No source, born digital.
Contributions to Contemporary History is one of the central Slovenian scientific historiographic journals, dedicated to publishing articles from the field of contemporary history (the 19th and 20th century).
The journal is published three times per year in Slovenian and in the following foreign languages: English, German, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Italian, Slovak and Czech. The articles are all published with abstracts in English and Slovenian as well as summaries in English.
Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino je ena osrednjih slovenskih znanstvenih zgodovinopisnih revij, ki objavlja teme s področja novejše zgodovine (19. in 20. stoletje).
Revija izide trikrat letno v slovenskem jeziku in v naslednjih tujih jezikih: angleščina, nemščina, srbščina, hrvaščina, bosanščina, italijanščina, slovaščina in češčina. Članki izhajajo z izvlečki v angleščini in slovenščini ter povzetki v angleščini.
Prispevek obravnava vprašanje homogenosti jugoslovanske
medijske krajine, ki je že v sodobni literaturi in časopisju bila
obravnavana kot izrazito republiško usmerjena. Za vsebinski okvir analize
sta avtorja iz množice tem v politično razgretih osemdesetih letih
prejšnjega stoletja odbrala poročanje o dogajanju na osmem plenumu
Centralnega komiteja Zveze komunistov Srbije. O tej temi so najobširneje in
najbolj poglobljeno poročali redki jugoslovanski politični tedniki, ki so v
prispevku predstavljeni, analiziran pa je tudi njihov diskurz. Iz analize se
nakazuje zaključek, da so politični tedniki sicer bili usmerjeni v
republiško okolje, vendar pa so zaradi široke mreže povezav med
obravnavanimi mediji in novinarji bili bistveno bolj jugoslovansko
usmerjeni, kot so to menili v času njihovega izhajanja.
Ključne besede: Slovenija, Jugoslavija, mediji, politični
diskurz, politična zgodovina
The article deals with the question of the homogeneity of the
Yugoslav media landscape, which is already considered to be distinctly
republican in modern literature and newspapers. From a variety of topics in
the politically heated 1980s, the authors chose reports on events at the
Eighth Plenum of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia
as the basis for analysis. The rare Yugoslav political weeklies reported on
this issue most extensively and in detail, and article deals with presenting
and analyzing their discourse. The analysis suggests that the political
weeklies focused on the republican environment but, because of the extensive
network of connections between the media outlets and journalists in
question, were significantly more Yugoslav-oriented than they were thought
at the time of publication.
Keywords: Slovenia, Yugoslavia, media, political discourse,
political history
In the Slovenian historical memory of the media landscape of socialist Yugoslavia
during the 1980s, the period between 1987 and 1991 has made the most prominent
impression. At that time, the tensions between the Slovenian and Serbian
political leadership led to the outbreak of the so-called “media war”, which put
a heavy strain on the mutual relations and did not come to an end until the very
disintegration of the common state. On the other hand, this war was distinctly
unequal, as, on the Serbian side, we can observe the silent takeover of the most
important media players, which then allowed for the consolidation of the new
Serbian Party leadership; while on the Slovenian side, the Party leadership
attempted to control the social unrest mainly by implementing technical measures
(occasional seizures of the individual issues of the disobedient press). In
response to the critical articles coming from Serbia, Jože Smole, the president
of the Republic Conference of the Socialist Alliance of Working People at the
time, asked in the daily newspaper Borba: “Why are
certain objectionable texts published in the Slovenian press, being responded to
with prominent commentaries that reach millions of readers and are thus provided
with unacceptable publicity?”Duga 359, 28 November – 11 December 1987,
67.
However, this process – popularly called the “Slovenian syndrome” in the “newly
composed journalism”Southeastern Europe 36, No. 2 (2012): 179.Delo daily newspaper addressed this issue in an
editorial: “During the festive days leading up to the New Year, the Yugoslav
press focused on ‘Slovenian topics’ a lot. One of the most interesting of
these was the recruitment of workers from the other republics in Slovenia.”
Thus, the Slovenian syndrome started becoming apparent already very early
on: “And precisely because the problem exists and because it is serious –
and because we should write about it and discuss it rather than ignoring it
– we should also underline that just as quickly as writing or speaking
carelessly and insensitively can leave a bad taste, it can also create
dilemmas in people, introduce a kind of an intimate agitation which, if
abused, can become political, to which we must pay particular attention to
in Yugoslavia…/… In its famous series of articles about Slovenia, NIN from Belgrade has already…/… What worries me most
is the undertone that can be felt in some of the Yugoslav press. Perhaps the
NIN magazine expresses it most evidently.” –
Mitja Gorjup, “Da bi se bolje razumeli,” Delo, 4
September 1974, 7.Slovenci v
osemdesetih letih (Ljubljana: Zveza zgodovinskih društev Slovenije,
2001), 22.Jugoslavija v času: devetdeset let od nastanka prve
jugoslovanske države, ed. Bojan Balkovec (Ljubljana: Znanstvena
založba Filozofske fakultete, 2009), 36.th Congress of the League of Communists of Slovenia in the
political weekly NIN. “The differences in the
development of Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia is completely obvious,
but, on the other hand, the gap between Slovenia and its western neighbours
has been increasing in recent years.” – Šćepan Rabrenović, “Slovenija na
jugu,” NIN 1843, 27 April 1986, 9.
Such observations were nothing new: Mitja Gorjup, a prominent expert on the
Yugoslav journalism and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Delo, had already addressed these issues in the 1970s: “To sum all of
this up, I will focus on the basic problems of the Yugoslav press in general,
which can be reduced to a single predominant theme: the entire Yugoslav press is
essentially not Yugoslav enough. It does not nurture the Yugoslav dimension
enough in terms of information and the political presentation of events and
trends.Samoupravno novinarstvo (Ljubljana: Delavska enotnost, 1978),
96.NIN, pointed out that this did not refer to the
statistical calculations of Yugoslav contents in the individual media (these
averaged between twenty and thirty percent – a piece of information that the
speakers at the conference kept pointing out as proof of disunity). However, the
fact remained that various environments perceived the same process differently,
even though Grizelj justified it with the globally present processes of
decentralisation, democratisation, and personalisation of information.NIN 1832, 2 February 1986, 19.
In 1977, Gorjup also raised the question of the Yugoslavianisation of the
newspapers of the individual republics. “I think we are too narrowly focused on
the republics. Of course, we are primarily republican newsletters, but we need
to provide our readers with as much information about Yugoslavia as possible. We
are not succeeding, though. In addition, a kind of mentality is spreading that
the affairs of the individual republics should only be discussed in the
newspapers of those republics…” Thus, he underlined the problem related both to
the “Slovenian syndrome” and later to the media war, as “the notion that one
should only mind one’s own business and leave one’s neighbours alone”Nin, which came across as a justification in front of
the Serbian public, as it was essentially devoted to his previous statement
for the British BBC regarding the issue of the distribution of
foreign-exchange assets in the Yugoslav federation. – Šćepan Rabrenović,
“Čije su devize: predsednik Skupštine SR Slovenije Miran Potrč govori za
NIN,” NIN 1864, 21 September 1986, 13–16.
“I believe that this issue is taking on very problematic proportions. Such
behaviour inevitably leads to closing ourselves within the republican borders,
which is certainly not beneficial. Another issue I think is problematic is the
over-sensitivity of the Yugoslav environments to what is written about them
elsewhere. What is happening now is that we often write about events in the
other republics unproblematically and uncritically. Thus a kind of an idyllic
image of Yugoslavia is being created in the mass media, suggesting that there
are no problems, difficulties, or misunderstandings. This is, of course, at odds
with reality…/… The public media simply avoid any ‘non-idyllic’ information,
leading to a paradox: because of this, people often refuse to believe us. We
need to shape the public opinion in such a way that people know that the state,
through its constitutional mechanisms, is capable of resolving all the objective
socio-economic and political contradictions without any political drama and
scandals.”Samoupravno
novinarstvo, 145, 146.
