What Can We Learn From the Short History of Independent Media in Serbia? Radio B92,George Soros,and New Models of Media Development

History

Begun in 1989 by a handful of young journalists who joined with a group of DJs and arty hipsters from the Fine Arts Faculty at the University of Belgrade, Radio B92 was initially known for playing Punk, New Wave, Rap, and an in-your-face attitude. This posture was ironic, however, as the station first aired on May 15, during a month-long anniversary of Josip Broz Tito’s birth, and was sponsored by the City Committee of the Unity of the Social Youth of Belgrade, an official organ of the Communist Party. As first CEO and founder Saša Vučinić explained, “The only way you could be a publisher or a broadcaster in the country at that time was to be associated with or approved by certain specific political organizations.” B92’s offices were on the fifth floor of Dom Omladine, the youth building, and the studio was “a very small room with a telephone, insulated by those boxes that you buy eggs in” (Licht 2022). ⁴

The story of B92 in the 1990s is well known. An early book was British journalist Matthew Collin’s Guerilla Radio, which emphasized the subversive power of rock and roll (Collin 2001). B92 founder Veran Matić likes this book, but points out that Collin was far more interested in rock and roll than he was in journalism. Or, as Saša Vučinić noted of Collin’s emphasis on the music, “cool, they were saying ‘fight the power!’ I mean what’s fight the power versus 35 minutes of news?”

To be fair, Collin’s book details a fine-grained and highly readable social history of Belgrade in the nineties, with stories of the demonstrations protesting stolen elections, numerous acts of political theater cum performance art, fears of being conscripted, the hyper-inflation resulting from international sanctions, and the 1999 NATO bombing. In 1998, chief editor Veran Matić won MTV Europe’s “Free Your Mind” award, which seemed to clinch his reputation as the Balkans’ coolest—as well as most important—radio executive.

To this day, Veran Matić remains an enigma. Although he understands English, he refuses to speak it, and asks to be interviewed through trusted interpreters. With an office in the socialist-modernist Tanjug building, he runs the B92 Trust and a website called javniservis.net, which means “public service.” A family man known for devotion to his friends and former colleagues, Veran is stocky and solid, with graying hair and a close-cropped beard. According to long-time friend and colleague Elena Popović, people not only admire Matić, but also blame him for B92’s downfall. “People started really to put a lot of pressure on him,” she said. “They blame him for the loss of independent media because B92 no longer exists. It’s just too much to hold on a single person.”

A Movement, Not a Medium

Everyone who was affiliated with B92 in the 1990s says the same thing, that the organization was “a movement, not a medium” (Mašić 2006). Danijel Bukumirović, who joined B92 as a reporter in 1996, said that from the very beginning, “for me and for my generation, B92 was like a drug. Because it was creating our identity and our taste and everything.”

Veran Matić said that B92 was not created as just a “media company”—they were rather looking for an angle from which to address their audience. Their common denominator was the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. “We were conscious that if we just emphasized Article 19 [the right to freedom of opinion and expression], it wouldn’t be a sufficient hook”:

The people that formed the core of B92 came from various movements: the human rights movement, the anti-war movement . . . B92 was originally set up as a media company, but also as an umbrella for all these groups. It was important for all of these people not to have just the journalism component, but actually to advocate for the causes that they represented. When we were formed, [Yugoslavia] was still a single-party political system, so this was the way to get the information out.

Veran Matić recalled that in the beginning, it was not a very coherent group. The music people and the editorial team “represented different ideas, and they didn’t always get along.” Giving an example, he described the events of March 9, 1991, when a massive protest challenging the results of the December election was staged in central Belgrade, and Milošević responded by sending in tanks. There were a couple of casualties, and B92 was banned; the police came to the station and forced them to stop producing content. “So what happened was that the music editor chose music that was actively engaged in political protest and called for massive action,” he said,

and the police did not get it at all. So they let them broadcast the music without realizing that this is also a message to the audience. It was the first time that the editorial team understood the importance of all these other elements of the B92 movement, and appreciated the music part of it.

The “music part” had an immediate impact, Matić added, because the students got it, and they came to the streets. “So music was a way of differentiating B92 from other like-minded media; while other radio stations would say now we’re going to a music break, for us it wasn’t a break. It was an important part of the message.” For Vlada Janjić, a veteran DJ who started at B92 in 1990 and stayed on for twenty-two years, the music was “about energy and sharing time and space, [and being] with similar people and enjoying the spiritual vibe that is present.” Integrated as it was with B92’s news and information, the music was also “an urban, noisy alternative to the regime.”

