the war,” says Milivojevic. TV Pink willingly obliged.
In an era of war, hyperinflation, and public sacrifice, TV Pink’s mindless entertainment was a welcome distraction. Milosevic’s support helped Pink rapidly expand between 1994 and 1996. The growth came with obligations, however, and by 1996, Mitrovic had cemented his ties with Serbia’s political establishment by joining the Yugoslav Left/JUL party of Milosevic’s wife, Mira Markovic. He served briefly in parliament on the JUL’s ticket, and then left the party in September 2000, just a month before the regime collapsed.
After Milosevic’s ouster, the media were a natural target for democratic reformers, who wanted to wrest control of the state broadcaster from the hands of political officials and establish laws that covered everything from cross-ownership to dealing with hate speech to the promotion of domestic production. At the same time, many journalists, media reformers, and opposition figures felt that the media had a responsibility to address their past complicity with the regime. Only after doing so, they reasoned, could they then turn to society at large and help in the healing process. “We talked about a truth and reconciliation committee,” said Velimir Curgus Kazimir, a Belgrade journalist and head of the Media Documentation Center. “But we don’t have a Nelson Mandela, and we will never get one. We recognized the media as a sort of tool for this.” When Zoran Djindjic came to power as the first democratically elected prime minister of Serbia, there was reason to hope that many of these goals could be realized. Among Djindjic’s first moves was to dismantle the hated Ministry of Information, which until then had governed the media with a heavy and often abusive hand. But by the time of Djindjic’s assassination, his government was plagued with the infighting common to fractious groups that are victorious in their efforts to defeat a common enemy. Djindjic himself was dogged by rumors of mob ties. And the stuttering inadequacy of political, economic, and social reform in Serbia had been established.
Today, almost none of the hoped-for media reforms have been instituted. Where television was previously used as a tool for wartime propaganda, private stations have become a vehicle for personal attacks against business or political rivals.
Nor has the change of government brought about a renaissance in journalism. The removal of blatant censorship has indeed led to freedom of expression within the media, but Serbia desperately lacks serious, unbiased reporting. A handful of newspapers and magazines, such as Danas and Vreme, are developing solid news operations, but B92 is one of the only broadcasters to champion such an approach to news. Its influence is limited, however, and to many potential viewers B92’s longstanding association with Western governments and nongovernmental organizations compromises its moral authority. Not even RTS can maintain an operation that is truly independent — its budget is now directly in the hands of the parliament, and the planned switch to a public subscription fee is languishing.
Meanwhile, TV Pink continues to grow. Under Milosevic, the station was prohibited from broadcasting news or any other type of “information program.” When it started its own news show after Milosevic’s fall, the program was frequently a vehicle for partisan attacks, a fact that did not really distinguish it from most other news programs.
Today, Pink’s “information programming” ranges from the evening news to talk shows to more recent additions such as Split Images, a popular satirical show in which Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s current prime minister, is portrayed as a female opera star. More recently the journalism has generally appeared to be less overtly biased. Srdjan Bogosavljevic, who runs SMMRI, Belgrade’s dominant polling outfit, says political attacks carried out through the media have gotten more sophisticated and subtle. The trend has been toward insinuation rather than the direct assaults and unsubstantiated accusations that were common in the past. These days, says Bogosavljevic, “If they are attacking somebody, they do it by quotation, not editorial.”
All this has helped put Pink in a curious market position. Bogosavljevic says that people may watch Pink, but it embarrasses them. In surveys, people often claim, for example, that during the Milosevic years they got their news from opposition sources. “But when you interview them carefully,” he says, “you can see by the answers they give that they were watching Pink.”
Actually, the paradox of Pink goes well beyond embarrassment. For media reformers, Pink’s continued success in the post-Milosevic era stands as a symbol of their failure. But dislike of Pink cuts across class and education lines. Two years ago, when I first encountered the Pink phenomenon, I was in Vojvodina, an agricultural region devastated by drought. I was interviewing a soybean farmer about his ravaged crops, but when he found out I had also been talking to people about Pink, all he wanted to do was tell me about its shady deals and questionable political connections. He was also an avid viewer.
Mitrovic once suggested to me that his programming, given its broad appeal, could be seen as something of a unifying force. But that is not really how he pitches TV Pink. Rather, he claims to represent an entirely different sort of reformist agenda: the creation in Serbia of a robust free-market economy. “For us, commercial programming is most important,” he says. “We tore down monopolies, we were pioneers.” As for the press’s social obligations, Mitrovic is very clear that “it should not happen that Serbia gets only public service stations.”