Therefore, the critical Serbian journalist Ivan Torov describes the period before
the process under consideration as one of relative media freedom: “The first
five or six years after Tito’s death – after an initial lull due to the
uncertainty inevitably provoked by the departure of a great leader – will
certainly be remembered as a period of a more notable liberation of news outlets
from the political shackles they had been subjected to. Critical analyses of the
economic and political realities were approached more and more courageously,
many scandals and abuses were exposed, and free professional journalism was
increasingly successful in filling the empty space resulting from the lack of
cohesion in Serbia and Yugoslavia. Already in the first half of 1985, it was
believed that Serbian journalism, along with many other newspapers in the other
republics, was experiencing a democratic development that would be difficult to
stop. Publications such as Borba, Duga, NIN, Mladost, and
NON dictated the rhythm in this new wave and
doubtlessly had a significant impact on the increasingly visible changes in the
leading media companies…”“Antibirokratska revolucija”: (1987–1989), eds. Bojana Lekić,
Zoran Pavić, Slaviša Lekić and Imre Sabo (Beograd: Statusteam in Službeni
glasnik, 2009), 270.Mladina became clearly
radicalised.Prispevki k zgodovini slovenskih
medijev, ed. Maruša Pušnik (Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede,
2008), 535.Teleks
from the Delo newspaper company, it developed into the
most important Slovenian political weekly.
When asked about it, Jure Apih, the first editor of Teleks, agreed that at the time, this magazine represented a medium
through which the society communicated with itself since the only official
newsletter of the League of Communists, Komunist, simply
adhered to the Party directives, while in the daily newspaper Delo, reporting was restricted to what had been agreed upon with its
official founder, the Socialist Alliance of Working People.Dnevnik.si, 24 October 2020, https://www.dnevnik.si/1042941784, accessed on 1 March
2022.Delo Mitja Gorjup when the Teleks weekly was being conceived: “With the advancement of technical
possibilities and the increasing flow of information, journalistic work is
starting to influence the public opinion more and more, while the public opinion
also keeps gaining more and more influence on the political decisions. On the
one hand, this offers the information media greater opportunities and power,
but, on the other hand, it also confronts them with greater responsibility, as
by highlighting and interpreting information, the press can make a significant
contribution to the creation of a certain public climate.”
As Ljubomir Tadić wrote, the task of the press was therefore clear because “under
socialism, the public opinion appears as a form of social consciousness for the
purpose of coordinating the interests in tackling social issues or as the
qualified, competent, clear, and understandable reasoning of the working people
regarding the general activities of the community.“ In this sense, it is a
permanent and important mental presupposition of socialist democracy.Javno
mnenje u savremenom društvu, javno mnenje o Prednacrtu novog Ustava
(Institut društvenih nauka: Beograd, 1964), 31.Borba as the newsletter of the Socialist
Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, Vjesnik as the
newsletter of the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Croatia, etc.). The
institution of editorial and programme councils in other major media (weeklies,
magazines, radio, TV) allows the SZDL to notably influence their policies.”Povijesni prilozi 3,
No. 3 (1984), 67.
The shape of the media landscape in Yugoslavia was therefore also dictated by the
political structure. In 1986, Joža Vlahović, the first editor of the Zagreb
weekly Danas, thus stated the following: “For a long
time, we have not had a situation where the main newspapers would simultaneously
be Party newsletters. That is how it used to be. Everything published today,
except newspapers like Komunist, of course, is a kind of
a voice, if not a body, of the Socialist Alliance – from Borba and Politika, Vjesnik (Delo, author’s note) and so on…” The
manner of writing was still controlled, though – as it is evident from the
example of the Teleks magazine, where the editors Apih
and Anton Rupnik were dismissed due to the negative reviews of the articles on
the socialist morality, while the cause for the replacement was the publication
of an interview with the controversial Italian publicist Oriana Fallaci.Duga: in terms
of contents, this publication was quite similar to the early Teleks, and according to the editor of the Danas
weekly, it had been a victim of political pragmatism before a thorough
editorial change in 1985. “Unfortunately, pragmatism is most important for
newspapers. Certain weeklies end up in serious conflicts with the ‘daily’
pragmatic policy and can easily get a shady reputation, although some of them
rightfully so and for a good reason. In terms of their spirit and mission,
weeklies should fight for more room for their activities (for the strategic
goals of the society) and are not obliged to submit to the dreary and often
narrow-minded daily politics…/… I think it was precisely Duga that has experienced a lot of this firsthand. If I can put it
this way, it was the very magazine that would often get caught in the pitfalls
of pragmatism, but with the overtones of politics I could not agree with. Well,
now I read about the better assessments by both the Party organisation and the
board of your magazine…”Duga 332, 15 – 28 November 1986,
10–14.
In this context, Joža Vlahović was probably referring to the report from the Duga publishing board,Duga for a decade –
that it is a kind of a dissident if not even a Greater Serbian newspaper…”Duga 331, 1
– 14 November 1986, 38.Studia Historica Slovenica 20, No. 3
(2020), 921–55.
The role of political weeklies among the media was important, as their way of
reporting differed considerably from that of daily newspapers. The period under
consideration was their golden age, despite the drops in circulation during the
times when the editorships were being disciplined, resulting in less public
attention. The more they were perceived as “Party newspapers”, the lesser their
influence. This trend can be observed in the examples of Teleks, Danas, as well as NIN and Duga. This made the weekly political
newspapers more independent from the day-to-day politics.Danas agreed: “Political weeklies – as well as other similar
publications – are, by their very design, a synthesis of all the dailies at the
end of the week. Therefore, they do not share the excuse of the daily
newspapers, which are often forced to react hastily and superficially. At the
same time, as soon as weeklies attempt to conduct deeper analyses, they end up
in a delicate situation, as they more often face unpleasantness, clash with
certain individuals from politics but also from the economy and culture, and
frequently stumble upon the interests of the daily politics and strategic
orientations.” During the period we are researching, the main Slovenian daily
newspaper Delo was much more neutral than the writing of
the political weeklies Teleks and Mladina. After 1986, the Zagreb-based Danas
paved the way for the positioning of the Croatian politics that was not evident
from the writing of the daily owned by the parent media company Vjesnik. Finally, the Serbian NIN,
published by the newspaper company of the daily Politika
– which became the first proponent of the new political trends in
Serbia – still resisted this trend in the first months of 1988. Already in 1983,
Danas and NIN were recognised
as the most important political weeklies in Yugoslavia.apih.si, http://www.apih.si/nekatere-ocene-vsebinske-neravnanosti-ekonomskega-polozaja-revije-teleks-v-letu-1983/,
accessed on 1 March 2022.NIN.NIN 1853, 6 July 1986, 16.Nin
magazine reprinted extracts from the most controversial texts from the
Slovenian media on several pages. ‒ “Slovenačko ogledalo štampe,” NIN 1963, 23 August 1987, 20–24.Teleks in 1983, “a review of these articles revealed that
the Teleks readers could get the impression that
everything was wrong in the other provinces and republics, that there was
nothing but scandals, affairs, and economic failures, that they were only
fighting among themselves, arguing, scheming against each other, and that they
were rife with nationalist outbursts. The Teleks readers
only learned the most ‘juicy bits’ of long interviews published in other
newspapers.apih.si, http://www.apih.si/nekatere-ocene-vsebinske-neravnanosti-ekonomskega-polozaja-revije-teleks-v-letu-1983/,
accessed on 1 March 2022.Danas and NIN had a large
readership, the main local newspaper company Oslobođenje published the weekly newspaper Nedjelja, while the youth newspaper Naši
Dani was probably more influential in the period under
review.Teleks and Mladina reached between 30 and 50 percent of the
population, while the political weeklies from the other republics had a much
smaller reach, e.g. 11 % for Danas, less than 8 % for Duga, and only 5 % for NIN – and
even in these cases, the readers indicated that they very rarely consulted the
press from the other republics. Compared to the daily newspapers, the difference
was even greater, with Delo reaching 65 % of the
Slovenian population and Zagreb’s Vjesnik 11 %, while
less than 5 % of respondents had ever got their hands on Politika, the most notorious newspaper at the time.Arhiv družboslovnih podatkov (Ljubljana:
Univerza v Ljubljani, 2000), https://doi.org/10.17898/ADP_SJM88_V1, accessed on 1 March
2022.