In 1993, Saša Vučinić left Radio B92 for Prague and a job with George Soros’ OSF, and Veran Matić took over Vučinić’s executive role. According to Elena Popović, that was also the year in which people in Serbia became extremely polarized, “where you were either with us or against us, and people took everything Veran said for granted.”

“Everybody I knew thought that Veran should run for the office of the president,” she added.

The Darling of the Donors

Today, Igor Božić is the news director of N1, an independent cable news channel affiliated with CNN and owned by the United Group. Until 2011, he was the news director of B92 Info, a television news portal that could be viewed via the internet. N1 employs a significant number of former B92 journalists—somewhere between 15 and 20 percent—and has faced its own struggles with the authorities. ⁵ Božić remembers how difficult it was for B92 to focus on alternative points of view. Throughout the 1990s, he said, “the majority of Serbia didn’t like that somebody was saying, ‘hey, Serbs did war crimes.’” As Collin (2001: 53) wrote,

B92 wanted to drag the war into Belgrade’s living rooms, to expose the bloody truth about what Milošević and his cronies were really doing. It established links with like-minded radio stations such as Studio 99 in Sarajevo, Radio 101 in Zagreb and Radio Student in Ljubljana to transmit collaborative programmes and on-the-spot reports from the other (now former) Yugoslav republics.

When Serb forces began shelling Sarajevo in 1992, B92 called on citizens to take to the streets in protest (Stavljanin and Veljanovski 2017: 266). Sociologist and former Serbian OSF director Sonja Licht remembers how Ivan Stambolić—a Communist Party politician and one-time president of Serbia who was also a supporter of B92—had said, “I told Veran that I never met someone from a medium that can [only] be heard in five streets of Central Belgrade, but who has such an influence over the borders!”

In the 1990s, B92 was completely dependent on donor funding. The international community, recognizing the small station’s significance, provided much-needed support even during the dark days of sanctions and hyper-inflation. General Manager Saša Mirković explained how it worked:

Because of the inflation, if you were receiving money from abroad, you will get the money at the official rate, which automatically means that you will lose 50% and the government would know very well what money you were getting, so the only way was to have the bank account abroad. So we established an agreement with our donors, a bank account which was in Budapest so the donors could follow the track of the money. You could also not easily bring money into the country. You had to organize some diplomats who were coming in at the same time with you, meet with them in Budapest, and the next day meet in Belgrade and they will give you the envelope with cash.

Former B92 journalist Dušan Mašić (2006) recalled how Mirković would bring bags of German marks back to Belgrade with him for the weekly payroll, paying in dinar that lost half of their value within the course of a day.

A key funder was George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a branch of which was established in Belgrade in 1991. According to long-time OSF executive director Sonja Licht, Soros had first visited Belgrade a year or two earlier, but had not believed that it would be necessary to open an office there, “because he was convinced that Yugoslavia was on a good track itself and won’t need his foundation.” When he came back in June 1991, he changed his mind. Licht remembers that he said “I regret I did not do it earlier. I understand I was wrong. This country is unfortunately falling apart in front of our eyes.” Today, Sonja Licht is in her seventies. “I was a very, very committed Yugoslav,” she said. “And I must say, I still mourn that country. It was like my own home, my family was falling apart.”

OSF began its work slowly, with very limited activities. Licht recalls that by the end of 1991, OSF had established a small media program in New York. “And in a few months, media became also part of our portfolio, and this was how B92 was a logical partner.”

At some point, Veran Matić and Saša Mirković realized that they needed to create an entity to store this donor money, as otherwise it would all belong to the state. With the advice of OSF, they set up a second company called KSV, named after three executives at B92, and put the donor money there. Later, this would become the basis of the B92 Trust.

Relations between the Milošević government and George Soros’ OSF were generally good, without the suspicion and overt anti-Semitism that it faced in other countries (Steele 2009). Belgrade especially welcomed the humanitarian aid of hospital equipment and medical supplies. Yet the organization did have enemies, and in 1995 “a so-called journalist” from a Belgrade weekly began a campaign accusing the foundation and George Soros “of everything that you can imagine.”

“At one point we were an espionage agency for the US, Mossad, MI6, everything, absolutely everything,” Sonja Licht said. “All kinds of idiotic things. And this campaign went on for two and a half months. And when I say campaign, of course they are also attacking B92.”

