Source: "Danas"
Belgrade - Media stage in Serbia necessitates bigger responsibility and better regulation, but I don't think that can be achieved by proposed changes of the Law on Public Informing, stresses for "Danas" Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance.He adds that besides issues of responsibility, many others have to be opened.
- Responsibility of media for publishing pornographic contents or texts endangering integrity of minors is beyond dispute. They are also responsible for conscious placing lies or semi-truth to media stage. However, we all know too well that behind disinformation there are often not journalists, but politicians - underlines Sabic.
According to his words, the power is inadmissibly often presenting strict relationship towards the constitutionally and legally guaranteed rights of the public to access information.
- The penalties for infringing those rights are either left out or are symbolic. Finally, when the Media Freedom Act is changing, we could have expected much more serious treatment of topics like incorrect, non-commercially motivated discriminatory relationship of distributors towards publishers or stopping of media privatization process - states our collocutor. Sabic notes that it is not completely clear which amendments the Government has adopted, and which one it hasn't, because „this hasn't been stated to the public in an unbiased way".
- However, it seems that by adopting some amendments, the Law Proposal text has been somehow corrected. There I primarily think of omission of the unsustainable, extremely high equity census of 50,000 euros, which would additionally aggravate otherwise already difficult economic situation in which most of our media operate, and omission of provisions prohibiting that any legal operations could be used for transfer of rights over media - explains Sabic.
He evaluates that for our circumstances, the penalties envisaged by the changes of the Law are too strict and can become a basis for auto-censorship.
- In the context of auto-censorship, provisions on so-called presumption of innocence also deserve attention. It is not quite the clearest what the proponents understand as that, but if that means that the journalist, under the threat of strict penalty must not write about someone's „guilt", before that person is validly convicted, than the question arises of relationship of that decision with some several decades old, generally accepted principles on journalists' responsibility - states Sabic. The Commissioner states that the journalist can defend himself from criminal liability for damage to someone's reputation even according to our criminal law, „if he proves that he has spoken truth, or that he had all reasons to believe that whatever he was stating was truth".
