Journalistic discourse of freedom: A study of journalists’ understanding of freedom in the Czech Republic and Serbia

Abstract

The idea of freedom plays a strong and important role among journalists in countries that have recently moved to democracy. In this article, we explore the relational nature of freedom and put forward an argument for more clarity in defining its meaning. We examine the values and experiences inscribed in journalistic discourses of freedom assuming that the ways of articulating freedom hold a key for understanding journalism practice. The article revises the question of freedom by focusing on the intersection between political and journalistic fields in two countries that moved from a one-party political system to political pluralism: the Czech Republic and Serbia. It seeks to give a perspective on understanding how concepts of freedom and autonomy work in Czech and Serbian journalistic discourse. The Worlds of Journalism Study’s data on journalists’ perception of political influences were used as a starting point, then a case study analysis of significant clashes between journalistic and political fields in recent years in both countries was applied. In 2014, both Czech and Serbian journalists declared that political factors had small influence on their daily work, but the situation has changed. Our case studies of recent developments in Serbia and the Czech Republic, show a striking discrepancy between what journalists perceive and what they know.

Keywords

Articulation Czech Republic discourse freedom journalistic Serbia Worlds of Journalism Study

Introduction

It looked like an ordinary morning, but 19 September 2017 turned out to be far more than business as usual in Vranje, a small town in the south of Serbia. Vukašin Obradović, director and editor in chief of a local newspaper Vranjske, dismissed the staff and locked himself in the office. He had been running the paper since 1994 and he had had enough. He announced closure of the paper he had founded, and a hunger strike. ‘This is my personal act, the last one I am making to draw attention of journalists, and to the all citizens, to the pointless fight for media freedom we have been fighting for the last 30 years’, he wrote in an open letter.¹ The next day, Obradović was taken to the hospital and pressed by doctors to end the hunger strike. His newspaper was closed.

At the same time in the Czech Republic – another European country whose press was considered to be liberated with the fall of the Iron Curtain – Andrej Babiš, the Minister of Finance who was about to become Prime Minister and a billionaire, had been purchasing media organizations as if they were disposable goods. In one of his clashes with journalists who reported about his financial mishandlings, he slammed them as ‘corrupted rabble’ (iDNES.cz, 2017) and openly and rudely refused to apologize.

The two examples differ as do the mechanisms limiting media freedom – (party/political in Serbia, business in the Czech Republic) – illustrating different local circumstances and relations within the journalistic field and within political and economic fields. Both examples of shrinking journalistic freedom are coming from a post-communist world, but they are not an exception. A number of studies and reports reveal that journalists are facing an increasingly harsh environment across the world – both in and out of war zones, and in democratic and authoritarian societies. The Council of Europe’ study of journalists’ experience of unwarranted interference (Clark and Grech, 2017), for example, paints an alarming picture of journalists’ experiences of freedom. Based on a survey of 940 journalists in 47 Council of Europe member states and Belarus, and their experiences in the last 3 years, researchers discovered that 40 percent of journalists had experienced interference that was bad enough to affect their personal lives, and 35 percent of them said they felt that they had no mechanisms at their disposal for reporting such interference. The most frequently encountered unwarranted interference was psychological violence (69%), followed by cyber-bulling (53%) and intimidation by interest groups (50%). The impact of unwarranted interference on the everyday work of journalists is remarkable and includes ‘toning down sensitive, critical stories, abandoning sensitive critical stories, reporting content in a less controversial manner, being selective about what items to report, framing content as acceptable discussion, withholding information and shaping stories to suit company’s/editor’s interests’ (Clark and Grech, 2017: 63).

It has been said that journalistic perception of freedom corresponds with indicators of political freedom (Hanitzsch and Mellado, 2011), but the link between the two is less than straightforward. When Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) surveys of journalists in the Czech Republic and Serbia were conducted in 2012–2014, the Freedom of Press Report ranked the Czech Republic as free and Serbia as partly free. Czech journalists indeed declared that political factors had small influence on their daily work. But ‘partly free’ Serbian journalists said the same – among the factors that had influence on their work, politicians were at the bottom of the list. Four years later, in 2018, both countries were ranked ‘partly free’ (Freedom House, 2018). With no current survey on the perception of influence, but with rapidly growing concerns for freedom in the Czech Republic and Serbia, we go back to the WJS survey data and re-examine it in the light of most recent developments in two countries. We aim to identify multiple meanings of journalistic freedom and their relation to concepts of autonomy and independence. We examine journalistic discourses of freedom by looking closely at journalists’ perception of freedom (as expressed in WJS large-scale survey of journalists) and by examining journalists’ articulation of the idea of freedom in Serbia and the Czech Republic (using a case-study approach).