OSF’s office in Belgrade was closed down in February 1996 over a technicality involving reregistration as a foundation in Yugoslavia. With the help of its partners, including B92, the foundation staged a big media event at the Metropole Hotel. It was standing room only, with hundreds of supporters in attendance, including an Orthodox priest. “I remember I was reading a long list of things,” Licht said, “not what we have been doing between 1991 and 96, but what we are not going to do because the foundation is closed down.”

The foundation was allowed to reopen in June, reregistering as the OSF Yugoslavia. It kept that name until 1999, when it became the OSF Serbia.

“There is no ban that you cannot overcome”

B92 produced books and CDs, and in the early 1990s it began to produce videos as well, including a 1992 film that focused on the symbiotic relationship between Serbian gangsters and the state security apparatus with the provocative English title See You in the Obituary. ⁶ There was, however, no hope of getting a TV license. B92 did not have either a radio license or its own transmitter; it was still borrowing the frequency of the youth organization, and using the transmitter of Radio Television of Serbia, the public broadcaster.

In 1996, B92 was banned for the second time. According to Veran Matić, the broader context was the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, in which Milošević was seen by the United States and other Western nations as a guarantor of the agreement. As Milošević became more prominent internationally, there was growing anger and dissatisfaction with him in Belgrade. When the opposition accused him of stealing the November 1996 general election, daily protests began, and continued for the next eighty-four days.

In December, two weeks into the protest, B92 realized that their signal had weakened and then completely disappeared. Fortunately, about one year earlier, B92 had established the first internet provider in Belgrade. Called OpenNet, it was intended to connect Serbia’s independent media organizations and allow them to reach out to the rest of the world. OpenNet was headed by Dražen Pantić, a professor of mathematics at the University of Belgrade who became involved with B92 because he admired its “libertarian spirit and urban sensibility,” as well as the fact that it played Tom Waits and Nick Cave (Collin 2001: 113).

When B92 journalists realized that the radio was off the air, they created what Veran described as “a perfect storm of getting everybody’s attention.” Using “every means possible to let what we are broadcasting be heard,” they printed a bulletin that they distributed on the street. They also created a package of programs that they sent to partners such as the Voice of America (VOA) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Veran Matić recalls that when he was interviewed by VOA, he said,

well VOA could help us, because I know that you have a satellite uplink that you don’t fully use, and you might finally give it the real purpose for which it was created, which was the Cold War, and give us space to broadcast from that free slot on your satellite.

As a result of Veran Matić’s plea, RealAudio files were sent to VOA and the BBC, put on a satellite uplink, and beamed back to the Balkans. This would become the model for the Association of Independent Electronic Media, or ANEM, a country-wide network of over thirty broadcasters. Each day, four hours of programming were sent to Amsterdam and then on to London, where the BBC uplinked them to its satellite. ANEM radio stations then downloaded and rebroadcast the programs across Yugoslavia (Collin 2001: 139). Funded by OSF, USAID, and the European Union, the ANEM network created a national audience for B92’s newscast—which by 2000 could reach nearly 70 percent of the population (Kumar 2006: 83).

When B92 was shut down in 1996, Katy Marton, the head of the American Committee to Protect Journalists and the wife of special envoy Richard Holbrook, called Veran Matić and said she was coming to Belgrade right away. A friend of B92, she had known Veran since 1993, when he received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual award. As luck would have it, Saša Vučinić, who was by that time working with MDLF, was also in Belgrade. He and Veran Matić were out with the demonstrators when a call came from Saša Mirković, who told them that B92 was getting its frequency back from the public broadcaster. Matić recalls that Saša Vučinić told him not to agree, but rather to hold out for a license. “Don’t let them do that,” he said. “Tell them that we are not accepting the mercy of being given a signal.” Within two days, B92 was back on the air. It had also signed a contract with RTS, and obtained its first formal license to broadcast.

More than twenty years later, observing that my students at the University of Belgrade were the future generation of Serbian journalists, Veran Matić said to tell them that “there is no ban you cannot overcome.”

A Medal, Not a License

The toppling of Milošević on October 5, 2000, brought an identity crisis to B92.

News reporter Danijel Bukumirović, who had made his name in live reports of the war in Kosovo, said problems began almost immediately when they started hiring journalists from other news organizations that did not share the values of B92. “It was just a job for them,” he said, and “it happened very fast”:

And a lot of native people from B92 were disappointed, like these guys are coming and they don’t share our values. We as a group could not get out of the bubble of being extremely important to the society. We were not important anymore. All the media were free in one day. Poof—free! Everyone could report. Suddenly there were appearing people that were doing better than us. It was very hard for people to accept this.

