Vučić's media machine is falling apart: the public broadcaster apologised to viewers, and the head of RTS has resigned

Less than 24 hours after it became clear that the Student List had convincingly beaten the Serbian Progressive Party, the public broadcaster's main news programme opened with an apology. "Things were kept quiet, an eye was turned, we reported one-sidedly, we reported uncritically, the right questions weren't asked or no questions were asked at all. And that's why we owe our viewers an apology," said presenter Goran Eror.

This was Radio Television of Vojvodina, whose programme is also broadcast on Radio Television of Serbia. Eror and some of his colleagues had fought an internal battle for years, without much success. Now the editor-in-chief of the Vojvodina broadcaster has resigned under pressure from the union, and many RTS employees are demanding the same. The apology arrived - one election night late.

The head of RTS steps down

At around 17:30, Manja Grčić, director-general of RTS, also resigned. She was appointed on February 11 this year for a five-year term and became the first woman to lead the public broadcaster. She lasted less than nine months in the job. Her resignation came after RTS staff and Student List candidates demanded she go, along with other members of the management and the editors of the news programme.

For years the students warned that the public broadcaster wasn't reporting objectively but pandering to Aleksandar Vučić's government: it played down the student protests, left out important information and gave critics no airtime. The broadcaster only started changing its tone on Monday - after the voters had already had their say.

96 percent positive

The numbers show how heavy the machine now falling apart really was. In recent years Vučić addressed the public on average more than once a day, through long press conferences and live appearances. His party's rallies were broadcast simultaneously by as many as forty national and cable channels. According to data from the Bureau for Social Research, in the final weeks of the campaign Vučić was portrayed positively 96 percent of the time on the five channels with national frequencies. The Student List, meanwhile, was portrayed negatively in 95 percent of cases.

And despite all that - the Student List will, according to the seat allocation, have 141 of 250 seats in parliament, the SNS 103. The propaganda clearly backfired: viewers were oversaturated. Perhaps the most important lesson from Serbia is exactly this - when one man is on every screen every day, at some point people stop listening.

The storming of Informer

That same Monday evening, a group of citizens burst into the premises of Informer TV, one of the main media pillars of the outgoing government. The broadcast was interrupted and equipment was reportedly destroyed. "They wanted to kill me," said editor-in-chief Dragan J. Vučićević. For years Informer led a pack of tabloids that branded every critic of the government a "traitor", a "terrorist" and an "Ustasha".

The student movement immediately distanced itself. "We don't support storming media outlets and institutions, nor do we call for it," the students said, promising to fight for media freedom in parliament. Later they also warned that someone was preparing a staged attack on Informer's newsroom in order to pin it on them, but didn't say whom they suspected or offer concrete evidence.

"Nothing is solved by storming media outlets. The Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media should start proceedings to revoke the licence. That's the only way," says Aleksandra Krstić, a professor of media systems at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. Journalists' associations have asked for exactly that. The problem is that for years the regulator was made up of people loyal to the government, and even today it doesn't have a working majority.

Two billion euros through Telekom

Critics point out that the backbone of the propaganda apparatus is state-owned Telekom. Over the years the company invested more than two billion euros in buying smaller cable operators and sports broadcasting rights, and money also went to directly funding more than ten TV stations close to the government. The Student List's programme now says state Telekom "must not own a television station, radio station or portal that produces news programming".

"We hope those who abused the media for propaganda, and those who paid for it with citizens' money, will be held to account," says Stevan Ristić, director of the weekly "Vreme". That is the real test for the new government. Replacing the head of RTS is easy. It's much harder not to install your own. Will the students resist the temptation every government before them gave in to?