Freedom in journalism

Freedom is a fundamental concept in journalism studies, presupposed rather than defined. When described, it is usually used along the notions of independence and autonomy. Championed and challenged over time, freedom has been defined by the battles to achieve it (Whitten-Woodring and Van Belle, 2014). The concept of independence, on the contrary refers to the sovereignty of editorial decisions, made without the interference from outside forces (Nerone, 2013) while the notion of autonomy is seen as a set of normative discourses and a set of reporting practices aimed at ensuring independence from external and internal influences (Hanitzsch et al., 2019). It seems reasonable to approach journalistic freedom from its instrumental, rather than intrinsic dimension – the value of freedom as means to other things, rather than value of freedom as end on its own right. In that sense, discourse of freedom has to be seen a process, not a single, fixed state of affair. Being a collective or individual, the ideas of freedom, autonomy, and independence come to the light when articulated in discrete situations.

Indeed, the history of journalism development certifies that using freedom, independence, and autonomy as an idiom designates the place of journalism in society in relation to forces of power, control, and influence. Journalistic discourses of freedom, in particular, despite national variations of experience, refer always to a discrete occupational task of journalists to act ‘autonomously’ and ‘independently’, free from direct intervention coming from the outside (Sparks, 2008: 51). In liberal democracies, journalistic freedom has been seen as a part of a larger group of rights that fall under the umbrella of the right to freedom of speech and freedom of information. In emerging democracies, it takes the shape of a normative ideal; of journalists seen as important players in re-establishing democracy and fighting for civil rights (Voltmer, 2014). In East European countries, freedom from authoritarian rule at the end of 20th century and the new style of democratic government opened up the possibility for journalists to act as conveyors of news without undue interference from the state (Amin, 2002; Chan and Lee, 2011; Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Hanitzsch and Berganza, 2012; Tejkalova et al., 2017; Voltmer and Wasserman, 2014). The notion of freedom, these studies have found, marches along with autonomy and independence as a prerequisite for any meaningful practice of journalism.

In this article, we start from the relational nature of freedom, but we put forward an argument for more clarity in defining its meaning. We examine the values and experiences inscribed in journalistic discourses of freedom assuming that the ways of articulating freedom hold a key for understanding journalism practice at individual, occupational, and institutional levels. Using the WJS’s data on journalists’ perception of influences on journalists’ everyday work as a starting point, we take a case-study approach to unpack the notion of freedom as a process rather than a state of affairs.

Foregrounding processes rather than systems or structures in studying the interplay between media and politics prove to be fruitful in the examination of media systems in East European countries (Roudakova, 2008). Social life in the Czech Republic and Serbia exhibits both democratic and authoritarian threads of political rule. By studying the dynamic process of perceiving, establishing, and questioning levels of journalistic freedom, it opens up a space for untangling the complexity of the journalistic freedom phenomenon as such, and as a product of the interactions between the fields of journalism, politics, and business.

Journalistic freedom as discourse

Studies of journalism have historically incorporated studies of the context of journalism operations, a setting described as ‘a constituting and constraining set of forces shaping how news is made and how journalism is understood’ (Carlson et al., 2018). At the individual level, freedom in journalism refers to a freedom to decide what stories to cover, to seek and gather information, to decide how to order it, what to stress and what to exclude, and how to write and disseminate – the idea of journalism as such. Journalistic freedom, however, is far more than individual freedom of choice or free will (Feinberg, 1998). Freedom in journalism is instrumental, has a utilitarian goal, a means to an end: a well-informed citizenry. In libertarian societies, ‘the media are obliged to provide citizens with the information necessary for informed social decisions, to serve as a watchdog regarding centers of power in society and to function as a conduit for all shades of public opinion’ (Himelboulm and Limor, 2008: 235). This view of media performance relates the control over professional tasks to journalists’ independence from forces that seek to use journalism to advance particular gains. This pattern is present in transition countries too but comes as an outcome of two, sometimes opposed, processes taking place: an acceptance of a libertarian commitment to the monitorial role of the journalism in society and also a strong belief that journalists have or should have an active role in the process of democratization of the country. In both systems, libertarian and transitional, the normative understanding of freedom, autonomy, and independence is based on ideas that Feinberg (1998) describes as a self-government (autonomy) and an ability to do, choose, or achieve things (optionality). Autonomy and optionality closely relate to the semi-autonomous nature of the journalistic field where the relations of power, between the fields of journalism, politics, and business, and autonomy within the field, structure journalists’ action (Bourdieu, 2005: 41).