The thesis of the disunity of the Yugoslav media space is almost ubiquitous in
the contemporaneous literature and even more so in the media themselves. On the
issue of reporting about the Eighth Session of the Central Committee of the
League of Communists of Serbia, Svetislav Spasojević wrote the following in the
NIN magazine: “It is not necessary to develop the
thesis about the connection between the leaderships of the republics and
provinces and their press, but in this connection lies a part of the reason why
some of the assessments of the press in Ljubljana and Zagreb about the political
situation in Serbia were met with unusually harsh reactions in Belgrade…”. Then
Spasojević returned to the metaphor of the eight mirrors held up to the public
by the media of the Yugoslav republics and provinces.NIN 1927, 6 December 1987, 12.
The authors of the present article are particularly interested in how the
Yugoslav magazines (especially the Serbian NIN and
Croatian Danas) and Slovenian magazines (Teleks, Mladina) reacted to
Milošević’s consolidation of power in Serbia. The NIN and
Danas weeklies were both aimed at the Yugoslav
public, even though they were also influenced by the political and media
circumstances in Serbia or Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the Slovenian socio-political
magazines counted on the Slovenian audience: they were Slovenian in terms of
language as well as content, although they were also a part of the broader
Yugoslav media space. In the middle of the 1980s, the Yugoslav media space was
undergoing a process of democratisation, and the editorships were breaking free
from the confines of the political forums, especially in the larger centres
(Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana).
From the very outset, the rise and the establishment of the authoritarian
Milošević’s regime were linked to the media landscape in what was then the
Socialist Republic of Serbia. According to Miodrag Marović, a researcher of the
history of the Politika newspaper, in the 1980s, Politika was not only a victim of political manipulations
like in the previous decades but also became a public means of retaliating
against the editorial offices that refused to accept the new “single-mindedness”
in its nationalist manifestation. After Tito’s death, several personalities
appeared at the top of the Serbian political forums until Slobodan Milošević
assumed control with a Party putsch in October 1987. The rise of the ambitious
economist and banker was the result of factional struggles between the two most
powerful leaders of the Serbian League of Communists: Dragoljub (Draža)
Mihajlović, one of the leaders of the 1972/73 showdown with the Serbian Party
liberalism, and Petar Stambolić. In 1984, the Serbian leaders sought a
replacement for Dušan Čkrebić, as he moved from the position of the leader of
the Serbian League of Communists to the post of the President of the Presidency
of the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Petar Stambolić ensured that his cousin
Ivan Stambolić, who had previously headed the Belgrade City Committee of the
League of Communists, was appointed to the vacant position. Ivan Stambolić’s
previous position was filled by Slobodan Milošević. As the leader of the
Belgrade Communists, Milošević – in cooperation with his wife Mira Marković, who
headed the University Committee of the League of Communists – created a scandal
over Marxism as a compulsory subject at the University, which was opposed by
prominent Party intellectuals. Already as the head of the Belgrade League of
Communists, Milošević started to take issue with the youth press ( Student, Mladost, NON), which opposed his and Mira Marković’s plan to make
Marxism a compulsory subject at the faculty. Although this episode revealed that
Milošević had broader ambitions, in 1986, Ivan Stambolić, who then took over as
the President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Serbia,
nevertheless nominated him his successor as the leader of the Serbian
Communists. Before the Congress of the League of Communists of Serbia in 1986,
Draža Marković – the uncle of Milošević’s wife Mira Marković – publicly opposed
Milošević’s selection for the highest Party position in Serbia but was not
successful. In May 1986, at the Congress of the League of Communists of Serbia,
Milošević was elected as the President of the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Serbia. After his election, Milošević immediately tried to take
control of the central Serbian newspaper company Politika, and he appointed his confidant Živorad Minović (the former Politika correspondent from Požarevac) as the president
of the Commission for Information of the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Serbia and as the deputy director of Politika. When Stambolić’s candidate was chosen as the director of Politika, Živorad Minović took over this newspaper’s
editorship.Политика i Politika (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za
ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2002), 215–33. Nebojša Vladisavljević, Antibirokratska revolucija (Beograd: Arhipelag,
2020), 86–106.
In January 1987, Politika and the Serbian media landscape
were shaken by a scandal made possible precisely by this newspaper’s new editor.
Politika published a defamatory article titled “Vojko i Savle” (Vojko and Savle), in which an unknown
writer slandered, beyond any decency, two prominent Serbian academicians: the
medical doctor Gojko Nikoliš and the physicist Pavle Savić. The publication of
this satire, which was below any level of journalistic standards, caused a
cultural and political scandal of Yugoslav proportions. A group of Politika journalists organised a petition condemning the
publication of the article and demanded that the editor be held accountable. The
petition was signed by 67 journalists from Politika and
47 of their colleagues from the other publications of the Politika newspaper company, which represented a minority of this
company’s journalists. The petition demanded that the true author be revealed,
but the editor refused. According to Sonja Biserko, the goal of the defamatory
article was to intimidate the increasingly vocal and prominent critics of the
system, and allegedly, it was also related to the media disclosure of the
planned Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, published by the
newspaper Večernje novosti in September 1986. Meanwhile,
Milošević kept actively suppressing the journalists’ attempts at emancipation,
meddling in the personnel policy of the Serbian media, and installing his
supporters in various positions. By visiting Kosovo polje at the end of April
1987, Milošević supported the Kosovo Serbs spectacularly.Niko ne sme da vas
bije, Slobodan Milošević u Kosovu Polju 24 – 25 April 1987
(Beograd: ISI, 2006).Niko ne sme da vas bije” (no one is allowed to beat
you) became a television attraction in Serbia: it was broadcast endlessly on the
Belgrade television, allegedly by the RTV Belgrade Deputy Director Dušan
Mitrević, Milošević’s personal friend.Istorija 20. veka, 2 (2013), 183–204.
Meanwhile, Milošević’s former mentor Ivan Stambolić was unhappy with the
development in the direction of Serbian nationalism: he believed that the
radicalisation of the Kosovo question was undermining the Serbian efforts to
change the relations between the republic and the autonomous provinces and
opening the door for nationalist hysteria. While Stambolić avoided a
confrontation with Milošević, the Serbian media kept underlining the conflict
between “Ivica and Slobo”. Milošević was supported by Politika with Žika Minović at the helm and by the Serbian television.
In this tense atmosphere, on 4 September 1987, an incident took place at the
military barracks in Paračin, where an Albanian soldier killed four soldiers and
wounded several others. The Belgrade press, led by Politika, commented on the tragedy in an anti-Albanian manner. In his
memoirs, Ivan Stambolić wrote that after the incident, Politika started to incite Serbia “as if on command”. The head of the
Belgrade City Committee Dragiša Pavlović, a social scientist and university
professor, attempted to calm the nationalist hysteria in agreement with
Stambolić. At a meeting with newspaper editors on 11 September 1987, Pavlović
underlined the dangers of Serbian nationalism regarding Kosovo. Pavlović’s
associate Radmilo Kljajić illustrated the described phenomena of Serbian
nationalism with examples from the newspapers Politika,
Politika Ekspres, and Intervju. In the following days, Politika ekspres
and Politika launched a media onslaught against Dragiša
Pavlović. As the president of the League of Communists of Serbia, Milošević took
advantage of the comments in Politika Express as a reason
to convene a meeting of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of
Serbia, where Pavlović’s statements would be discussed. The famous Eighth
Session of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia (23 – 24
September 1987), broadcast live on Belgrade television, represented a complete
defeat for Dragiša Pavlović and Ivan Stambolić. In his action against them,
Milošević used mainly the loyal and previously unestablished cadres from the
province. Dragiša Pavlović was dismissed from the leadership of the League of
Communists, and at the beginning of 1988, he was even expelled from it.