From the perspective of B92’s management, Saša Mirković described how difficult it was to convert guerillas into a regular army:

First of all how to tell them that now they have to come on time. How to tell that they could not smoke? How to tell them that they have to work eight hours a day five days a week? To tell them that each of them is not now having their own table? Because you know it’s a huge desk and when you finish your shift somebody else is coming? You cannot imagine the childish demands we are getting from people.

To broadcast outside of Belgrade, B92 needed a national license, but the new reform government headed by Zoran Đinđić had frozen all licenses. Ironically, this moratorium preserved the monopoly of those companies that had been given privileges by the Milošević regime. B92’s dissatisfaction with this situation led to a famous exchange between Veran Matić and the new Prime Minister. In a 2001 press conference in Washington DC, Đinđić was reported as saying:

We do not give privileges to certain media. Some of them are our friends, but we now have a new system in Serbia with which we want to provide everyone with equal access . . . If someone was very brave during the time of Milošević, we will give him a medal but not a TV channel. (Pavlović 2001)

Although the individuals at the top had changed, the bureaucracies had not. Saša Mirković described how a chance meeting at a New Year’s Eve gathering with Đinđić’s new minister for education had led to the suggestion that they visit RTS together to discuss “the problem with your frequency.”

[After the meeting], my friend says “I cannot believe how they hate you.” Influential people within the government still have this control over the spectrum, because the law had not been changed. And you are simply on their mercy, while you also know [that you were] the main media structure that brought them to power.

We were naïve, you know? Because the people who [had been] in the opposition simply didn’t understand and didn’t like the role of the watchdog media.

B92 did not get a national frequency until 2006. ⁷

The fall of Milošević created an additional problem: the international donors who had assisted B92 during the 1990s “tapered their support on the assumption that in a democratic and market-based environment, all media outlets should have an equal chance to grow and to become self-sustainable” (Stavljanin and Veljanovski 2017: 261). The OSF’s Sonja Licht remembered that “the philosophy was that now things have changed,” and there was a feeling that B92 could become sustainable on its own.

The first years of the new Đinđić government were also marked by what Saša Mirković (2022) has called a “lack of political will.” In an article for B92, Matić (2001) wrote that the new administration’s decision to abolish the Ministry of Information left “no one in the Government in charge/responsible for the implementation of all necessary tasks, [such as] passing regulations, correcting injustice, analyzing the bad past”.

Marko (2013) explains that post-Milošević governments continued “to misuse and exert control over the media” in subtle ways. It was not until a state of emergency was declared after the March 2003 assassination of Đinđić that the government adopted a new Public Information Act, “introducing last-minute restrictions on the media without consulting the independent media experts who had co-written the law” (IREX 2003). Marko concludes that these laws “were only adopted in order to meet preconditions for membership of the Council of Europe and the EU. Professional demands and criteria became less important and even dismissed, while political loyalty was given advantage” (Marko 2013: 14).

Saša Mirković described those who drafted the new law as “very nice persons,” but “people who do not have anything to do with media,” concluding that “the damage they created” was considerable. The first law on information was not adopted until April 2003. “What were you doing during those two years at the top?” he asked.

Privatization

Serbia was a latecomer to the process of privatization (Ivanović et al. 2019; Obradović 2009). According to Saša Mirković, B92 had begun preparing for the end of the Milošević regime in 1996, when it was granted its first radio license. Beginning in the late 1990s, MDLF also started working with B92 to prepare for the end of the regime and the inevitable privatization of “social capital.”

Because B92 had the foresight to set up KVS—which was renamed the B92 Trust—only 44 percent of the company was owned by the state. Of the part that was state owned, 70 percent was auctioned, and the rest distributed to employees based on their years of service. Thus, it was only about 30 percent of B92 that was up for private sale.

The rules for privatization were set up by the government of Zoran Đinđić. Each of the companies proposed a business plan or “prospectus” that stated how the company envisioned its privatization. MDLF’s goal was to design the prospectus for B92 in such a way that there were “poison pills” in it for anyone who would come in and potentially damage the company. The plan had two key requirements: prospective buyers had to have experience running a media company and they were obliged to invest $100,000 directly into the news organization. As Elena Popović pointed out, B92 was “deprived of cash,” and in privatization buyers pay money to the state rather than to the company itself. “So by the privatization plan we made sure that whoever decided to buy needed to commit money to the company,” she added.