If journalism cannot be separated from its context, nor understood without looking at its wider environment, then how does this relational element of journalism, exemplified in the notion ‘freedom from’ relate to the universal, non-relational element of journalism inscribed in the notion ‘freedom to’? Journalistic discourses of freedom include the notions of autonomy and independence, but however intertwined these ideas are in terms of journalism’s everyday practice, academic rigor requires a definitional untangling of each before attending the issue of their unity. Championed and challenged over time, freedom has been defined by the battles to achieve it (Whitten-Woodring and Van Belle, 2014). The concept of independence, on the contrary, refers to the sovereignty of editorial decisions, made without interference from outside forces (Nerone, 2013), while the notion of autonomy is seen as a set of normative discourses and a set of reporting practices aimed at ensuring independence from external and internal influences (Hanitzsch et al., 2019). It seems reasonable to approach journalistic freedom from its instrumental, rather than intrinsic dimension – the value of freedom as a means to other things, rather than value of freedom as an end on its own right. In that sense, the discourse of freedom has to be seen as a process, not a single, fixed state of affairs. Being a collective or individual, the ideas of freedom, autonomy, and independence come to the light when articulated in discrete situations.

As we have already stressed, it is the process of the articulation of freedom that leads our inquiry. Following Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) concept of discourse, we examine the articulation as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (p. 105). We hope to identify a discursive structure of freedom that comes as a result of the articulatory practice, not as a taken-for-granted premise of journalistic work. The journalistic discourse of freedom stands as a driving force behind the professional ability to describe and interpret reality without interference from outside, but the ultimate meaning of freedom refers to the position of journalists in relation to individual and social agents, and to centers of power and centers of discontent.

Methodology: Investigating discourse of freedom

Our investigation starts with a survey of Czech and Serbian journalists, conducted as a part of the WJS, a collaborative project based on a common methodological framework applied in 66 countries in the period 2012–2016.² A survey of journalists in Serbia was done in early 2014 and included a sample of 407 journalists purposively chosen based on quota (media type, content, reach, and ownership), with the newsroom size taken into account, and on convenience when faced with a low response rate in some of the planned media. The field work was carried through face-to-face, telephone, online, and e-mail interviews, using a fully structured and standardized questionnaire. A survey of journalists in the Czech Republic was done continuously over a longer period of time – between October 2012 and March 2014 and included a sample of 291 journalists following the same set of criteria. We focused on journalists’ answers to the following two questions:

Thinking of your work overall, how much freedom do you personally have in selecting news stories you work on? (scale 1–5, where 5 means complete freedom, 4 means a great deal of freedom, 3 means some freedom, 2 means little freedom, and 1 means no freedom at all).

How much freedom do you personally have in deciding which aspects of a story should be emphasized? Again, 5 means complete freedom, 4 means a great deal of freedom, 3 means some freedom, 2 means little freedom, and 1 means no freedom at all.

We use the answers from the common questionnaire and analyze them in relation to the question about potential sources of influence on journalistic work: personal values and beliefs; peers, editors, managers, owners, editorial policy, advertising, and profit expectations; audience research and data; availability of news-gathering resources; time limits; and journalism ethics.

The normative authority of journalistic freedom is tested against press freedom reports in two countries. We apply a case-study analysis – an in-depth, multi-faced qualitative method that relies on several data sources (Feagin et al., 1991) – to examine the articulation of a journalistic discourse of freedom in recent years. We first clarify what journalists say when asked about the freedom and about influences on their work, then we move to the analysis of articulation of freedom in specific case studies.

