Pressure Rises on Journalists in the Balkans

At the biennial meeting of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Saturday, Ana Petruseva, director of BIRN Macedonia, said the situation facing the media in the Balkans "seems to be going from bad to worse".

In addition to the usual political and financial pressures, she said, the media is seeing new types of pressure - the labelling of reporters and media outlets as spies and foreign mercenaries, as well as the opening of a large number of fake news websites.

Petruseva said the flood of fake news was "creating a media noise" in which it is becoming difficult for the public to distinguish between real and fake information, as a result of which confidence in the media in general is declining.

"People are losing trust in the media, and start to see everything as propaganda and promotion," Petruseva said at the BIRN meeting on Saturday in Kopaonik, Serbia, referring to the new challenges facing the Balkan media.

Wolfgang Petritsch, a BIRN Board member and the president of the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, warned the Balkan countries not to always count on EU support, as many in Brussels saw "stability as the priority" over reforms.

"The EU position has weakened owing to its internal problems. As long as it does not finish the process of internal reforms, there will be no strong EU role in the region," he said, noting that while the promise of EU enlargement is fading, authoritarian regimes in the region are strengthening.

"Since no system has been established of how to handle enlargement, the situation will remain in the 'twilight zone'," Petritsch said.

Political analyst for The Economist and Balkan expert Tim Judah said the policy of "stabilitocracy", whereby the EU and the US appear to...