B92 was sold at a public auction in the Sava Center. The event was broadcast live, and Elena and Harlan Mandal flew to Belgrade from New York to represent MDLF. They had a broker who was actually doing the bidding, and were accompanied by their local attorney. “I don’t think the bidding lasted more than two or three [rounds],” Elena Popović said.

Media Development Loan Fund

Elena Popović believes that it was Saša Vučinić’s experience at B92 that shaped his ideas about the approach to media, and that the “missing link [was] supporting media through loans.” LaMay describes how, after leaving Belgrade in 1993, Vučinić joined the Open Society Foundations as a media consultant, working with radio start-ups in the former Soviet Union. There he met former Washington Post editor Stuart Auerbach, who was also working for Soros, and together they came up with the idea for the loan fund that would ultimately become MDLF. Approaching the initially skeptical Soros, they convinced him to give them $10,000 in seed money to pursue the idea. A few months later, Soros gave Vučinić and Auerbach control of a dormant Open Society Foundations program called the Fund for Independent Media (2007: 245–6). The fund contained $500,000, and according to Vučinić, the donation was “a rope you can use to hang yourself.” ⁸

Like everyone who worked at B92 in the 1990s, Saša Vučinić was born in the former Yugoslavia, and thus shared with his contemporaries a particular world view. Vlada Janjić, a DJ who joined B92 in 1990, described the Yugoslavia in which they had grown up as “a bigger country,” one that was both “multicultural and multiethnic.” As Sonja Licht said, despite being a one-party state, Yugoslavia “was not a totalitarian state. There were certain spaces of freedom, if you don’t touch politics.” Yugoslavia’s concept of “social capital” also meant that, as former B92 reporter Danijel Bukumirović said, in the 1990s “there was no owner—we were the owners!”

Key to MDLF’s investment in B92 was a feature of US tax law called “Program Related Investments,” or PRIs. PRIs “allow non-profits to make interest-bearing, revenue-generating investments in other firms, both non-profit and for-profit, whose work will further the stated social mission of the non-profit investor” (LaMay 2007: 242). In the case of B92, MDLF’s equity investment—estimated at more than $6 million in 2007—allowed for its direct involvement in the company’s activities (p. 248).

Since its founding twenty-five years ago, MDIF has provided $270.1 million in financing, including $233.5 million in loans and equity investments, and $36 million in support and technical assistance grants. It has supported 138 independent media companies in forty-five countries with loans and equity, while assisting many more through Media Advisory Services and various media development projects (MDIF 2022).

Lessons learned from B92 have been folded into a rigorous vetting process known internally as “the pipeline process.” ⁹ In looking for potential partners, MDIF’s regional directors consider the country’s economic and political context, along with the legal and economic environment for media. They look for independent news businesses that are in no part owned by the government or any state agency, or by any political or economic interest. Once MDIF’s board of directors confirms eligibility, investment teams work closely with the potential client company’s management to assess its strategy and business plan. ¹⁰

In the case of B92, the transition from a “movement” to a commercial media company required huge changes. “TV is a very expensive animal,” Popović said, “and B92 knew nothing about it.” In December 2004, MDLF asked her to go to Serbia and help manage B92’s transition. She points out that it was Veran Matić who had asked for help:

I did not come here because MDLF decided it wanted to take control. Veran actually asked Saša [Vučinić] for help. I am not a TV manager, but I know how to manage things. Saša said, would you consider going back to Serbia and helping with that? And I said okay, I’ll go and I’ll help them. But I have one condition, which is that I’m given autonomy. I don’t want to do things, and then Veran talks to Saša [Mirković], and Saša and Veran reverse my decision.

There were a number of tough decisions. There were personnel problems, workflow issues, and struggles over office space, all of which spoke to a much bigger concern: how to get B92 on a commercially viable footing. One of the first things that MDLF did was to set up a supervisory board consisting of Veran Matić, Saša Vučinić, MDLF’s chief financial officer, and Popović. Later, MDLF brought in its own comptroller to help with the accounting. As LaMay (2007: 230) observed,

[B92’s] profit centers are its radio and television entertainment programs, which subsidize the news and public affairs programming . . . the profits B92TV earns from “Sex in the City” and NBA basketball games . . . cover the costs of carrying live all of the testimony from the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In 2006, B92 made the controversial decision to broadcast a Serbian version of the reality show “Big Brother.” Elena Popović explained,

We had really fierce debates among ourselves as to whether this was appropriate. The theory was that it’s meant to bring the audience to the news and information program. It never panned out; the audience that comes to watch Big Brother would leave the TV when Big Brother was over.