While Pink has clearly been forcing its competitors to try to match its commercial success, it has also done more than any other station to professionalize Serbian broadcasting. The station pioneered the use of ratings and people meters for making programming decisions, and although most large stations in Serbia now use these tools, Pink is the most aggressive in responding to the information they provide. From very early on, Mitrovic concentrated on building solid advertising revenue — not necessarily a self-evident strategy in a media world that was emerging from socialist management. Bogosavljevic, whose firm has done polling for Pink, told me that Mitrovic is “the only one in Serbia with true media understanding.”
Mitrovic himself presents an unlikely Balkan media mogul. He has a sort of affable, fleece-and-sneakers style that contrasts sharply with the Armani suits and Gucci shades that Serbian businessmen favor. He got his start playing bass guitar for a moderately successful rock band, and in the late 1980s launched a production company that broke the state grip on music production and distribution. From there it was a small step to radio and eventually television. When he was starting out, he says, “none of the big businessmen understood the power and profitability of the media.”
The expansion of Mitrovic’s broadcasting empire, however, is at least as much a testimony to his political savvy as it is to his business skills. His links to the Milosevic government seemed close enough that after sanctions against Serbia were lifted, the U.S. Treasury placed him on a list of individuals with whom American companies may not trade, a status that was finally lifted in May 2003. His JUL membership was, Mitrovic claims, a business transaction. “We were very powerful but we couldn’t expand because of political pressure,” he says. “The only way not to become a political station was to sacrifice myself instead of the TV station.”
Even if Pink was not an overtly “political station,” it became the center of a powerful cog in the Yugoslav wartime propaganda machine: Turbofolk music, a new sound that blended electronic dance rhythms with Serbian and Gypsy melodies and lyrics that ran from saccharine to nationalistic. Turbofolk worked at cross purposes to the rock and roll that B92 played, which conjured a street-fighting antiestablishment tradition that had become a battle cry for opposition groups and a perceived threat to the regime. Turbofolk helped reposition traditional values as part of the nationalist agenda, but it also helped to legitimate in pop culture an emerging class of paramilitary war criminals and gangsters. “There was a newly composed culture of crime emerging during the war,” said Ivana Kronja, the author of a book on turbofolk and a professor at the University of Belgrade. “Milosevic promoted these criminals as a new middle class.”
The ties between turbofolk and organized crime reached their apotheosis with the 1995 marriage of the busty hit singer “Ceca” to Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic, a notorious paramilitary leader, crime boss, and occasional guest on Pink talk shows during the war. Their wedding was a national event. After Arkan was gunned down in the lobby of Belgrade’s Hotel Intercontinental in early 2000, Ceca seems to have kept her fingers in the family business. When she was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic, it was because she had been hanging out with the key suspects, and the police had found a cache of weapons in her house. Ceca eventually walked, and although the affair embarrassed many Serbians, some found her apparent ties to the underworld to be another sign of her devotion to the Serb nation. “TV Pink institutionalized this culture,” says Kronja.
For many involved with Serbian media — especially those who put their property, reputations, and lives at risk to fight Milosevic — this sort of collaboration with the regime was inexcusable. Yet the picture that emerges from Mitrovic’s past is not one of a die-hard Milosevic insider, but rather an opportunist willing to toe whatever political line is necessary for him to stay in business. He has consistently showed an ability to stay a step ahead of Serbia’s mercurial politics. As masses of protestors burned the RTS studios on October 5, 2000, TV Pink used its satellite uplink to broadcast to the world the now-famous images of the popular uprising, even before it was clear that the protestors would win and the regime would fall. Mitrovic quickly — and successfully — switched his allegiances to the new government of Zoran Djindjic.
“Nobody expected the new government to start handing out medals” to independent journalists, said Dejan Anastasijevic, a reporter for the magazine Vreme who was himself a vocal critic of Milosevic. “But what we definitely did not expect was that people like Mitrovic would get a free hand. It leaves a bitter taste.”
Media reform in Serbia has centered on regulation, and especially the establishment of a functional, nonpartisan regulatory body that will insulate RTS from government pressures, enforce quality standards, and preside over what promises to be the biggest change to broadcast media since the introduction of free speech: the sale of up to five national frequencies. For companies like Pink and B92, both of which are likely to win a national frequency, this long-awaited change would help stabilize the market and simplify advertising and revenue planning. Other competitors for the frequencies include BK-TV and TV Palma, and RTS is almost certain to keep two of its current three frequencies. One frequency may also be opened to a foreign investor.