Perception of journalistic freedom

Our investigation of journalistic discourse focuses on journalists’ perception of freedom in the context of various factors that have an impact on journalistic work. We follow the early model of the set of forces that limit and enable news production by making a distinction between individual, organizational, and institutional levels (Ettema et al., 1987). Other scholars (e.g., Shoemaker and Reese, 2013) provide more detailed models of the hierarchy of influences approach, but in this study, we focus on a broader model of individual, occupational, and institutional influences because we aim to identify the process of articulation of discourse that springs simultaneously from an individual, immediate, and wider social group.

Journalists’ perception of freedom as expressed in the results of the WJS shows that journalists around the globe experience more freedom in emphasizing aspects of stories than they have in story selection (Tables 1 and 2). This perception of freedom is a habitual response to the environment characterized by the interplay between normative ideals of journalism as a public service and creative practice, and journalists’ socialized subjectivity determined by an ongoing negotiation between the norms and reality. Comparatively, journalists in democratic countries, not only in Western societies but also in Central and Eastern Europe, more strongly believe in the idea of institutional independence from other powers than their peers in other countries. When asked ‘how much freedom do you personally have in selecting news stories you work on’, more than two-thirds of journalists in Serbia and the Czech Republic say ‘great deal of freedom’ or ‘complete freedom’.

Table 1.

Freedom in selecting stories.^a

C9 Thinking of your work overall, how much freedom do you personally have in selecting news stories you work on?	SR	CZ
Complete freedom	25.6	46.7
A great deal of freedom	42.4	25.1
Some freedom	21.3	24.4
Little freedom	7.7	2.4
No freedom at all	3	1.4
Mean	3.8	3.9
Standard deviation	1.003	0.843

Source: Authors’ data from consolidated Worlds of Journalism data set.

Table 2.

Freedom in deciding aspects of stories.^a

C10 How much freedom do you personally have in deciding which aspects of a story should be emphasized?	SR	CZ
Complete freedom	33.5	27.7
A great deal of freedom	39.5	47.8
Some freedom	17.9	21.5
Little freedom	6.2	2.4
No freedom at all	3	0.7
Mean	3.94	3.99
Standard deviation	1.014	.808

Source: Authors’ data from consolidated Worlds of Journalism data set.

While some might argue that in the East European context, high overall perception of freedom in the post-1989 era has been related to the memory of limited freedoms in the decades of one-party rule, the journalistic credo ‘freedom is what you fight for’ goes beyond experiences of two historically different media environments. When asked to specify how much freedom they have in selecting stories, almost three quarters of journalists in both countries said a ‘great deal’ or ‘complete freedom’. We also tested the statistical significance of differences between the Czech Republic and Serbia by Mann–Whitney U-test,³ and there are no statistically significant differences (for freedom to select stories U = 55,904.500, p = .428 and for freedom to emphasize aspects of stories U = 57,562.500, p = .783).

These results have to be put in a context of the difference between what is believed to be the practice and what is experienced on the ground. When asked how much influence each of the listed sources had on their work, and how influential each of these was, both Czech and Serbian journalists put journalism ethics (4.42 and 4.39, respectively, on a scale from 1 to 5) at the top of the list and political and business interests at the bottom of the list of potential sources of influence (Tables 3 and 4 and Country Reports, 2012– 2016). Procedural influences include those connected to the journalists’ work, the ‘procedure’: ethical codes, availability of sources, and so on. In addition, the organizational influences include actors on various levels of the media organizations. Economic influences mean influences journalists have in mind while considering the possible profit their work can bring to the organization; therefore, they also have to think of what the audience would like to read, watch, or hear. Personal networks involve perceived influences of the opinion of people around the journalists and political influences potential pressure from the people in power and various types of lobbists.

Table 3.

Perceptions of influences on journalism in Serbia.^a

Source: Rupar and Seizova (2017).

Table 4.

Perceptions of influences on journalism in the Czech Republic.^a

Source: Authors’ data from consolidated Worlds of Journalism data set.

Asking journalists to reflect on the perception of their practice privileges the normative dimension of their work. The experiential side of the practice – daily encounters that constitute and modify journalists’ understanding of freedom – is side-lined in such an endeavor. High levels of perceived freedom in both the Czech Republic and Serbia give an insight into journalists’ take on the profession in this part of the world but does not explain what stands behind their belief that ethics matter the most, nor does it help understand the discrepancy between journalists’ perception of high levels of freedom and the reports that state the opposite.