Long-time B92 journalist Igor Božić, who is now the news director of TVN1, put it more bluntly.

Of course the majority of employees at that time were against it, especially the core ones. But after Milošević fell down, Veran came up with the idea that we should be the mainstream. What was the phrase—it was like “we have to become mainstream media with dignity?” I think the biggest mistake was to make the radio, which had been alternative radio, into commercial, nationwide radio. The progressive idea from B92 had a limited audience in Serbia. And we had to measure that we cannot be loved in the whole country.

For many “native” B92 journalists and DJs, these changes were unpalatable. Danijel Bukumirović left B92 in 2004, saying that the end of B92 started when they hired an HR consultant. “Like HR was the biggest joke in the company,” he said. “Come on! Team building? We had team building every day with drinking beer and rakija at 5 p.m., after the news like old-fashioned media. So HR killed B92, that was the internal joke.”

More seriously, he added that the problem was not “Big Brother,” the problem was that the reality show came on after five or six hours of live coverage of the war crimes trials in the Hague. “It cannot work!” he said.

You had like war crimes for 6 hours, and then 6 hours of Big Brother. Every day from Monday to Friday, the whole court hearings were live. If you ask me it was amazing, and it was important, but basically it killed the radio, it killed the TV, everything.

The lack of a law on advertising was another problem. Veljanovski and Stavljanin (2016) have shown that between 2004 and 2012, only two agencies controlled between 70 and 80 percent of the advertising market in Serbia (p. 63). As Elena Popović said, “one of the tragedies of Serbia” was the unregulated media space, a vacuum into which oligarchs who had amassed great wealth during the wars were able to enter. There were oligarchs with TV stations, such as the pro-government Pink TV, who also ran production, advertising, and music labels—all of which were related to party transactions. “It was in their interest not to have controls on how much advertising you could sell on TV,” she said. “You have Pink TV, awash in the money and advertising that they control because they control advertising agencies.”

B92 was not immune to the economic crisis that struck in 2008, which Saša Mirković described as a “huge blow,” and “the beginning of the end of the old B92.”

“We were having very ambitious plans,” he said, “and then suddenly we got a huge drop in income from the advertising. And in the meantime, we were not close to any of the government who will help us surviving.”

Moreover, B92’s investigative programs like Insajder were ruffling feathers. Both Igor Božić and Saša Mirković tell the story of how an investigation of one of the richest men in Serbia, Miroslav Mišković, the owner of the Maxi grocery store chain, had led to the company retaliating by pulling out all of its advertising. According to Igor, it was a 30 percent cut.

Ownership

MDLF was established on the premise that the best way to keep clients focused on their editorial mission is to build their businesses, with the ultimate goal of “attract[ing] investment capital from more traditional sources” (LaMay 2007: 224). According to Elena Popović, by the end of the decade it was obvious that MDLF had “maxed out on its ability to help B92 continue to grow,” and that the company needed another investor. She explained:

We needed a strategic partner who could help us capitalize the company, but also, more importantly, leverage these regional programmatic views. If you buy for a bigger region, you get a better deal, things like that. We needed somebody who knows studio operations, production, program acquisition, the software that is set up for TV traffic.

In 2006, the loan fund proposed the Polish company TVN as a buyer, but they were unable to reach an agreement with B92. There were also prospective investors in Slovenia and Greece.

In November 2010, Veran Matić accepted an offer from Astonko Ltd, a Greek–Swedish joint venture with suspected links to the Antenna Group, a media company established in 1988 by the Greek–Cypriot shipowner and businessman Minos Kyriakou. The Antenna Group had first entered the Serbian media market by acquiring Televizija Fox (today Prva) in December 2009 (BIRN, n.d.). From the beginning, it was alleged that the real owner of Astonko Ltd was Theodor Kyriakou of the Antenna Group, and that Astonko was merely acting on his behalf. One possible reason for concealing the connection between the two companies was the fact that Antenna was already the owner of TV Prva, and the ownership of two TV stations with national coverage was prohibited. When the law was changed in 2015, that impediment was removed, and the Antenna Group announced that it had acquired a controlling stake in B92 (Stavljanin and Veljanovski 2017: 268–9). According to the Balkans Investigative Reporting Network, “the B92 Trust retained 11.35% of shares, and small shareholders had 3.66% of total shares” (Barlovać 2014).

