Dragan Vucelic pulled from Kulturni Dnevnik, RTS silent
After nearly thirteen years and close to two thousand episodes, Dragan Vucelic is no longer the host of Kulturni Dnevnik. He says he never got an explanation, and RTS is not offering one.
Dragan Vucelic told Danas that he still came to work every day, as always. The difference was that he now watched Kulturni Dnevnik, the show he had hosted since its very first episode, from the sidelines. He is no longer part of the new lineup, and no one at the house where he works told him so, not before the decision and not after it.
The news was first reported by a group of Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) employees behind the Instagram account “Nas pRoTeSt” (Our pRoTeSt). According to them, Vucelic himself found out about the change the way people in large newsrooms usually do: through informal conversations with colleagues, and only days later through the written press. He still had not received an official explanation by then, they say. In the meantime, RTS announced that Kulturni Dnevnik would move from its evening slot to a daytime one starting September 21 and get a new team of hosts. As of this writing, the broadcaster has issued no public statement explaining why Vucelic specifically was left out.
Who Is Dragan Vucelic
He was born in 1974 in Podujevo and studied acting at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pristina. In 1999, during his third year of studies, he moved from Kosovo to Belgrade, where he later completed his degree. He landed his first job through an open call at Studio B, then moved to YU Info, and after that station shut down, he spent twelve years at Radio Belgrade. He arrived at RTS with a voice already familiar to listeners and became the host of Kulturni Dnevnik from its first episode. Over the more than thirteen years the show existed in that format, he hosted close to two thousand episodes and became one of the recognizable faces of the public broadcaster’s culture programming.
In 2017 he received the Radmila Vidak award for excellence in spoken delivery, though sources differ on the exact framing: N1 describes him as the youngest winner of that award, while Danas writes that he was its third laureate, and the youngest at the time, after Zarko Obracevic and Dejan Djurovic. According to Danas, the jury singled out the melodiousness of his voice, his precision of stress, and what it called “the persuasiveness of someone people trust.” Given this week’s events, that phrase has taken on a very different weight.
Institutional silence is rarely accidental, and here it reads as a message in itself. Vucelic spoke out yesterday in a statement carried by the Journalists’ Association of Serbia (UNS), and he did not choose his words to soften what happened to him.
“I was the host of Kulturni Dnevnik from when it was created. I am not anymore. I did that job for over thirteen years and made close to two thousand episodes. I was removed from that position without any official notice, and therefore without any explanation.”
He also said that changes in television lineups are a normal thing, but that this particular decision strikes him as, at the very least, strange, since, he says, he never once received a complaint about his work or a request to change anything about it. He did, however, leave room for his own interpretation, one that points directly at the institutional politics of the house where he spent the last thirteen years.
“Yes, I stood by my colleagues when we were insulted and humiliated for defending the dignity and reputation of the house I work for. I have good reason to suspect that this is where the real reasons for my removal from the screen lie.”
On March 7, 2025, outside the RTS building on Takovska Street, Vucelic spoke publicly on behalf of employees who had opposed the editorial policy of the News Program, arguing that professionals at the broadcaster were “collateral damage” of people who, in his words, “chose benefits over professionalism.” He was also among those who objected when students and actors were called jihadists and terrorists on RTS programming. That trajectory, from publicly standing up for colleagues to quietly being removed from the position that gave him his greatest visibility, is hard to read as coincidence, even though RTS has not confirmed or denied that interpretation in any way.
What makes this case heavier than an ordinary staffing change is precisely the absence of any process. The show changes time slot, gets a new lineup, and the man who had been its face since it was founded finds out in the hallway, not in a meeting. For an institution that presents itself as a public broadcaster, one accountable to the citizens who fund it, that is not a technicality but a matter of cultural policy in the narrowest sense, since it measures how much the institution respects the people who built it, year after year, with a voice that, according to its own award, people trust.
Vucelic closed his statement with a line that reads like the conclusion of the whole story, even though it was framed as a personal choice.
“But if that is the price I have to pay, I pay it with pride!”
For now, RTS has no response to that, at least not a public one.