When we ran Spearman’s rank-order correlation inside each country’s sample among the influences perception and both freedom to select a news story and freedom to emphasize the aspects of a story, the results were consistent for each dimension of influences, with logic significant correlations found, in Serbia being always more significant (for the vast majority of cases, the correlation was significant at the 0.01 level) than in the Czech Republic. There was also a strong, positive correlation between freedoms to select stories and emphasize the aspects of the story (r_s = .606, p = .000 in the Czech Republic, and r_s = .795, p = .000 in Serbia).

While journalists’ perceptions of influences in the Czech Republic and Serbia are to a great extent similar, journalists in the Czech Republic tend to attribute higher importance to personal networks than to economic influences. In the light of significant foreign direct investment in media in the Czech Republic and subsequent buy-out by local businesspersons with political interest, this finding could indicate an interiorizing of market mechanisms and values into Czech journalistic culture. Similarly, journalistic role perceptions (Hanitzsch, 2011; interventionist/monitorial in Serbia and monitorial/populist in the Czech Republic (Table 5)) – point to transitional path dependence. In the case of Serbia, the stronger interventionist role is a result of young and still-developing democracy, as journalists feel the necessity to promote particular values and ideas. Populist role in the case of the Czech Republic is the result of oligarch media ownership and thus strong profit orientation of media, as the oligarch media owners are at the same time active politicians. These usually belong to the new breed of politicians using populist rhetoric as a main program, leaving the traditional ideological left-right wing concept of politics behind. Media owned by these oligarchs are then always influenced by the political orientation of their owners. Monitorial roles correspond with ‘an understanding of journalists as critical observers of political conduct’ (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018: 154) and refer to promotion and application of professional journalism standards in Serbia as well as in the Czech Republic.

Table 5.

Journalistic roles perception in Serbia and the Czech Republic.

Serbia	Mean (1–5)	Standard deviation	The Czech Republic	Mean (1–5)	Standard deviation
Interventionist	3.8951	0.86703	Monitorial role	3.015	0.95431
Monitorial	3.6548	1.01438	Populist role	2.9936	0.95278
Populist	3.4185	1.05413	Interventionist	2.7324	0.87841
Collaborative	1.9612	1.09241	Collaborative role	1.4258	0.69558

Source: Authors’ data from consolidated Worlds of Journalism data set.

Case study: Serbia

An emotionally charged hunger strike and the closure of Vranjske newspaper was a critical moment in the 30-year long battle for media freedom in Serbia. Against the backdrop of 1990’s Yugoslav wars, media have struggled to find their place in new environment. Economic pressures, political assassinations, and murders of journalists⁴ – the most significant changes since the break-up of the country – were all envoked in the movements that followed Obradović’s hunger strike. Ten days after Obradović’s hunger strike, a wide movement of around 130 journalists’ and media associations, civil society organizations, and political movements gathered around, and #IStandByVranjske #StopToMediaDarkness #ForMediaFreedom staged a blackout of their web pages. They were joined by only two print media – the daily Danas and the newsmagazine Vreme, carrying black front pages and the same messages: ‘This is what it looks like when there is no free media’, ‘We are not free to give you the news’, ‘Stop to Media Darkness’.

These professional movements, the loose Group for Media Freedom, and #IStandByVranjske #StopToMediaDarkness #ForMediaFreedom, not only seek freedom from external political control but also freedom as such, freedom to practice good, fact-based reporting. The space of freedom has been shrinking in the face of tabloidization, hate speech, self-censorship, intimidation, and attacks against journalists. Both processes steeply increased in the last 4 years and were widely perceived as being backed by the authorities over a long period of time. In the late 1980s, Slobodan Milosevic was making his way up the institutions of multi-cultural Yugoslavia, riding on the crest of Serbian nationalistic ideology. The abrupt ascent of Milosevic through the ranks of his former political sponsors and Communist Party structures encompassed taking control of the media. This included big Yugoslav systems such as the national news agency Tanjug, and state radio and TV, rendering by 1993 a great number of journalists out of job. Some lost their job because of their professionalism which would not yield to war-mongering, and others because of their ethnic background. It is mostly from this pool that after the introduction of a multi-party system in 1990, new, private media were founded. These new agencies, dailies, weeklies, TV, and small local radio stations, often with support of Western institutional donors, emerged as ‘independent media’, radically different from their pro-regime peers. They offered professional, facts-based, public-interest reporting on the wars and Serbia’s role in them. The ‘independent media’ in Serbia – and Obradovic’ newspaper Vranjske belonged to that group – have been at the forefront of professional battle for freedom, freedom from political influence, signifying both resistance to political pressure and distinction from the pro-governmental journalism.

