Press Council: In six months, 5,715 articles violated Serbia's Journalist Code

From July 1 to December 31 last year, the Alo daily violated the Code mo the most; the Serbian Telegraph was second, while the Informer was third.

The Press Council said that compared to the previous year, there had been an increase in the number of violations of the Code and that since last year two new outlets, Objektiv and Nova, appeared on the market.

Traditionally, Danas and Politika dailies violated the Code the least.

Violations of truthful reporting recorded the most significant increase.

"We can interpret that differently, and we assume that this jump happened as the elections approached, i.e., at the beginning of the election campaign," Tamara Skrozza, a member of the Press Council's Complaints Commission, said.

The ten observed dailies often violated the presumption of innocence in their articles and did not mark paid content in the prescribed manner. Also, the Council noticed the high presence of disturbing pornographic content.

"The number of disturbing contents has increased due to stories about how a criminal group tortured and killed people. The fact that this information came from the top leadership does not abolish the media that carried it," Skrozza said.

She added the problem was that children couldn't be spared such content because they could see it on the newspapers' front pages.

The Belgrade NIN weekly journalist Vera Didanovic said the number of articles that could be suspected of being created in one centre had increased. "The headlines are often fabricated, or something that does not exist in the article is in the headline."

She added an obvious campaign was carried out in primarily unsigned articles in several different newspapers.

"As it was the case in July with a campaign against the United Group with numerous violations of the Journalist Code," Didanovic said.

The Council also noticed that the print media often used insulting words last year, such as "Shiptar" for the Albanian nationals.

"It happens that it is not used in the article itself but seems to be an editorial intervention to put the term in the headline," Didanovic added.