Media in Balkan States 'Partly Free', Report Says

Map of press freedom in the world | Image by: Freedom House

Freedom House, a global media watchdog based in Washington, DC, released on Monday its report on media freedom in the world in 2010, which found that global media freedom has reached a new low point, though scores in the Balkans did not change significantly from 2009.

Finland topped the global list, followed closely by other northern European countries, while Turkmenistan and North Korea took the bottom rankings.

Freedom House, which ranks 196 countries' levels of press freedom based on legal, political, and economic criteria, listed Serbia as the highest ranking state in the Balkans, in 72nd place with a score of 33.

While Serbia remains in the category of partly free media, it moved up the rankings slightly compared to last year, when it stood in 76th place with a score of 34.

Dragana Milicevic-Milutinovic, state secretary in the country's Ministry of Culture and Media, said on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day on May 3 that the state would do everything in its power to improve the situation in the media sector, but that much depends on the journalists themselves.

Kosovo came out on the bottom of the list of Balkan countries, ranked at 104th globally with a score of 51, a slight improvement over last year's placing, when it came in 108th with a score of 53.

The other countries in the Balkans largely maintained their scores from last year's report, with Bulgaria ranked 76th with a score of 35; Montenegro 80th with a score of 37; Croatia 85th with a score of 41; Romania 87th with a score of 42; Bosnia and Macedonia 96th with a score of 48, and Albania at 102nd with a score of 50.

While Romania improved slightly over its score in the 2010 report, when it was ranked 88th with a score of 43, experts say that the position of journalists in Romania remains difficult in many ways.

"The situation of the media in Romania remains problematic. First of all, the economic context has led to a major drop in newspaper circulation, with advertising also falling. Furthermore, there are still cases of political influence and evidence of serious attacks on journalists and their media by political groups,” says Mircea Toma from Romania's Media Monitoring Agency.

In Bosnia, meanwhile, media associations held a press conference on World Press Freedom Day to present the results of a recent poll on the state of the media in the country.

The quality and professionalism of the media in Bosnia continues to deteriorate, but oddly, trust in the media is growing every year, representatives from the Media Centre Sarajevo, BH Journalists and the Press Council said on Tuesday at a press conference in Sarajevo, referring to the results of a recent poll.

"Citizens are asking journalists to devote more effort to issues like corruption, crime, health, education, and to avoid sensationalism," said the president of the Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina Journalists, Borka Rudic.

Boro Kontic, director of the Media Centre Sarajevo, noted that journalists in Bosnia face a number of obstacles in the effort to produce quality reporting.

"Journalists often work under political pressure, but we must point to the bad financial situation as one of the causes of decline in the quality of the media," said Kontic.

The countries in the Freedom House report are ranked partly according to legal criteria, which concern the country's laws and regulations that "could influence media content and the government’s inclination to use these laws and legal institutions to restrict the media’s ability to operate."

Political criteria, including the evaluation of the degree of political control over media content in the country, are also part of the assessment.

Finally, economic criteria focus on the structure of media ownership, assessing elements including the concentration of ownership, and the costs of establishing media.