N1 Program Director Igor Bozic said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic “wants absolute control of all media” and that all the developments during the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) rule can be described as “an absolutely ignorant attitude towards the journalistic profession.”

“Since coming to power, Vucic has been focusing his attention on the media and wants to have absolute dominant control over everyone. This is why something yet unheard of is happening, N1 has been fully boycotted for eight and a half years, punished, because no one from the ruling party wants to come and answer normal journalistic questions,” Bozic told the show ‘Half an Hour of Demostat.’

Bozic stressed that “Serbia is at war with a media.”

He said that the award of the fifth national broadcasting license (that N1 TV has not applied for but Nova S TV has) is being delayed and that this “delay is a game played by the regime, not by the regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM).”

N1 and Nova S television stations operate under United Media.

REM issued in July last year four national broadcasting licenses to the same television stations that previously had them – Pink, Prva, Happy and B92. Both N1 TV and Nova S TV had applied.

For reasons unexplained, the competition for the issuance of the fifth license was called only in August last year, to which four television stations applied: Nova S, Kurir, Kopernikus and BK.

In December 2022 Nova S sued REM for failing to adopt a decision on the issuance of the fifth national broadcasting license within the legal deadline.