In 2017, Antenna changed B92’s name to O2. ¹¹ Dušan Mašić observed that “the channel [had] long ago forfeited almost everything B92 used to advocate” (Živanović 2017). By the time B92 was sold to Antenna, most of the journalists from the “old” B92 had left. Many had started to work for the cable channel TVN1. Of the others, Brankica Stanković, the author of the investigative show Insajder, left in 2015 and started her own production company and website. Jovana Milićević, a young editor of the IT section of B92’s website who joined the organization in 2009, said that her dream and even her “passion” had been to work for the news organization—but that after the new owners came in, everything was different. She left in 2012.

Antenna owned TV O2 until December 2018, when the company was sold to the Kopernikus group for 180 million euros. Founded by Serbian national Srđan Milovanović and alleged to have strong ties to Vučić and the SNS, Kopernikus Technology was the leading importer and distributor of equipment for cable television. One month before the sale of TV Prva and TV O2 to Kopernikus, Telekom Serbia bought the cable operator part of Kopernikus for what critics claimed was the inflated price of 195 million euros. As Goran Mišić (2018) noted,

Since Srđan is the brother of Zvezdan Milovanović, a high-ranking official of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), there is reason to suspect that there is no clean business and that the brothers were left with a tip of 15 million euros in this transaction, without lifting a finger.

As a result of the sale, all five national television stations were now under the control of the state, which was at odds with both domestic legislation and Serbia’s negotiations with the European Union. As Rudić and Georgiev (2018) noted in the Balkan Insight,

experts have alleged that Telekom Serbia overpaid to buy Kopernikus Technology . . . The leader of the opposition Alliance for Serbia, Dragan Đilas, accused state-run Telekom Serbia of being the real buyer of TV stations Prva and O2, and the Kopernikus Corporation of being the buyer in name alone.

The case of B92 thus “exemplifies how the mechanical and uncritical application of a liberal market model has led to a shrinking of genuine pluralism and to disguised monopolies, opening the space for politicians and tycoons to exert control” (Stavljanin and Veljanovski 2017: 262). In Serbia, companies with nontransparent ownership have come to dominate the media market, creating an environment in which “free and independent media seem like a utopian ideal” (Milutinović, 2017: 376).

As former US Ambassador to Serbia (2007–2009) Cameron Munter observed, there was a “Zeitgeist shift” from “the post-Yugoslav humanism of the reformers in the 1990s [to the] tough, unsentimental attitudes throughout society one finds there today.”

“B92 had (it seemed to me) lost its way,” he added. “The 2008 economic crisis really undercut the power of the narrative of those of us supporting the march of democratization. Shrewd calculators (such as Vučić, and perhaps even Matić) felt that the days of Soros and Licht were over.” ¹²

Conclusion

Since 2014, when Aleksandar Vučić assumed the premiership of the SNS, Serbia has experienced considerable “democratic backsliding.” With “significant shortcomings” regarding the fairness of elections, virtually all democracy and press freedom indices show Serbia’s increasing authoritarian tendencies and worsening democratic governance (Castaldo 2020: 1617–8). This has occurred despite Serbia’s European Union candidacy. The economic crisis that began in 2008, coupled with the oversaturation of the media market, created a situation in which many media outlets became dependent on public subsidies. According to a 2016 estimate by Freedom House, state advertising represented 40 percent of the market (quoted in Castaldo 2020: 1629).

Evidence of state capture of the media is everywhere. In the April 2022 presidential and parliamentary elections, all private national television stations expressed a positive view of the SNS in their news programs, allocating approximately 90 percent of their coverage to the president and government officials (OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights 2022: 22). Although the incorporation of European media policy standards into Serbian media laws in the period 2000–2016 has arguably been a success, development of the “market media system model” in Serbia has not resulted in conditions for democratic public debate (Milutinović 2017: 367). Or, as Danijel Bukumirović put it, “I always say that the EU and the US killed the media. Ten years ago they said, ‘The state has to go out of the ownership of media. That’s not European, that’s not democracy.’ Vučić said ‘Fantastic! Thank you, guys!’ And he bought all the media in a year.”

Reflecting on the sad history of B92, former general manager Saša Mirković concluded “a lot of mistakes were made. This country would look much different if the original B92, with the original program scheme, and with everything that was at the core of its mission remained,” he said.