The timing of the 2014 WJS survey coincided with the changes of the media laws and withdrawal of the state from media ownership on the contrary, but also with the return to power of political forces defining the nationalistic, war-mongering 1990s. While media reform was perceived as a way to advance media freedom in a wide participatory process, the ongoing democratic roll-back, ‘characterized by strong party political control of the administration and a flexible attitude towards the law’ (Bieber, 2015),⁵ was consolidated by 2014. These contradictory dynamics reflected on journalistic articulation of media freedom by simultaneously raising journalists’ expectations of media reform, impacting on their perception of freedom, and de facto limiting media freedom. ‘Freedom of speech has become practically a nonexistent category’ because ‘the state is stimulating the suppression of freedom of speech’, according to Tamara Skrozza, a journalist with Vreme weekly (Media Sustainability Index, 2017: 2).6 At the same time, fully controlled financial flows created a situation described by Zoran Sekulić, founder and editor of FoNet news agency: ‘There is a media scene and there is business in that scene, but it has nothing to do with the media market’. In these circumstances, Vranjske was subject to multiple tax and financial inspections, apparently aiming to harass, following the publication of an interview with a whistleblower, former Vranje tax authority head. In an open letter to the tax authority’s new director, Obradović said his reporters were under pressure, in retaliation for covering issues of public interest, and that they were treated by the ruling party as political opponents because they were doing their jobs as journalists. He ended the hunger strike over health issues, and closed Vranjske.

In the wake of Obradovic’s protest, journalistic articulation of freedom moved from description of the lack of it, to a call for action for freedom to be reinstated. Five journalists’ associations⁷ listed recent cases of intimidation and threats against journalists attributed to the authorities, demanding change. They ‘warn(ed) citizens and international institutions that the authorities in Serbia entered new, brutal phase of suppressing media freedom and intimidation of journalists aimed at fully disabling the control role of the media and break all free, critical voices’ (NUNS, 2017) and called on international organizations ‘to take more active part in protection of democratic values they promote’ (NUNS, 2017).

Powerless in the face of government’s political pressures, journalists’ associations turned toward the European Union (EU), perceived by many as a higher political instance with potential for impact on domestic affairs. Director of the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia Branko Čečen called on the EU to offer greater support in the fight for media freedom. He criticized the discrepancy between the European Commission’s assessments of Serbia’s democratic progress, and the reality in which the authorities play a crucial role in marginalizing and threatening independent journalism (IJAS, 2017).

The case study of Serbia demonstrates how more globally connected forces affect media performance, being political, economic, or cultural. Evoking EU norms in defending journalistic freedom in Serbia relates to the ‘competitive authoritarian regimes of the Western Balkans’ that rely strongly on external legitimacy as ‘reformers’ but are internally running the system through the creation and management of crises (Bieber, 2018: 340). The EU officials’ preference for ‘stabilitocracy’ (Pavlović, 2017) over democracy, leaves journalism in a state of limbo, a point made by the International Federation of Journalists who called on the Serbian government to do its utmost to guarantee a free and independent press in the country, and on ‘the international organizations to stop ignoring severe problems that journalists and media in Serbia are facing and to become actively involved in the protection of the democratic values that they have been promoting themselves’ (IFJ, 2017). By 2018, it was clear that the expectations of media reform failed, giving ground to state capture of media. The same period saw IREX (2017) Media Sustainability Index (MSI) drop way below the initial level (1.86 in 2001) to 1.46 in 2018,⁸ placing the country at the Unsustainable Mixed System (Cetinić, 2017). The Reporters Without Borders (RWB) World Press Freedom Index, highlighted in 2018 issues of safety, impunity, and orchestrated smear campaigns against journalists and ranked Serbia 22 places down compared to 2014. These findings are also reflected in the journalists’ discourse of freedom.