Meanwhile, Stambolić, who held the post of the President of the Presidency of
the Socialist Republic of Serbia, was increasingly attacked by the mainstream
Serbian media under the influence of Milošević until he resigned under public
pressure at the end of 1987. Simultaneously, the purge in the managements and
editorships of media companies continued. Party commissions demanded
“accountability” at all levels. Apart from the function of the editor of Politika, Živorad Minović also assumed the post of its
director. The NIN weekly was the publication that managed
to resist Milošević’s purges the longest. At the beginning of 1988, Milošević
replaced its editor-in-chief, but the journalists rebelled and refused to write
in accordance with the new guidelines. The ultimate destruction of the
journalistic independence of NIN took place in June 1988,
when the local municipal committee of the League of Communists organised a
commission of inquiry, which interrogated the NIN editors
and journalists and imposed harsh Party punishments on them.
Vladimir Petrović noted, however, that it had not been the media that had brought Slobodan Milošević to power: he had gradually ascended up the Party ladder, assisted by Ivan Stambolić. Nevertheless, on this ambitious path, Milošević recognised the importance of controlling the mass media, which was decisive for his domination over his former mentor. Once at the helm of the Serbian Communists, he attempted to maintain and justify his monopoly with a new political mission: the solution to the Serbian national question. The media sphere became a key tool in consolidating Milošević’s power and developing it into a regime.
The Danas weekly was founded in 1982 as a project of
the newspaper company Vjesnik. It was planned as
Zagreb’s rival to the Belgrade weekly NIN.Jugoslavija: Poglavlje
1980–1991, ed. Sonja Biserko (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za
ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2022), 528.Vjesnik u srijedu (VUS),
launched in 1952, is deemed as its predecessor. In the early 1970s, VUS was going through a crisis, as several
journalists were removed for supporting the “Croatian Spring”. After the
purges during this period, the magazine never recovered, despite the
attempts at modernisation, and it ceased to exist in 1977.Hrvatska
enciklopedija, mrežno izdanje (Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod
Miroslav Krleža, 2021), http://www.enciklopedija.hr/Natuknica.aspx?ID=64990, accessed
on 6 March 2022.Danas gained significant influence
thanks to its analytical and critical writing, reaching a circulation of
120,000 copies. However, due to the political pressure, its first
editor-in-chief Joža Vlahović was forced to resign in May 1983, which led to
the weekly changing its concept and losing its readership (the circulation
dropped to 30,000 copies). After 1986, when Mirko Galić (1986–88) and Dražen
Vukov-Colić (1988–90) were the editors-in-chief, it grew into a very
influential weekly with a circulation of between 100 and 180 thousand
copies. In the second half of the 1980s, the weekly critically addressed the
most crucial social issues, encouraged liberal and democratic solutions to
the Yugoslav crisis, and cautioned against the rise of Slobodan
Milošević.Hrvatska enciklopedija, mrežno izdanje (Zagreb:
Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 2021), http://www.enciklopedija.hr/Natuknica.aspx?ID=69427, accessed
on 7 March 2022.Danas weekly during this period, told the Lupiga website in 2017 that Danas had been a Yugoslav magazine sold all over the former
country. More than a fifth of the magazine’s copies were sold outside of the
Socialist Republic of Croatia. The focus of the magazine was to cover the
relevant events throughout Yugoslavia. Danas reacted
harshly to Milošević’s rise, with the journalist Jelena Lovrić being
particularly critical of him. According to Čulić, Milošević allegedly threw
an issue of Danas to the floor in a moment of anger
and literally stomped on it. The former Danas
reporter Jasna Babić especially highlighted the atmosphere of political
freedom and the Danas editorship’s tolerance of
original and provocative topics.Lupiga.Com, https://lupiga.com/vijesti/feljton-hrvatska-stampa-80-ih-i-danas-zlatno-doba-novinarstva-i-njegova-propast,
accessed on 6 March 2022.
According to the American historian Patrick Hyder Patterson, it is somewhat
surprising that in the 1980s, the official newsletter of the youth
organisation in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia transformed into an
alternative political newspaper. In the complex system of the late socialist
self-management, the Socialist Youth League of Slovenia (ZSMS) was one of
the socio-political organisations that operated relatively independently.
Although media liberalisation was a phenomenon characteristic of the entire
Yugoslavia at the time, the trend was most obvious in Slovenia. The
communist authorities in Slovenia tolerated the critical youth press, and
only in specific cases would it resort to various means of interfering with
the editorial policy.East European Politics and Societies 14 (2000),
411.Mladina served as the internal magazine of the ZSMS, informing its
members about the past and future activities and providing them with
ideological guidance. It was disseminated through the extensive network of
the ZSMS organisation. Despite its broad reach and institutional funding,
Mladina had few readers. It was allegedly so
boring that even some of the municipal committees of the ZSMS refused to pay
the compulsory subscription. The poor handling of the economic crisis after
Tito’s death on the part of the authorities resulted in political
instability. New trends in popular culture emerged (punk), and new social
movements were born, including the pacifist, antimilitarist,
environmentalist, feminist, and gay/lesbian movements. At its 12 th Congress in 1982, the ZSMS substantially
changed its fundamental principles. It dedicated itself to a broad range of
topics that concerned the youth, but above all, it adopted a stance that
legitimised the criticism of the system. Moreover, it – even if shyly at the
beginning – defined itself as the protector of the new social movements that
were institutionalised into the system of socialist self-management through
the ZSMS. All of this was reflected in the editorial changes of the Mladina magazine. In addition to a critical attitude
towards the social reality, the magazine also started exploring
light-hearted or entertaining topics – including graphic depictions of
sexuality. As early as in the first half of the 1980s, Mladina exposed the influence of the League of Communists and
other political forums on the media editorships. The editorship of Mladina redefined the boundaries of media freedom,
using innovative strategies to attract readers. By transforming itself into
an alternative medium, the weekly helped educate a critical readership that
was becoming increasingly sensitive for critical issues and taboos. The
provocative style of writing became a trademark of Mladina, which increasingly functioned as a free platform where
all social critics could present their views and ideas.Med Marxom in
punkom (Ljubljana: Modrijan, 2005), 345‒49. Bernard Nežmah, Časopisna zgodovina novinarstva na slovenskem med
letoma 1797 in 1989 (Ljubljana: Koda, 2012), 313‒36.
The Teleks magazine was founded as a modern political
weekly based on the tradition of two editions of the ČGP
Delo newspaper company, Tovariš as a family
weekly and Tedenska tribuna, which were merged into
the joint ITD edition between 1974 and 1977. The
altered media consumption that followed the rise of television called for a
new concept for the magazine, which was envisioned by Ante Mahkota. Due to
the death of the director of the ČGP Delo newspaper
company Mitja Gorjup and the change in management positions, Jure Apih,
primarily a marketing expert, became the magazine’s first editor. The
editorship’s report shows a design that was much more commercially oriented:
“In Teleks – the Delo
company’s informative weekly – the consistency with the contents of the Delo daily newspaper is reflected especially in the
influences of the everyday Slovenian, Yugoslav, economic, domestic,
cultural, and foreign politics on the published materials. The journalistic
approach is adapted to the fact that as a weekly, the publication cannot
normally be the first to publish the relevant information. However, it can
produce more complete, synthesised, commented, precise, and selective
information. Teleks should thus mainly cover the
events whose importance, exceptionality, and appeal would otherwise not be
sufficiently prominent in the flood of other daily information or which
would lose the attention of the readers too quickly. An equally important
area of interest for Teleks is the discovery of those
facts and images that are present among us, but at the same time hidden,
concealed, and invisible, and which only journalistic research can reveal
and draw attention to. The magazine’s aim is therefore not only the
transmission but also the creation of information. Last but not least, Teleks should provide its readers with a package of
relaxed, interesting, and entertaining reading. Thus, we have outlined the
structure of the newspaper in our basic content document. It was clear to us
(and the Co-Council also assessed this issue) that Teleks is a publication that cannot be aimed at the broadest
readership, which is already covered quite successfully by other newspapers
(ND, Jana, Stop, 7D, etc.), but rather at
those who are also interested in more demanding information.”apih.si, http://www.apih.si/1329-2/, accessed on 1 March 2022.Danas when it started coming out in 1982. ‒
“Naklada revije Teleks,” apih.si, http://www.apih.si/naklada-revije-teleks/, accessed on 1
March 2022, and Tagirov, “Ne pucaj na novinara: Joža Vlahović,”
12.Časopisna zgodovina novinarstva, 300.Teleks’s role as a
release valve was assumed by the Mladina magazine as
a “political project”, and in 1990, Teleks stopped
coming out for business reasons.
