Bitola municipal secretary Borče Dimitrovski has announced the decision of Macedonia's Council of Media Ethics (SEMM) - TERA TV breached professional and ethical standards with the article "Same people, same address, one family - who runs Bitola?" Dimitrovski's complaint has been upheld.

Specifically, SEMM found a breach of Articles 1 and 13 of Macedonia's Journalists' Code and the provisions for ethical online reporting. The main points of the breach: not publishing accurate and verified information, and an insufficient distinction between facts and opinion. Which means a journalist wrote things he did not verify, and presented them as facts - rather than as his own opinion.

Dimitrovski's complaint concerns what he describes as "tendentious attacks" against his person, the cultural-artistic society "Ilinden," the sports club "Trčaj be" and the athletics club "Olimp." That's a fairly long list of allegedly connected entities - and that's exactly what makes the case interesting. When a journalistic story draws connections between multiple organisations through "same address, same people," that's investigative work. But investigative work requires evidence - and that's where the Council found TERA TV came up short.

The open question: will TERA TV respect SEMM's finding, or will it dismiss it as a "political attack"? SEMM has no sanctioning powers in the legal sense. It's a self-regulatory body - its decisions carry weight only if the media respect them. At a time when the fragmentation of Macedonia's media scene makes self-critical reporting rare, decisions like this matter. Not because they solve anything, but because they set a standard against which media can be measured.

When someone in the future asks about the ethics of an approach, there will now be a documented precedent - "in 2026 SEMM confirmed that this technique doesn't work." That's a win for Dimitrovski. Whether it's also a win for the quality of Macedonian journalism depends on how many outlets actually read decisions like this.