Media and blogs - Part 3

posted by julia on 2006/02/08 00:22

[ Media and blogs ]

In the recently released Media Online report on the media situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2005 Radenko Udovicic, Head of the Research and Analysis Section of Media Plan, writes about the problems of the public radio-television. A considerable number of people in Bosnia-Herzegovina do not feel that their views are represented by the public broadcasters, and in consequence refuse to pay the broadcast license fee of 3 euro/month - the most important source of funding for the public broadcasters (besides international donor money).

R. Udovicic raises the issue from the point of view of the audience - for him the major challenge is not the offer of the media, but the political points of view of the audience...

[...] the BHT evening news program Dnevnik
really does try to cover every part of the country, [...] to see and hear different unitary and separatist groups, to tell the stories of ordinary
people from different parts of BiH [...]. However, is this enough to attract
the majority audience to the primetime news program? As painful as it may be, this
“audience” often has extreme views which are insufficiently followed and covered in
news programs.
Did, for instance, BHT cover tens of thousands of Serbs from the
Republika Srpska who were awaiting and preparing to watch in coffee shops and on
squares in large towns a game between Serbia & Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
And who, of course, rooted for Serbia. It did not! Or, it did, but only through a prism of
absurdity and negativity. Was there a news crew with the thousands of people in Banja
Luka who celebrated Serbia’s victory? There was not! Did it report at all that a
significant number of people in the Republika Srpska do not want to have anything to do
with the state of BiH? It did not! Did it report about people who are denying the crimes in
Srebrenica, who believe that The Hague is a politicized institution, who are strongly
against BiH’s lawsuit against Serbia and Montenegro… It did not! Did it give enough
airtime to Croat politicians and Croat citizens who insist on a third entity, who complain
that Bosniaks want a unitary state, to western Herzegovinians who would be happy to
have their region annexed to Croatia… It did not! Was enough airtime given to that part
of the Bosniak population which considers BHT to be “anti-Bosniak”, which asks that
Alija Izetbegovic and his merits be spoken about, at least on the second anniversary of his
death, at the top of the evening news program, which notices that even on FTV there are
more Croat and Serb program hosts than there are Bosniak ones, which says that “Serbs
are a genocidal people” and that the “international community is giving in to them at the
expense of Bosniaks”. No, it was not!
Let’s not kid ourselves; this, unfortunately, is the
majority public opinion in BiH. Politically, ethnically and economically frustrated.
(Radenko Udovicic: The Media Landscape of BiH in 2005: Between Money and Politics, Media Online, 27.01.2006)

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