In Yugoslavia, the Serbian political weekly NIN (Nedeljne informativne novine) had both a long
traditionNIN 1775, 6 January 1985,
52.Politika in 1958. At the paper’s peak in 1981, its circulation
amounted to 180,000 copies.НИН — Википедија,”
https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr/%D0%9D%D0%98%D0%9D, accessed on 2
March 2022.NIN 1914, 6 September 1987, 5.NIN’s parent company Politika, which became a tool for the promotion of
the new Serbian leadership and for discrediting the Party’s opposition, the
weekly remained independent and professional long after the Eighth Session
of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia.Politika newspaper company, it kept reporting objectively and
did not adopt the discourse that had become dominant in the Serbian
media landscape, from daily newspapers to television. ‒ Slobodanka Ast,
“Smenjivanje direktora Politike,” NIN 1920, 18
October 1987, 16–19.NIN’s editor at the time, complained in an
editorial.NIN 1921, 1 November 1987, 9,
10.NIN 1923, 8 November 1987, 8.NIN’s editorial policy.NIN
1925, 22 November 1987, 13.NIN 1930, 27 December 1987, 27.NIN 1957, 3 July 1988,
8–15.
A common feature of the Danas, Teleks, and Mladina magazines – regardless of
their different profiles – is the almost complete absence of references to the
politician Slobodan Milošević before the famous Eighth Session of the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, although he had been the leader
of the Serbian League of Communists since 28 April 1986 and had faced Serbian
demonstrators in Kosovo on 24 April 1987. Naturally, the Serbian NIN did follow the political rise of the Serbian leader
and the events in Kosovo. This lack of references is partly due to the
journalistic discourse, especially in Danas and Teleks, which, although critical, were closer to the
mainstream at the time. During that period (1986–87), Mladina already cultivated an image of an alternative and provocative
medium. In the analyses of the socio-political organisations’ politics and
particularly of the League of Communists politics at the Yugoslav level, the
actors or protagonists of certain factions are rarely mentioned. The journalists
usually describe the clashes between different factions or ideological struggles
in an impersonal way. The nuances in the use of the established terms from the
self-management communist vocabulary are also important, e.g. bureaucracy,
differentiation, democratic centralism, antagonism, etc. This means that
commentators could criticise Slobodan Milošević’s politics without mentioning
the protagonist. Mladina would more often mention
political actors in a negative context. For example, it mentioned Milošević in
an article of 20 March 1987 about the failed organisation of a symposium on new
forms of genocide in Belgrade. The symposium was organised by Vladimir Dedijer
and hosted by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Mladina claimed that when the President of the Central Committee of
the League of Communists of Serbia Milošević had read the programme of the
symposium, he had immediately prevented it.Mladina, 20 March 1987, 6.Mladina reported on the Serbian demonstrations in Kosovo
on 24 April in its weekly review of events titled Zlopamtilo, it did not name Milošević. Furthermore, for the subsequent
media and political history, it is certainly not irrelevant that Milošević’s
famous motto “ niko ne sme da vas bije” (“no one is
allowed to beat you”), promoted by TV Belgrade at the time, was not mentioned
either. The Ljubljana weekly Teleks did not even register
Milošević’s visit and the events in Kosovo, while Teleks
mentioned him only briefly on 14 May 1987 in a commentary on the “ideological
plenum” of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia,
which took place in Belgrade after the Kosovo events. In its commentary, Teleks also referred to the articles published in NIN and Danas, but it paid more
attention to the standpoints of Slovenian Party leader Milan Kučan. At the Party
summit, Kučan warned of the danger of “constant purges” and “differentiation” in
the League of Communists, which were preventing the social crisis from being
resolved.Teleks, 14 May 1987,
23.Danas devoted much more attention to the events in Kosovo on 24 April
and to the ideological plenum of the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Yugoslavia. Regarding the Kosovo events, Danas wondered what had actually happened. It cited different sources
and listed various interpretations of events. Danas did
not quote Milošević’s famous sentence either, but it did provide a more detailed
description of the events. The crowd of people that gathered apparently shouted
that they were being beaten by the police and demanded the resignation of Azem
Vlasi, the leader of the Kosovo Communists, with whom Milošević had a meeting.
Milošević supposedly reacted by demanding that order be maintained without the
police. The Danas journalists clearly demonstrated the
difference between the official statement of the Priština police, which strived
to justify the moderate use of force, and Milošević’s statement that the police
had no reason to intervene. The Danas commentators did
not accuse Milošević of siding with the Serbian nationalist protesters, but they
did write the piece in such a manner that this interpretation was also possible.
The article concluded by quoting the assessments of various Party officials, who
stressed the need to distinguish between the legitimate demands of the Serbs
that their problems in Kosovo be solved and their nationalist aspirations.Danas, 3 May 1987, 20.
Danas paid the most attention to the marathon Eighth
Session of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia (23 – 24
September 1987). The magazine’s cover featured a picture of the deposed
Pavlović, the commentator Jelena Lovrić analysed the session on five pages, and
Pavlović’s biography was published as well. In a dedicated section, the Zagreb
weekly also published a transcript of Pavlović’s controversial speech, which,
according to the journalist, the members of the Central Committee of the League
of Communists of Serbia who were deciding his fate had not received before the
meeting.NIN,
but not until three days after the end of the Session. At the time when the
issue was being prepared for print, the Session had still been ongoing, and
therefore only an official explanation concluding the report from the
previous session of the Belgrade City Committee was published in a separate
section. ‒ “Šta je Pavlović rekao,” NIN 1917, 27
September 1987, 18–20.Politika newspaper to encourage emotional reactions in the Serbian
public could be dangerous.NIN, where Milan
Milošević already emphasised this in the heading of the report from the
Belgrade City Committee meeting. ‒ Milan Milošević, “Trenutak istine,” NIN 1917, 27 September 1987, 18–23.Danas, 29 September 1987, 9.
Danas published a harsh critique of the factional
struggles in Serbia as a biography of Dragiša Pavlović. The article titled Čovek drugog vremena (A Man from Another Era) was signed
by Ratko Rodić. This was an editorial pseudonym, as no journalists with this
name existed, and allegedly, the article was (according to subsequent testimony)
written by Aleksandar Tijanić, then a journalist at the Belgrade weekly NIN.Istinomer.rs, https://www.istinomer.rs/akter/aleksandar-tijanic/, accessed on 1
March 2022.mladoturci” (Young Turks),
which Ivan Stambolić promoted in order to carry out a generational change in the
Serbian leadership. Only once he had attained the position of the leader of the
Belgrade Communists, Pavlović supposedly realised that lately, the Party
positions had been divided according to the principle of “one Stambolić
supporter – one Milošević supporter”. Allegedly, each of these two
“mini-Parties” controlled its own medium. Stambolić was said to control the NIN weekly, while Milošević controlled Politika and Politika Express. Pavlović was
allegedly the victim of poor timing: he spoke out openly at the moment when the
distribution of the political power between several centres in Serbia collapsed
and a single power centre emerged. Nations are like people – they prefer to put
up with their own diseases rather than a doctor. The principle of “one Serbia –
one nation” was being joined by the principle of “one opinion – one leader”, and
there was a danger, the journalist argued, that dissenting views might be
labelled as anti-Serbian. In such a climate, any attempts at a dialogue turned
into an ideological dispute, making any discussion impossible.Danas, 29 September 1987, 12, 13.Danas, 29 September 1987, 34.