Efforts at market-based reform, however, have been disappointing so far. The Broadcasting Law, adopted in 2002 but still unenforced, calls for the establishment of the Broadcast Agency Council, which would act as the law’s main enforcer and regulatory body. But from the start, the council’s legal foundation was questionable and there was disagreement over its make-up. It never established legitimacy, and several local media organizations — including B92 — have boycotted it. European Union aid agencies, which had planned to provide 300,000 euros to help fund the council’s operations, have suspended payments until the internal political battles are resolved. As CJR went to press, the government was attempting to appoint a new council.
The failure to regulate has helped stifle a broad public discussion of what the role of the media has been — and should be — in Serbian society. It has never been clear, for example, whether private broadcasters such as Pink should have been made to pay some sort of reparations for the market advantages they attained under Milosevic.
But reformers have another, arguably much more fundamental problem than the feckless effort at regulation. The public service model championed by B92, as crucial as it may be to the development of a responsible press, doesn’t resonate with viewers the way Pink’s more colorful approach does. The central problem with B92’s “truth and reconciliation” programming is that the people who watch it tend to be those who are already aware of the problematic role of Milosevic and Serbia in ethnic cleansing and the break-up of Yugoslavia. In 2001, for example, B92 showed a documentary on Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia that was the site, in 1995, of the massacre of some seven thousand Muslims by Bosnian Serbs. The documentary elicited little response. Yet several months later there was a public outcry and protests against the airing of the same documentary after it was shown on RTS, which reaches the much larger segment of the population that was not prepared to even consider Serbian complicity in the massacre. Belgrade intellectuals might dismiss RTS’s audience for refusing to confront reality, but as a media outlet forwarding an agenda of social reform these are precisely the viewers B92 needs to reach.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the station can seem disconnected from the concerns of the country. One foreign adviser told me that when he suggested that B92 add traffic reports to its morning radio show, the idea was met with a slightly puzzled protest from the young urban staff: Why? We don’t drive to work. More broadly, there is the simple fact that the grinding poverty in which most Serbians live tends to push media reform off the list of priorities. The unemployment rate is around 30 percent; and the average monthly wage, after taxes, is around 150 euros, or about $200. So the attitude of many is that the present is difficult enough without dredging up the past, TV Pink now as then, offers refuge from reality.
A Western diplomat involved in media aid programs explained the divide as well as anyone: “The orthodox son of socialist self-management is public service,” he says. “The market economy son is tit and shit.”
In his effort to realign himself with the post-Milosevic power structure, Mitrovic built a valuable network of friends, including Vladimir “Beba” Popovic, who runs the local franchise of Ogilvy & Mather, headed media relations for Djindjic’s government, and is infamous for a string of libel suits he filed against independent media while holding that office. Another friend is Giovanni Porta, who ran the Serbian media operations for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and was responsible for shaping decisions about coverage, fairness, and political influence. Mitrovic has also hired the Washington lobbying shop Barbour Griffith & Rogers, for commercial and trade purposes.
Porta recently took a job with TV Pink helping to set up its new operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Pink has been pushing hard into foreign markets, and in addition to Bosnia is broadcasting in Macedonia and Bulgaria. It is also trying to attract foreign media business to Serbia, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, its subsidiary, Pink Films International, signed a five-movie, $20 million production deal with Grosvenor Park, a British horror film producer.
The rest of Serbia’s media world is watching, and learning. B92 has almost entirely weaned itself from the foreign aid that kept it going under Milosevic. Five years ago, donations paid for a majority of operating expenses, but Sasa Mirkovic guesses that now they make up less than 10 percent. The station continues to put resources into its daily news report, as well as documentaries such as last year’s award-winning Tapestry, which tells the story of postwar ethnic relations and reconciliation through a family’s tapestry, lost in the battle of Vukovar. The station is also buying more popular programming, such as Sex and the City and European professional sports, which has led some old-school fans to grouse that B92 is selling out and straying from its antiestablishment roots. In the surest sign that commercialism is taking root, though, B92 brought in Robert Nemecek in 2003 to work on its entertainment programming, only to see RTS hire him away by the spring of last year. Nemecek’s old boss? Zeljko Mitrovic at TV Pink.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
