The Media Council for Self-Regulation, on the occasion of World Media Freedom Day, reminds the fact that media freedom is guaranteed by the Constitution, but it does notmean that it is guaranteed in practice. The Constitution of Montenegro obliges everyone in the country to respect media freedom, guarantee freedom of expression, prohibit censorship, but also the right of access to information held by state authorities. This should not be just a declarative formulation, these are the constitutional obligations of the state. Media freedom exists as long as the judiciary, institutions, political elites and the profession itself are ready or powerful to fulfill those obligations.
This year's World Media Freedom Index of "Reporters without Borders" confirmed what has been warned about on the domestic ground for years: Montenegro has fallen four places in the ranking of 180 countries. This is not a mere statistical coincidence, nor can it be explained and justified only by external factors. The latest Reporter report warns of what we all see: the questionable independence of the public service, unsolved older cases of attacks on journalists, an economic framework in which the state is still the main advertiser, and a culture of public discourse in which political elites and powerful people label journalists as traitors, mercenaries or enemies. The status of a country with "satisfactory" media freedom should not be an excuse for complacency, but rather a call to work, because staying on that list is increasingly difficult.
The Media Council particularly warns that attacks on journalists in Montenegro cannot be treated as individual incidents for a long time. They became a pattern. Whether we are talking about physical attacks on photojournalists working in the field, about years of unsolved cases such as the attempted murder of Olivera Lakić or the murder of the editor of the newspaper Dan Duško Jovanović, or about death threats against journalists like Danica Nikolić. The attacks on colleagues Stevo Vasiljević, Balša Rudović and Boris Pejović in Gornje Zaostro received and are receiving numerous court and prosecutorial epilogues, in which the system has so far found two minors as the only culprits. Such a message is not neutral. It encourages new attackers, and pushes professional journalists towards self-censorship or leaving the profession. This directly destroys freedom and the Constitution.
Of particular concern is the practice of institutional pressure through the prosecution. Inviting journalists, editors and columnists to informative interviews because of texts and publicly stated views about power holders, even when these cases are concluded without a criminal offense, has a clear function of disciplining, or even criminalizing the profession. That this is a pattern, and not a coincidence, is also shown by the fact that in a short period of time several columnists and journalists were summoned to the police and prosecutor's office, among them Duško Kovačević, Petar Komnenić, Darko Šuković, Tinka and Draško Đuranović, Jasmina Muminović, Brano Mandić and Boban Batrićević. Article 50 of the Constitution clearly stipulates that the competent court can prevent the dissemination of information and ideas only in exhaustively enumerated, exceptional cases - calling for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order, propagation of war, incitement to violence or racial and religious hatred. Any other institutional pressure on the word of the media comes out of the framework set by the Constitution. When this kind of coercion of the system on the media, even in a formal procedure, turns into a routine response to a journalist's word, the border between the rule of law and what is called repression, silent or obvious, ceases to exist.
The economic foundations of media freedom in Montenegro are, in parallel with all this, increasingly dilapidated. The market is small, advertising dependence is high, and government money still functions as an instrument that rewards obedience and punishes criticism. In such circumstances, economic insecurity is not a secondary problem, it is one of the most successful forms of censorship. A journalist who cannot live with dignity from his/her work is not a free journalist. A newsroom that depends on one advertiser, one owner or one political position is not an independent newsroom.
Media freedom is not a facade that is whitewashed once a year, on May 3. It is the daily relationship between the state and its citizens, and the media are mediators whose meaning and purpose, no matter how much it bothers some, is to ask uncomfortable questions, to control the powerful and to inform the public. Institutions must protect media workers!
The Media Council for Self-Regulation calls on all stakeholders of public authority, the judiciary, regulatory bodies, political actors and the media community to stop treating media freedom as a matter of rhetoric on May 3, and start treating it as what it is - a measure of the maturity of a state.
Media Council for Self-Regulation
