Media & Me
A memoir through the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav media.
With Lara Ranković (Mediji i ja).
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Transcript: “Media & Me” (Episode #118)
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PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all.
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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your producer, Peter Korchnak.
Here on the podcast I usually feature projects and people that can be understood even if you don’t speak any Serbocroatian. But I recently started following an interesting Serbian-language project that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit; and besides, for the rest there’s translation AI. So here goes, in the Inspired by Yugoslavia segment: Mediji i ja (Media & Me) , a Substack by Lara Ranković.
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PETER KORCHNAK: Lara Ranković hails from Valjevo, Serbia where she grew up in the 1970s and 80s. She has lived in Belgrade since the early 1990s when she moved there for university studies, with a break for master’s in sociology at the Central European University (always good to have a fellow CEU alum on the show). Ranković has worked as a journalist and media analyst, and is currently involved in the international humanitarian field. She was also an early blogger in Serbia, in the early 2000s.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: And then several years ago, just in a moment of serendipity, I realized that I want to write a book. Because I’ve been with the media my whole professional life, but I didn’t want to write from that perspective. I wanted to write about my personal experience with the media, starting from my early childhood onwards.
And I thought it’s a good way to tell the story of one country—and then it became several countries—and all the media and social changes that were developing in all these decades.
It was also way to honor the legacy of my late father, who was a journalist himself, and whose magazines from the 1960s were at our home, and I was reading them, learning from them.
And so all of that became one coherent story for me, something that I was drawn to write. And I did a lot of it for a while.
PETER KORCHNAK: Then life intervened, as it’s wont to do, and Ranković took a few years off from the project.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: Last autumn, Substack was slowly entering into my life. I was following some writers there, and I started another blog there was also related to my mom, who passed away last summer. And then I somehow got the idea that I can made [sic] the second part of that blog related to my media project and posting things that I already wrote, also editing on the way, adding new stuff…
PETER KORCHNAK: Substack is a media platform that enables authors to essentially blog and then distribute and even sell their work via email. Some, mostly those who make money off of it love it; some, mostly those who dislike that the platform also hosts Nazis, hate it.
Ranković launched Mediji i ja, Media and Me, last October. Its tagline is, “Growing up with Yugoslav media, and with all that came after.” All translations from the Serbian are mine.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: I’m mainly following some chronological way. Sometimes, and now I’m writing about a certain magazine from the 80s, but there is a recollection of something that happened before or after, or something like that.
Or, as you probably know, there are protests going around Serbia, so at some point, I decided to publish a post about student press from a big protest in ‘96-‘97 to be somehow in tune with what is happening in the country in this moment.
But generally, I just go period by a period. I have decided some that some publications are important for me to write.
I have some media archives in my parental home. But many other press publications that were important for me, I don’t have anymore, so I order them online and take one or two issues and present how they looked like, what they wrote about, quote some texts that I find interesting. I want this to be my personal recollection.
PETER KORCHNAK: Ranković aims to fill a gap in the media analysis discourse of her country.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: One is that there is huge number of books and analysis and research about the media in the former Yugoslavia since the break of the country at the beginning of the 90s, until the year 2000. And of course, there are academic articles about different periods after that and before that.
But I at least did not see many of them that cover periods before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, during that and after that.
And on the second hand, I definitely did not see any publication which is written from the personal perspective. And that’s where I saw that I could offer something to the people, interesting to remember the lives they lived, but also to tell my story about these changes.
PETER KORCHNAK: A memoir through the media, media through a memoir.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: What is characteristic of my life since I don’t know I started reading, or at least, I don’t know, 8, 9, 10, years, is that I started reading or at least looking through many different print media. We had plenty of them at home because my father was buying almost everything that was published in former Yugoslavia, and that was a lot. There were different daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and so on.
And then that intensified, of course, in high school, when at some point I started buying some magazines myself, for example, we had German Bravo. I don’t speak German, and most of my friends don’t speak German, but they were available at kiosks, and we would buy them and just look the pictures and take the posters. It’s not that we did not have our own teen magazines, but this German Bravo was glossier and it offered a peek into some other world, which was shinier than the one we lived in. I’m not telling that we lived in a gray society and that we lacked anything, but there were limits at what we had then.
And then later on, I started reading another magazine, it was a female magazine printed in Croatia, Zagreb, called Svijet—
PETER KORCHNAK: —The World—
LARA RANKOVIĆ: —which was very feminist, very smart one.
PETER KORCHNAK: “Svijet was an excellent magazine,” writes Ranković. “It connected the intellectual and the beautiful, the smart and the slightly exotic, [it was] both a friend and a teacher.”
“Thanks to Svijet, the way they wrote and the personalities they wrote about, at the end of [the eighties] I had already formed a plan for my future life.”
LARA RANKOVIĆ: When I entered university in 1990 I started studying philosophy. My idea at that very first year before the war broke, was that I graduate philosophy and then move to Croatia and start working for Svijet.
