One hundred and fourth place: the symptom watched at 19:30

A neighbour of mine from the building in Krunska Street, a lady of about seventy who has watched the evening news at 19:30 for decades, told me in the lift a fortnight ago a sentence I have been carrying with me for two months: “Sasa, it seems they are no longer lying to deceive us; they are lying to convince themselves.” My neighbour is not a politically engaged person, she does not go to protests, she has voted for all the existing parties at different periods, and her judgement is more psychological than ideological. But it describes a process that international organisations now measure with figures.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published in May 2026 its annual Press Freedom Index. Serbia stands at 104th place out of 180 countries. That is a drop of eight positions compared with 96th place the previous year, and the worst result since Serbia has been measured by that index (since 2002). In the region, Serbia is now the worst-placed country, behind Kosovo (86th), Albania (83rd), Bosnia and Herzegovina (90th), Montenegro (41st), and Croatia (60th). RSF rated the situation in Serbia as “difficult”.

I bring these two things together, my neighbour’s sentence and the RSF figure, not because they are the same, but because one measures the other. The decline in media freedom is not an abstraction unfolding in the reports of international organisations. The decline unfolds in every minute of the evening news, in every choice of segment, in every spoken introduction by an anchor who “marks” an event rather than reporting it. The neighbour from Krunska does not read RSF reports. She reads the tone of Aleksandar Trijic’s voice, the length of an opening announcement, the order of segments in the news, the granting or denial of airtime to certain politicians. From those signals she draws a conclusion that is sociologically accurate, even if a professional media scholar might call each of those signals individually into question.

What a service that no longer convinces its audience produces

Pivot to the structure of the problem. Under the Law on the Public Service Broadcaster (Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia, no. 83/2014, with subsequent amendments), RTS is obliged to be independent, to provide fair representation of different political and social groups, and to report in a way that enables the formation of an informed public opinion. What this means in practice is best shown by the monitoring reports of NUNS and BIRN during 2024-2026, which in every electoral campaign measured minutes of appearance, representation in segments, and tone of coverage. The results have consistently shown a structural preponderance of the ruling coalition, especially in flagship programmes, in an average proportion exceeding 70 per cent of political airtime.

That is the technical side. The sociological side is different. In “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (1962, Serbian translation 1969), Jurgen Habermas distinguishes a “bourgeois public sphere”, which functions as a space for the exchange of arguments, from a “manipulative public sphere”, which functions as a stage on which power appears. RTS in 2026, especially in flagship programmes, increasingly belongs to the second model. The difference is not in what we see on the screen (both models have people, cameras, microphones), but in why we watch. In the first model we watch to be informed. In the second we watch to see who is in the frame and who is not. The neighbour from Krunska formulated it differently, but it is precisely that thought.

Here we reach the point where I must bring in a counter-argument, because a commentary that does not is not a commentary but a pamphlet. There is a reading according to which RTS, over the past few months (since February 2026), has “partially opened up”, reporting from the student protests in a leading slot, giving space to opposition statements, which the SNS characterised as “scandalous reporting”. UNS and NUNS judged that such reporting was “professional”. By that logic, RTS is an institution in motion, which responds under public pressure, and which cannot be reduced simplistically to “an extended arm of the authorities”. I agree partly. But an opening that is a consequence of protest pressure, not of internal arrangement, is not a structural change, but a tactical correction. A structural change would be a change in the way the management is selected, a change in the way editorial responsibility is distributed, a change in the way the agenda is decided. None of that has happened.

One more element should be mentioned, which RSF particularly highlights in its 2026 report. Pressure on journalists is not limited to the public service broadcaster. According to RSF methodology, it includes physical attacks (more than thirty recorded attacks in 2024-2025), lawsuits against journalists by officials and people close to them (several hundred active SLAPP-type cases, according to NUNS data), surveillance of journalists’ communications (the 2023 Pegasus case, which has not been procedurally resolved), and a systemic absence of source protection. Individually, each of these indicators can be contested. Added up, they cannot.

I return to my neighbour. After her sentence in the lift, I asked her whether she still watches the evening news. She told me, “I do, but as if it were a film”, which is an interesting phenomenology of media consumption. “A film” means that distance has been established, that what she sees she no longer perceives as information, but as a genre. From the standpoint of public interest, this is worse than the state in which she would be angry at having been deceived. The one who is angry still expects truth. The one who “watches as a film” has already crossed out of the space of the rational political subject into the space of the passive consumer. That transition, more than any figure, describes the state of the Serbian public sphere in 2026.

A return from that place is possible, but not through RTS reforms announced from within the same structure of power that produced the problem. A return would require external pressure (the RSF figure is part of that pressure, but is not enough on its own), internal resistance from the professional community (which exists, but is organisationally fragmented), and the hardest of all, a new generation of viewers who do not watch the evening news. This last category already exists, statistically; it is called “TikTok and Instagram news consumers, 18 to 35 years old”. Whether their level of being informed is any better is another question. A question for another column, another month, after another report which, I suspect, will bring a figure worse than this one.