So what happened to B92? Some blame Veran Matić for having made a poor decision in selling B92 to Antenna in 2010. Yet at the same time, they are quick to say that his decision was understandable. Danijel Bukumirović put it this way:

Veran was the mother and father of B92. Without him, it would have never happened. Veran was just not ready for the new role. He was not a corporate guy. Maybe he was overconfident, maybe he was naïve in some moments, or advised by bad advisors. But I would never blame him personally. I know that he always wanted the best for B92, for the brand, for politics, for the truth about war crimes, about everything. He’s an amazing person. He made mistakes, of course. But his mistakes were just bigger than ours because he was bigger than we were.

When media scholars write about the history of privatization in Serbia, the case of B92 is always mentioned. In Serbia, “rapid liberalization . . . led not to an ideal ‘marketplace of ideas’ furthering democracy,” but rather “to commercialization and the drastic loss of space on the airwaves for alternative voices and critical investigative journalism” (Stavljanin and Veljanovski 2017: 261). OSF’s former director Sonja Licht said,

Now when I look back, after 20 years, I am deeply convinced that for really independent media to be sustainable in a transition period, is extremely difficult. I mean theoretically it sounds great. As theoretically, even the shock therapy sounds great. But then after two decades or more, you look back and you say how can you have a serious privatization without strong institutions? Who is going to provide the legal guarantees? And it won’t be the crooks, who will just buy them off.

The fate of B92 seems, in fact, to be the perfect illustration of failure, not only of a legendary news outlet, but also of something even bigger. For young people in Serbia today, who know next to nothing about the 1990s and for whom the nation’s history begins with the 1999 NATO bombing, “resistance” no longer means the “Otpor” [Resistance] movement that inspired their parents, but rather a kind of defensive nationalism, along with the sad recognition that in the eyes of the world, “Serbia is always the bad guy.” ¹³

Despite the gloom, not everything that has developed out of Serbia is bad. The history of B92 demonstrates that Serbia has a strong tradition of quality journalism. It is common knowledge that the best journalists in Serbia today are those who worked for B92. ¹⁴ Insajder continues to provide hard-hitting investigations. Vice kept alive what former editor Danijel Bukumirović called B92’s “punk” spirit. TVN1, in its ongoing fight to win a national free-to-air frequency and its reports on topics that the Vučić administration would rather not discuss, carries on B92’s tradition of willingness to give airtime to the opposition.

When asked about the relationship between B92 and what would become MDIF, Saša Vučinić said that based on his B92 experience, he had understood very early on “that giving a grant is not solving the problem”:

Because the amounts of money are so small, you have two or three months of payroll and that’s it. And I thought that what media companies needed was a big investment. Bigger amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And because nobody would give you that as a grant, that’s how the idea of the loan came about. And I told Soros that the best thing he can do is, instead of giving grants, to start giving loans. And it should not be his organization, because no one is going to repay a billionaire.

If Radio B92 grew out of the culture and society of the former Yugoslavia, then so did MDIF. As Veran Matić once said, “media cannot survive on donations alone” (Balkan Insight 2007), and MDIF’s model of combining financing with the development of managerial skills was a direct result of what happened in the case of B92. The idea of sharing knowledge and techniques among competing practitioners began with the ANEM radio network established by Veran Matić and Saša Mirković. The use of satellite uplinks to share packages of stories started with the 1996 ban of B92. ¹⁵ And throughout the world, news organizations like Malaysiakini, MDLF’s first partner in Asia, continue B92’s tradition of speaking truth to power.

Of course in the long run, MDLF’s support of B92 turned out to be insufficient. The fact that both Veran Matić and the loan fund agree that in order to grow, B92 needed more funding and greater investment than MDLF could provide, suggests that given the capital-intensive nature of media production, the MDIF model may best be suited to the middle stages of a company’s growth—as it moves from being a small start-up to becoming a commercially viable venture. ¹⁶ When asked about the life cycle of companies that MDIF has supported since its founding in the mid-90s, Saša Vučinić said,

if we fast forward from that time, the next 20-something years, not too many companies survived. I think that companies have their own lifecycle. They go like people through that life cycle. And some of them manage to, very rare among them, manage to reinvent themselves fast enough and on time to have a second or third or fourth life, and some don’t.

Or, as Veran Matić put it,

Very often I hear that B92 was targeted to be destroyed after October 5 [2000], and that many were actively working on it for a long period of time. We successfully resisted it for ten years, which is a feat in itself. ¹⁷

Ultimately, B92 was a flashing star in a constellation that soon went dim. Although it was unable to reinvent itself, the lessons learned from its short, brilliant life continue to have an impact on struggling news organizations across the globe.