PETER KORCHNAK: “…live in Zagreb and have a house in Dubrovnik.”
LARA RANKOVIĆ: Unfortunately, around a year, that whole dream stopped being possible at all.
PETER KORCHNAK: “For the next ten years you wouldn’t even be able to go to those cities as a tourist,” concludes Ranković.
Another post I enjoyed was about quote, “the best Yugoslav magazine” Start, also published in Zagreb. Notorious for nudes on the cover, it actually had really good longform articles, and I mean longer than the New Yorker longform (most recently I used it to read about the Sarajevo Olympics).
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PETER KORCHNAK: Ranković launched her journalistic career in 1992.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: —first in student and youth publications, radio and magazines.
This period was very difficult for the media. They were heavily censored, but there always existed a group of media that fought for their independence, and they managed in that. So there was always an island consisting of several media that would offer information not available through the state media.
PETER KORCHNAK: In 2000 Serbs bulldozed Slobodan Milošević out of power and replaced that authoritarian regime with a more democratic one. Or so they thought.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: And we hoped that this will also mean much more freedom for the media.
Unfortunately, this period since more or less 2000—but then also there was the assassination of our prime minister, Zoran Djindjić, in 2003—was also connected to the changes in [the] business environment in which the media existed.
Previously, those independent media were supported by international donor organizations and so on. That continued throughout the decades but many media turned this commercial way, including Radio B92 which was very liberal, politically but also culturally and in [a] musical sense, and was a hub for creativity and freedom in 1990s.
PETER KORCHNAK: B92 was a bastion of opposition to the Milošević regime, first as a radio station and the day after that Bulldozer Revolution as a TV channel as well. In the post-Milošević era, the company became a lot less subversive and more commercial. It got bought by a foreign venture, and turned into something of a media conglomerate.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: So with these changes of the political system, came the changes in the economic system and the commercialization of media.
And at the same time, there were tabloids spreading like mushrooms that were always in one or another way under the influence of political elites and presenting or favoring the leading political elites’ agenda.
So this is more or less the same story now.
The state of the media in Serbia is quite sad, in [the] sense that Serbia is from year to year, being worse and worse placed on the international media freedom index by different organizations.
PETER KORCHNAK: In the Freedom House “Freedom in the World Report,” which has been tracking global trends in political rights and civil liberties since 1973, Serbia now ranks as partly free, attaining 56 out of the possible 100 points on political rights and civil liberties measures; it had 76 points and ranked free in 2017.
Particularly since 2019, writes Freedom House, “rights and liberties have steadily deteriorated [in Serbia under the leadership of President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party]. Attacks on journalists and tightening control of the media environment have been among the most prominent features of this erosion. Investigative journalists have faced smear campaigns, punitive tax inspections, threats from leading politicians, and arrests. Authorities have used their control over regulation and licensing to aid progovernment media outlets. A lack of transparency in media ownership, indirect government subsidies for media, and the politicized allocation of advertising have also helped progovernment media dominate the market. (…) All of this manipulation has created an environment in which positive coverage of Vučić and the SNS swamps the information landscape, especially ahead of elections, and critical voices are increasingly silenced.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: It’s difficult to control all the media voices, but the state is doing its part to control the narrative and to influence those with less possibilities to gain access to independent media. The voices of the state media, or these tabloids, which are said to be private, but are actually heavily supported by the state, are stronger.
PETER KORCHNAK: Reporters without Borders notes in its evaluation of Serbia that, quote “with around 2,000 media outlets registered in the country, the market is highly fragmented.
“Although there is quality journalism in Serbia, awarded for its investigations into crime and corruption, it is caught between rampant fake news and propaganda. Despite a solid legal framework, journalists are subjected to political pressures and crimes committed against them go unpunished.
“Women journalists are still the target of attacks both for their work and their gender.”
LARA RANKOVIĆ: On the other hand, there are some very positive trends.
For example, we have a quite a strong group of investigative journalism media, including Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, then Krik, CINS [Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia], and also some local or regional media outlets. And they also form networks, either among themselves or with some international media outlets or organizations of the similar type.
PETER KORCHNAK: Ranković was a media analyst with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network until 2021. BIRN is quote “a network of local non-governmental organisations promoting freedom of speech, human rights, and democratic values.” End quote.
Its flagship product is Balkan Insight, an award-winning English-language news site. I get a lot of my regional news there, and I know you might too.
Outside interest in the region remains high.
LARA RANKOVIĆ: What is interesting to me is that my blog has many international readers, you included. I have a pretty large base of foreign readers, and according to the emails and the names there, they are people not from the region of Yugoslavia.
This brought me to [the] conclusion that there is maybe a new generation of people interested in things related to Yugoslavia, though, right now and until now, I write about Yugoslavia, later on I will write about what happened later.
Or, maybe these are not so young people, maybe they are just, in a way, interested in these times.
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PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening and reading with us.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!