In the Slovenian press, Mladina was the magazine that
devoted the most attention to the Eighth Session. On 2 October 1987, it
published an editorial on the developments in the Serbian politics, written by
the editor of the internal politics section David Tasić. The journalist in
question was the most “Yugoslav” member of Mladina’s
editorship at the time. In 1981, he had moved to Ljubljana from Serbia to study,
and apart from Mladina, he also wrote for various
Yugoslav newspapers and was well acquainted with both the Yugoslav and Serbian
media landscape. In his editorial, Tasić clearly defined the developments in the
Serbian leadership. He mentioned Dragiša Pavlović’s warnings about the rise of
the Serbian nationalism in Politika, which marked the
beginning of a ruthless political struggle. Also this time, Slobodan Milošević,
who had already proved to be a fan of repression in his confrontations with
political opponents, resorted to any means at his disposal. He bypassed all of
the Party’s statutory rules and got Pavlović dismissed on the pretext of
undermining the unity. In Tasić’s view, the unity platform was clearly a
platform for open Serbian nationalism. He was clear in his opinion that if this
prevailed, it would mean that Serbia would return to the romantic nationalism of
the 19 th century while Yugoslavia would enter the
most serious political crisis of the post-war period.Mladina, 2 October 1987, 1.Mladina published an article by the Belgrade-based
independent journalist Milovan Brkić on the clashes in the Serbian Party
regarding the media and Pavlović, which had apparently been written before the
Eighth Session. Brkić informed Mladina’s readership about
the importance of the media landscape for the factional disputes in the Serbian
Party. He described Pavlović as a reasonable politician and Milošević as a
hardliner who gathered people without authority around him and put relatives and
friends in prominent positions. He was particularly critical of Milošević’s wife
Mira Marković, whom he renamed Elena (alluding to Elena Ceaușescu, the wife of
the Romanian dictator). Brkić claimed that Slobodan Milošević, until recently an
anonymous economist, wanted to assert himself at all costs, while Ivan Stambolić
kept avoiding controversy with Milošević.Mladina, 2 October 1987, 32, 33.
In the following issue of Mladina, a comprehensive report
on the purges in the Serbian Party was published. The article was signed by a
certain Nešo Dragošević – most probably a pseudonym, as the author of this
article has not been able to find a journalist by that name anywhere else.
“Pavlović was ousted in a typical rigged political process aimed at discrediting
him by any means necessary”, the journalist was clear. “Now that the
authoritarian spirit backed by a firm hand has prevailed, the question rightly
arises as to who in Serbia will now even dare, without fearing for their own
head, to speak out about Serbian nationalism or to criticise the undemocratic
methods of the senior leadership.”Mladina, 9 October 1987, 8, 9.Čejeni in Šošoni
section. In his commentary, Kovač repeatedly referred to the Zagreb-based Danas, where he had acquired the most crucial
information. Kovač described the reprisal against Pavlović as disgusting: almost
all the speakers only accused Pavlović of thinking independently, while they (if
the claims made by Danas were true) had not even read the
speech he was accused of making. The fight against one’s own nationalism in the
home environment was no longer a fundamental moral virtue of the Yugoslav
communists, the commentator established. The old ideology was collapsing and a
new one was emerging, with Serbian revanchism aimed at the abolition of Kosovo
as an autonomous province. The amendments to the Constitution of the Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, discussed in all of the Yugoslav political
forums, went in the direction of restricting the republics and provinces. The
Yugoslav unitarism met the fundamental demand of the Serbian nationalism: the
abolition of Kosovo as an autonomous province. It appeared that the Serbian
nationalism would be articulated as the Yugoslav unitarism. Kovač did not stop
at the Serbian nationalism: instead, he also commented on the “democratic”
nationalism of the Slovenian intellectual opposition from the circle of the Nova revija magazine. During the same period, the
Slovenian literary historian and philosopher Taras Kermavner was publishing his
texts titled Pisma srbskemu prijatelju (Letters to a
Serbian Friend) in the Slovenian and Serbian press, which attracted considerable
media attention.A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central
Europe: Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),
114.Mladina as the newsletter of the ZSMS, which had adopted democracy as
its political programme – and all this without any national, Slovenian
connotations. Kovač was clear: what the Yugoslav unitarism and Slovenian
“democratic nationalism” had in common was that they both functioned as national
ideologies. This meant that within Yugoslavia, political definitions were
transforming into the characteristic features of the Yugoslav nations
(Slovenians were democratic and Serbs unitarist). In Kovač’s opinion, the
solution lay in radical democratic reforms throughout Yugoslavia, ensuring that
the national identification became merely one in a series of possible democratic
identifications.Mladina, 9 October
1987, 11, 12.
The same issue of Mladina reported on the arrest of the
Serbian journalist Milovan Brkić, who had published an article on Milošević and
Pavlović in this magazine’s previous issue. Apparently, Milošević’s war against
the media reached Slovenia as early as in 1987. When the Belgrade magazine Student was being disciplined and accused of
anti-TitoismПолитика i politika, 228.Katedra handed over the central part of its publication to its
Belgrade colleagues for editing. “The Katedra magazine,
which would be sent by train from Maribor to the south of the country and also
sold on the streets of Belgrade, was probably the only voice of the public
protest against the purges initiated by the pivotal Eighth Session of the
Serbian League of Communists at the time,” Igor Mekina, a member of Katedra’s editorship, later recalled.Katedra, June/July 2011, 25, 26.Katedra published an article in which Brkić
criticised the purges in the Serbian political leadership. Brkić was accused of
“disturbing the public”, even though the issue of Katedra
in question had not even been released. The magazine was also confiscated for
other critical articles. The prosecutor’s office in Maribor justified the
accusations against Brkić with the explanation that around a hundred copies of
the banned magazine had disappeared from the printing house and been illegally
distributed around Maribor. According to Mladina, without
any announcement, the Serbian police violently arrested Milovan Brkić on 29
September 1987. On the same day, he was tried and sentenced to fifty days in
prison. Mladina was positive that his arrest was not a
coincidence. The relentless critic of the political activities of the Milošević
– Marković couple was brutally arrested for publishing an article in Katedra on 30 June 1987 as late as at the end of
September, a few days after the “Eighth Session”, where Milošević had
consolidated his power.Mladina, 9 October 1987,
13.Mladina, 9 October 1987, 14.
The first issue of the Teleks weekly after the Eighth
Session was published on 1 October, giving the journalists ample time for their
first reflections on the recent developments. In the Teleksova
tribuna section, the journalist Srečo Zajc commented on the purges in
the Serbian Party and underlined the Party’s insistence on maintaining its
monolithic nature. Zajc was much more cautious in his criticism than Mladina and mainly considered the role of the League of
Communists. The main reason why Stojanović and Pavlović came into conflict with
the decisions of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia was
the fact that they had drawn attention to the Serbian nationalism: was it
nationalism or a struggle between two factions, the peaceful and the monolithic?
The author wondered whether the same fate would befall Ivan Stambolić. The
method chosen by the leadership of the Serbian League of Communists consolidated
monolithicity. The League of Communists would lose its character of a voluntary
alliance of supporters as well as its historical opportunity to reunite a
divided Yugoslavia. In his view, this was only possible with a modern, humane,
and pluralist programme, through the separation from the state apparatus and
rehabilitation of self-management. Srečo Zajc claimed that the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia had been buried by the Serbian nationalism, while the new Yugoslavia
was born out of patriotism and the programme of the Yugoslav communists.
Meanwhile, a third Yugoslavia was not possible “because we will scatter like a
flock of geese”. The League of Communists should put a stop to the “divide and
conquer” policy pursued by the national and local leaders in order to cover up
their past sins related to the economic policy.Teleks, 1 October
1987, 5.