The reactions by individual journalists, their organizations, and media associations pointed once again to the uphill battle the independent media have been fighting for 30 years for freedom from political influence on their work, impacting on their freedom to practice journalism as it should be in its primarily watchdog role stressed in the responses to WJS survey. With the economic field subdued to the political, the Serbia case study is about the scale in the long-term dynamics between the journalistic and political fields. It marks the point when political influence is relying increasingly on direct pressures and threats to safety of journalists and a turning point in journalists’ expectations that democratization and institution building, guided by the EU accession process, would lead to the improvement of media freedoms.

Case study: The Czech Republic

There have been minor protest rallies against the Prime Minister in the Czech Republic in 2018, but development within the field of media ownership has been quite turbulent from the time when WJS results were gathered (2012–2014). With lowering profitability of media, changing business models of media and consequences of the economic crisis, the structure of media ownership went through extensive transformation. The Western media owners left, being replaced by the new generation of local media barons who concentrate the media ownership (Hájek et al., 2015).

The press became independent from the state in 1989, for the first time in more than 40 years. The new independence was followed by wide-ranging enthusiasm and feeling that the media could contribute to the democratization process and societal change, especially after the formation of the Czech Republic in 1993. The country has been ranked by RWB and was placed among the states with the most press freedom, being 16th in 2013, 13th in 2014 and 2015. Since 2016, we can witness a steep decline from 21st to 34th place in 2018, connected with verbal public attacks on journalists from politicians, media ownership monopolies, and interventions into media content (RWB, 2018).

The first Czech billionaire who entered the media business was coal baron Zdeněk Bakala, who bought publishing house Economia in 2008 (and Centrum Holdings, the publisher of quality online news daily Aktuálně.cz, in 2013), followed by many others. He was followed by Jaromír Soukup who owns publishing house Empresa Media. Soukup, owner of Empresa Media and the media agency Médea, engages in political activities, being a host of many programs on TV Barrandov and has been actively supporting the Czech President Miloš Zeman. In 2013, one of the richest people in business in the Czech Republic, who earned his fortune mainly through agrochemical company Agrofert, billionaire Andrej Babiš bought one of the biggest media houses Mafra (publisher of quality newspapers Lidové noviny and MF Dnes). Before this purchase, he already owned local media within the publishing house AGF Media. Mafra merged with another big group of lifestyle magazines Bauer Media in 2018, but it is no more under Babiš’s direct ownership. In 2017, Babiš was forced by so called ‘Lex Babiš’, the law against conflict of interest to put his property into a trust fund he created, even though the trustees were very close to Babiš, including his wife. Financial group and electric power billionaires J&T bought Czech branch of Ringier (publisher of, for example, tabloid daily Blesk and serious weekly Reflex) in 2013. Their purchase, as well as the purchase of regional Czech dailies Deníky Bohemia and Deníky Moravia by the big Czechoslovak investment group Penta in summer 2015, was called ‘defensive purchases’ among business people.

These purchases were not coincidences. The richest people in the country were purchasing media at that moment, since Western companies started to the leave market because it was no longer profitable. It is evident that these purchases were not motivated by the effort to get into the well-developing media business or altruism, but more by pragmatism. The answers to the question ‘why’ started to be obvious pretty soon. For example, Babiš and his political movement ANO was in second place in parliamentary elections in 2013 and he got the position of Minister of Finance. In 2017, they won the elections and he became prime minister.

Marek Dospiva, one of the owners of Penta, very clearly declared what he thought about the independence of their newly bought media in 2015: ‘I do not want to tiptoe about the topic. The media ownership gives us a certainty that for everyone it would be harder to irrationally attack us’ (Safarikova, 2015). There are also signs that media ownership is connected with agenda setting performed by the media gathered in Mafra, like the case [?] of Babiš’s meeting and discussions with one journalist concerning what topics might be ‘good’ to cover, revealed by published wiretaps in 2017 (Novinky.cz, 2017).

