It wasn’t that long ago, you may remember, back in early 2021, when Vučić, as a guest in the talkshow Ćirilica, asked Marić not to interrupt his fluttering flow of thoughts with any questions. He wanted to finish his monologue, to bare his soul and mind, because he “rarely has the opportunity”, he “doesn’t often appear on television, he prefers to answer journalists’ questions”, so he “always tries to take advantage of an opportunity like this”.
After this, some malicious people with nothing better to do found that, in the previous year, he had been a guest on various TV shows almost 40 times, most of which were broadcasted on national frequencies. During the 2022 election campaign alone, he had 19 guest appearances and major TV interviews, 10 of them in the last two weeks of the campaign. In the current campaign, where he is not running for president, he has already had six guest appearances, thirty live statements and countless reports about his activities, both promotional and regular ones.
It’s clear to everyone that Vučić dominates the media. In the pro-regime media he is depicted as some kind of omnipotent demigod, of course, but even in the critically inclined media he is unavoidable. He doesn’t only dominate the media, but everything that even remotely resembles a printed work, a publication, a website, all made possible by SNS loyalists and those trying to get in his good graces.
Well, not always. It may be hard to believe, but someone actually dared to shove Vučić in the backseat. The website of the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure recently featured something called “One Year of MCTI”. It is not a report, it wasn’t even placed among the reports, although the minister, in the introduction, refers to it as a report. This document shows some data on the “values” of individual projects and completion dates, but not on contractors, contract awarding procedures, and no reports on money flows within the ministry. This is a colorful sticker album, a richly decorated propaganda publication and, knowing the SNS way of functioning, the only thing that surprises me is that Vesić did not think to print at least two million copies of it and send it to all households in Serbia or rent billboards to advertise it.
But, let’s stop giving Vesić more terrible ideas for ways to spend our money, and go back to Vučić. The publication opens with photographs of Vučić and Ana Brnabić with quotes that only Vesić’s imagination managed to connect with his ministry, and the imagination of SNS propagandists with reality (“Everything we do, we do for the future of our children, so that young people stay in Serbia! Serbia dreams and its dreams come true!” – AV, and “There is one Serbia, a Serbia that lives, works and believes in a better future!” – AB).
This is followed by the aforementioned introduction in which the minister reveals that both he and the Prime Minister are mere insignificant cogs: “The results presented in this report are part of the vision of President Aleksandar Vučić to create a modern, successful and connected Serbia.”
The publication ends with a full-page photo of Vesić, Mali and Vučić. A reminder of the happy days of patrolling the streets of Belgrade in an old Skoda, looking for something to fix and tune up.
Between these bookends, the 125 pages of the “report” feature 74 photos of Vučić and 85 mentions of his name.
So what’s the catch, you might ask. Where is the “media blockade”?
It’s quite simple. This “report on the work of the ministry” mentions Goran Vesić’s name 255 times. And features 425 photos of Goran Vesić. Let’s spell that out: four hundred and twenty five.
So much for the “work report”, we can move on now. Let the fellow traveler from Škoda apologize to the cabinet for what he did, let Vojislav Šešelj despair that he never came close to this kind of dominance in Greater Serbia, and let us take a look at the daily press and see if someone else has managed to force Vučić into the backseat.
During the campaign, Transparency Serbia monitors the appearance of all political actors on the covers of 13 daily newspapers – nine “national” (Politika, Novosti, Blic, Danas, Nova, Kurir, Alo, Informer, Srpski telegraf), two regional (Dnevnik and Narodne novine) and two “special” ones – News which is published in Germany, and the Sports Journal.
In the first 30 days, Vučić appeared on the front pages 204 times, 166 of which were in a positive context. Only front pages of Danas and Nova featured him in a negative context (31 times). He was the main headline 64 times, out of which 48 were in a positive context. When we add others from the list around SNS to this, it comes to a total of 337 covers (76 as the main headline), out of which 271 were in a positive context.
In second place we have the Serbia Against Violence coalition with 92 appearances, out of which 15 were positive and 77 were negative. Dragan Djilas stands out individually from this list – 40 headlines showed him frowning, and only one featured him in a positive context.
All other lists are featured less often on the front pages – SPS-JS a total of 24 times, half of which were negative, which was significantly contributed to by the campaign against them run by Kurir. Dveri-Zavetnici 16 times, in two-thirds of cases in a negative tone, and all others less than 10 times.
This data clearly shows that Vučić’s presence is greater that in the previous campaign, the president of the SNS (we all remember who that is, right?) is invisible, and even the papers that previously did not have negative headlines about the opposition “toughened up” their reporting.
And finally, let’s go back to the beginning. One more newspaper did Vučić a disservice. At least five basketball players, football players and coaches appeared on the front page of the Sports Journal more times than him. Despite being a future basketball coach, a stadium builder, a passionate chess player, in one word, a “friend of sports”, Vučić was on the front page of the daily sports newspaper only four times in the past month.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 14.12.2023.
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