The Teleks journalist Jasna Venturini strove to understand
the “Eighth Session” purges from the viewpoint of historical comparisons. She
compared the events to the showdown with the Serbian “liberalism and
technocratism” in 1972. In October 1972, the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Serbia had held a multi-day session where – at Tito’s initiative –
the leaders of the Serbian communists at the time (Marko Nikezić, Latinka
Perović) had been dismissed.Zgodovina Socialistične federativne republike
Jugoslavije (Ljubljana: Partizanska knjiga, 1980), 429.Politika had been involved in the disputes. Although the
journalist was clear that a major purge had taken place in the Serbian communist
leadership and that such activities would likely continue, she was cautious in
her conclusions. She pointed out that the “Eighth Session” had been
characterised by honest observations during the discussions, and honesty could
help make the League of Communists healthier.Teleks, 1 October 1987, 9–11.Teleks published individual statements by
the participants of the discussion and the chronology of Dragiša Pavlović’s
expulsion. In the same issue, readers could read a report from a roundtable in
Celje, organised by Teleks in cooperation with the ZSMS.
The topic of the roundtable was the freedom of information, and the invited
participants included “direct actors of the freedom of public information”:
journalists, sociologists, politicians, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers. Teleks summed up the journalists and editors who had
defended the freedom of expression in particular.
On 22 October 1987, Teleks published a more critical
commentary on the situation in Serbia. Janko Lorenci described the death of the
dialogue and the new monolithicity in the largest of the Yugoslav republics.
What was the reason for the rapid rise of Milošević’s faction? Lorenci claimed
that the essence lay in a combination of several factors: a mix of
socio-political demagogy and populism, the indulgence of nationalism and
anti-Albanian sentiments, the control of most press, and Yugoslavia’s
indifference towards Kosovo and the crisis in Serbia. The journalist argued that
a “quick and decisive” solution to the Kosovo issue was not possible, and if
Milošević’s hardliners were not aware of this, then they were out of touch with
reality. Lorenci agreed with the Danas commentator Jelena
Lovrić, who was worried about the silence of the federal authorities. If Serbia
was drifting towards the authoritarian option, then this was very bad for Serbia
as well as for Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia could only be strong with a strong Serbia,
but only a democratic Serbia could be strong, the author concluded.Teleks, 22 October 1987, 12, 13.
Teleks would often write about Serbia, but usually about
things that concerned the Slovenian reality as well – for example about the
relations between the Serbian and Slovenian leadership or the relations between
the Slovenian and Serbian cultural workers – while it paid less attention to
Serbia as a topic in itself (Kosovo was the only exception). It seems that after
the “Eighth Session”, the editorship of what was then the central Slovenian
weekly focused on detailed research of the political and media situation in
Serbia. In November 1987, Teleks published an extensive
three-part analysis of “the methods, goals, and consequences of the showdowns in
Serbian journalism” by the journalist Jasna Venturini. At the beginning of this
series of articles, the author established that many journalists in Serbia had
been dismissed in the autumn. According to her, it was clear that the main sin
of the media that were under attack was the lack of support for the decisions
reached at the Eighth Session of the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Serbia. When she looked for someone to discuss this topic with in
the Belgrade newspaper companies, the journalist detected a great deal of
mistrust. No one at Politika wanted to talk. The
situation was different at the NIN magazine, where they
pointed to the political pressures from the Serbian communist leadership.Teleks, 5 November 1987, 13.Teleks’s writing. Before the second
part of her article was even published, Mirko Djekić, the editor-in-chief of the
NIN weekly, had been dismissed. Sava Kržavac, the
president of the Information Section of the Serbian SZDL, tried to convince the
journalist that the recent developments in Serbian journalism were nothing
unusual. He assured her that there was no cause for concern among journalists,
nor was it true that a list of unwanted journalists existed. The journalist
received a completely different testimony from the Politika journalist Radmilo Kljajić, who had been dismissed as the
secretary of the City Committee of the League of Communists of Belgrade at the
“Eighth Session” as well as expelled from the League of Communists. Kljajić was
appalled at the accusations at the “Eighth Session” and by the draconian
punishment imposed by the Party leadership. He found no rational reason for this
but suspected it was the revenge of the Milošević – Marković family. As it was,
Kljajić had recently published a contribution on the revolutionary movement in
Belgrade, in which he had mentioned Mira Marković’s mother in a negative
context.Teleks, 12 November 1987, 6–8.TV Dnevnik, the daily news programme,
allowed a comment by the Danas journalist Jelena Lovrić,
who characterised the leadership of the Serbian League of Communists as dogmatic
and Stalinist. The editor was punished with a pay cut, while the news programme
editor was dismissed, even though the journalists’ collective was against this.
Meanwhile, the editor of the Svet magazine Jelisaveta
Jevremović was also under attack for reprinting Radmilo Kljajić’s defence from
the federal youth magazine Mladost. Just like Borba, the main newspaper of the Yugoslav communists, the
Mladost magazine was beyond the reach of the Serbian
authorities. Therefore, it could still afford to be critical of Milošević’s
“line”. Jasna Venturini concluded that the “cleaners” of the Serbian
journalistic scene had no problems when the founder of the media was the Serbian
SZDL, but things got complicated in the case of other founders. “However, with a
bit of goodwill, even such minor difficulties can be overcome,” the author
concluded cynically.Teleks, 26 November 1987,
12, 13.
How does the brief analysis of the writing of Danas, NIN, Teleks, and Mladina about this pivotal event reveal the character of the Yugoslav
media space during the crisis of the Yugoslav political system? The “Eighth
Session” has a special place in the historiography of the dissolution of
Yugoslavia. Researchers rightly refer to it as one of the milestones on the path
towards the establishment of the authoritarian Milošević’s regime in Serbia and
as one of the turning points in the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
For example, the German historian Holm Sundhaussen defined the “Eighth Session”
as Milošević’s “putsch”.Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten
(Dunaj: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 251.
The common feature of the magazines under consideration was the profound
scepticism towards the nationalistic phenomena in Yugoslavia. We can argue that
all three magazines were critical of the “Eighth Session” in the sense of
rejecting Slobodan Milošević’s policies, his authoritarianism, and the newfound
Serbian nationalism, while NIN was outwardly less
critical of the new policy and sometimes described it with different emphases,
but in terms of the balance of forces and this magazine’s position in the
Serbian media space, it can nevertheless be seen – until the purges of its
editorship – as a voice of the opposition. In terms of terminology, all the
magazines were critical of the term “differentiation”, which they interpreted as
a euphemism for Party purges, authoritarianism, and suppression of intra-Party
democracy. However, the critical attitude was expressed in different ways. All
the magazines celebrated the freedom of speech and democracy in the broadest
sense. Danas was the most careful in its texts: criticism
was concealed in selected quotations and rhetorical questions but still clearly
evident to the educated reader. This Zagreb-based weekly evaluated the events by
paying much attention to the “Eighth Session”, especially with the image of
Dragiša Pavlović on its front page. Teleks initially
reacted in a principled and cautious manner but later became much more critical.
The writing of Mladina was the most honest and without
any convoluted comparisons and rhetorical questions: it tried to be
straightforward and used the most critical discourse.
We cannot fully accept the thesis that the Slovenian media space was relatively
closed due to the specificity of the Slovenian language. The Yugoslav public was
not merely an extension of the Slovenian media space but rather also an
important part of the narrower Slovenian public. This supports the thesis of the
complex, even liminal nature of the Yugoslav public, which was thus both the sum
of the publics of the individual republics and provinces as well as the single,
all-Yugoslav public. The coverage of the “Eighth Session” beautifully
illustrates this interplay of levels and the unusual richness of the
journalistic (and general communication) networks. The Zagreb-based Danas collaborated with the Serbian journalists who would
publish critical texts regarding the Serbian leadership under pseudonyms
(Aleksandar Tijanić). The member of Mladina’s editorship
David Tasić came from Serbia, was a respected youth journalist at the Yugoslav
level, and understood the political situation in Serbia very well. Mladina also collaborated with the critical freelance
journalist Milovan Brkić. He, together with other Belgrade journalists,
regularly published his articles in the Maribor-based Katedra, which at one time became an alternative newsletter of the
Belgrade students. The collaboration between Katedra and
the journalists of the Student magazine indicates that
critical journalists were able to use the differences between the media regimes
in the different republics to their advantage. The editorship of Teleks made up for its poor initial knowledge of the
Serbian media scene with investigative journalism in Belgrade.
The Croatian music critic and journalist Ante Perković titled his book on the
Yugoslav pop-rock music scene Sedma republika (The
Seventh Republic). In it, he mainly analysed the part of the Yugoslav rock that
defined itself nationally and politically and supported exclusive nationalist
projects with its activities. However, he also described the fate of the part of
popular music that “remained faithful to the supranational and pacifist idea of
rock and roll in spite of everything”.Bukla.si, https://www.bukla.si/knjigarna/umetnost/glasba/sedma-republika.html,
accessed on 8 March 2021.Sedma Republika (Ljubljana: Zenit,
2018).Danas weekly, to a lesser extent at Teleks, and
even less at Mladina. There were significant differences
between them, also conditioned by the environments of the particular republics,
but we can nevertheless identify a common field of values that held this
pan-Yugoslav media grouping together.
The Party purges after the “Eighth Session” were closely linked to the purges in the ranks of the press. With the emergence of media populism associated with authoritarian nationalism, these purges had a devastating effect not only on the Yugoslav Party and the political structure but also on the Yugoslav media network. The transnational Yugoslav Republic of Journalists started to crumble. Media cooperation was overshadowed by the media wars. If, in his work on Yugo-rock, Ante Perković suggested that the “Seventh Republic” survived Yugoslavia, then we can conclude that the “Eighth Republic” of Yugoslav journalism was not so fortunate.
Jugoslovanska medijska krajina je že v času svojega obstoja bila ocenjena kot fragmentirana, informacijski sistemi naj bi delovali predvsem v okviru republik in naj bi odsevali interese republiške oziroma pokrajinske oblasti. Dolgoživa teza, ki je z leti dobivala skorajda dogmatski značaj, je zato v prispevku analizirana in potrjena z množico navedb sodobnikov. Pod drobnogled je nato vzet tudi jugoslovanski medijski sistem in načini njegovega nadzora, predvsem pa je bila v procesu analize medijev prisotna jasna segmentacija tiska, ki jasno opredeli, kateri mediji so bili za razumevanje političnih procesov v Jugoslaviji najpomembnejši in so imeli tudi relativno močno prisotno zavest o potrebi po podrobnejši analizi in kritičnem poročanju o dogajanjih v svojem matičnem okolju in izven njega. To so bili politični tedniki. Vloga političnih tednikov v medijski krajini je bila pomembna, saj so se po svoji obliki poročanja bistveno razlikovali od dnevnega časopisja. Njihova zlata doba je bila ravno v obravnavanem obdobju, kljub padcem naklad v časih discipliniranja uredništev, ki so vodila k manjši javni pozornosti. Bolj ko so jih dojemali kot »partijski časopis«, manjši vpliv so imeli. A analiza tekstov, objavljenih v jugoslovanskih tednikih, je to tezo, ki je bila ob načrtovanju raziskave postavljena kot ena od osrednjih raziskovalnih vprašanj, postavila pod vprašaj.
Drugi namen prispevka je analiza medijske vidnosti vzpona in konsolidacije
Miloševićeve prevlade v Srbiji s poudarkom na znameniti osmi seji CK ZK Srbije
(24.–26. september 1987). Avtorja predvsem zanima, kako se je na Miloševićevo
utrjevanje oblasti v Srbiji odzval jugoslovanski revialni tisk (predvsem srbski
NIN in hrvaški Danas) in kako
slovenske revije (Teleks, Mladina). Tednika NIN in Danas sta bila usmerjena v jugoslovansko javnost, čeprav sta bila tudi
pod vplivom političnih in medijskih razmer v Srbiji oziroma Jugoslaviji.
Slovenski družbenopolitični magazini so računali na slovensko občinstvo – bili
so slovenski tudi po vsebini, ne samo po jeziku – čeprav so bili po drugi strani
del širšega jugoslovanskega medijskega prostora. Sredi osemdesetih let je v
jugoslovanskem medijskem prostoru, še zlasti v večjih centrih (Beograd, Zagreb,
Ljubljana), potekal proces demokratizacije medijskega prostora, uredništva so se
izvijala iz oklepa političnih forumov.
Teze o slovenskem medijskem prostoru, ki naj bi bil zaradi specifičnega
slovenskega jezika relativno zaprt, ne moremo povsem sprejeti. Jugoslovanska
javnost ni bila samo podaljšek slovenskega medijskega prostora, bila je tudi
pomemben del ožje, slovenske javnosti. To govori v prid tezi o kompleksni, celo
liminalni naravi jugoslovanske javnosti, ki je bila seštevek posameznih javnosti
republik in pokrajin pa tudi ena, vsejugoslovanska javnost. Poročanje o »osmi
seji« lepo kaže na ta preplet ravni in nenavadno bogastvo novinarskih (in
splošno komunikacijskih) mrež. Zagrebški Danas je
sodeloval s srbskimi novinarji, ki so pod psevdonimom objavljali kritična
besedila o srbskem vodstvu (Aleksandar Tijanić). Član uredništva Mladine David Tasić je prihajal iz Srbije, bil je
spoštovan mladinski novinar na jugoslovanski ravni in je dobro razumel politične
razmere v Srbiji. Mladina je sodelovala s kritičnim
samostojnim novinarjem Milovanom Brkičem. Brkić je skupaj z ostalimi
beograjskimi novinarji redno objavljal v mariborski Katedri, ki je v nekem obdobju postala alternativno glasilo
beograjskih študentov. Sodelovanje Katedre in novinarjev
Studenta kaže na to, da so kritični novinarji znali
uporabljati razlike med medijskimi režimi v različnih republikah v svojo korist.
Uredništvo Teleksa je začetno slabo poznavanje srbske
medijske scene nadoknadilo z raziskovalnim novinarskim delom v Beogradu.
Hrvaški glasbeni kritik in novinar Ante Perković je svojo knjigo o jugoslovanski
pop-rock glasbeni sceni naslovil Sedma republika. Čeprav
je v tej knjigi analiziral predvsem tisti del jugoslovanskega rocka, ki se je
nacionalno in politično opredelil in je s svojim delovanjem podpiral ekskluzivne
nacionalistične projekte, je prikazal tudi usodo tistega dela popularne glasbe,
»ki je vsemu navkljub ostal zvest nadnacionalni ter pacifistični ideji
rokenrola«. Ta fenomen dolgega trajanja je poimenoval sedma jugoslovanska
republika. Podoben okvir razmišljanja bi lahko uporabili tudi za jugoslovansko
javnost. Obstajala je vsejugoslovanska mreža kritičnih, a ne nacionalistično
usmerjenih novinark in novinarjev, ki so podpirali demokratizacijo družbe
(večinoma znotraj sistema), opozarjali na gospodarske napake (na primer afera
Agrokomerc) ter na nevarnost unitarizma in partikularnih nacionalizmov. Medijska
mreža se je spletala v vse smeri, ne samo med istimi kategorijami jugoslovanskih
medijev. Na Jugoslavijo so gledali kot na svojo državo, priznavali so njeno
kompleksnost in pozivali k strpnosti in dialogu. Med njimi so bile velike
razlike, pogojene tudi s posameznim republiškim okoljem, kljub temu pa lahko
identificiramo skupno polje vrednot, ki so to vsejugoslovansko medijsko združbo
držale skupaj.
Partijske čistke po »osmi seji« so bile tesno povezane s čistkami v novinarskih vrstah. Te pa so s pojavom medijskega populizma, navezanega na avtoritarni nacionalizem, delovale uničujoče ne samo na jugoslovansko partijo in politično strukturo, ampak tudi na jugoslovansko medijsko mrežo. Transnacionalna jugoslovanska novinarska republika je začela razpadati. Medijsko sodelovanje so zasenčile medijske vojne.