There have been several other examples of strong interferences of centers of power into journalistic freedom during the past few years. One of the most scandalous cases of censorship happened in 2016 in the publishing house Economia, owned by coal baron Zdeněk Bakala. Quality news daily online Aktuálně.cz published an interview with successful entrepreneur Radim Jančura (Hejl, 2016). The interview, which contained several provocative claims such as ‘there is a mafia behind the reorganization of the police’ and some other accusations against politicians and the ruling party, went online on 21 June 2016. Two hours later, there was an order from the Director of Content Vladimír Piskáček (the highest manager of the publishing house) that the text had to be removed from the website. The editors responsible protested against this step, but the interview was pulled down. This gained the attention of the readers who started to share the article on social media. Later the interview appeared again on server Aktuálně.cz, but with several parts changed or removed. Readers again reacted on social media and started to compare the two different versions of the interview. The next day, 24 reporters wrote an open letter to the Director of Content demanding an explanation and expressing their concerns about editorial independence:

We do not find your explanation why the interview was censored as sufficient. Your decision is damaging our work and credibility, as well as the reputation of the server Aktualne.cz and the whole publishing house Economia. Since yesterday we are facing questions from our readers, e.g. why the mention of the Bison&Rose was removed from the text. We have no answers to these questions. We expect your explanation as soon as possible. (Bártová, 2016).

On the third day, the original version of the interview was published again on the website.

The censored passages contained mention of the PR company Bison&Rose, which was very close to the politicians of the ruling party – one of the owners of the company was the advisor of the Minister of Defense. At the same time, this company was close to the publishing house Economia, for which it was organizing events. Director of Content Piskáček declined any connections with Bison&Rose. The second part of the censored text was about Martin Roman, a controversial businessman with close relations to the politicians, and his rumored control or ownership of Skoda Transportation company. There was no clear response from the Director of Content to the open letter; his explanations were evasive. As a result of this affair, five top journalists and the editor of domestic news left the publishing house. ‘Similar interventions into our articles have spread lately; sometimes the texts were changed without the knowledge of the authors. As a result of this, some of the journalists quit their jobs’, explained editor Štůsek in another open letter when leaving the publishing house (Aust, 2016).

Our source in the newsroom⁹ confirmed, that similar pressure from management to change, remove or not to mention some information was coming about five times a year. When we were trying to conduct research interviews with other newsroom staff at that time, after first promises of collaboration, most of our respondents refused to cooperate, and said it was forbidden by the management. There were informal unofficial threats to the members of the newsroom staff as well as to the researchers trying to ask questions. According to our source, the situation in the Economia newsroom has worsened after the purchases of other media by Andrej Babiš. Despite all these affairs, the Director of content of Economia Publishing House has had full support from its owner Zdeněk Bakala.

In the past, the Czech journalists did not experience so many direct and rude public accusations by the political or business elites (with the exception of former Prime Minister and now president Miloš Zeman). However, in January 2017, a reporter from public TV Czech Television Jana Neumannová broadcasted a report about Andrej Babiš, at that time Minister of Finance, and his financial mishandlings. Babiš reacted immediately calling her and her program Reportéři ČT ‘corrupted rabble’. He accused the program saying they shoot the stories ‘on demand’ (ČT 24, 2017). The journalists defended themselves, a colleague of Neumannová Michael Fiala published in his Twitter channel a picture collage with two other tweets of Andrej Babiš where he praised the program Reportéři ČT in the past (Břešťan, 2017). Andrej Babiš tried to use his political influence and reported to the Czech Television Council (Czech Television controlling body) the possible ethical misconduct of Reportéři ČT program. He said, they were ‘leading a campaign’ against him (iDNES.cz, 2017). His complaint was refused by the Council, but instead of apologizing to Czech TV reporters, Babiš said about the editor-in-chief of the program: ‘For me it is over and Mr Wollner is corrupted rabble for me. It is valid, as I said before’, (iDNES.cz, 2017).

What is still a good piece of news for the Czech media environment, even though its position on the ladder of countries of RWB (2018) has worsened, is that journalists still keep the light of good practice alive. Babiš and his activities were repeatedly mentioned in Freedom House report about the Czech Republic (2018), but Neumannová got the independent journalistic award Novinářská cena for her report in 2018 (ČT 24, 2018).

Conclusion

The analysis of Czech and Serbian journalistic discourse of freedom shows that the idea of freedom plays a strong and important role among journalists in countries that have recently moved to democracy. However, journalists’ perception of great deal of freedom in selecting and in deciding aspects of stories, the main finding of the WJS survey, tells only one part of the story. Higher freedom in shaping a story (Table 2) than picking up part of reality to write a story on (Table 1) in a context of journalists’ perception of influences on journalistic work – journalism ethics at the top of the list and politicians and business people toward the bottom – reflects the power of normative framework as a driving force in journalism. This power, we argue, comes from the low level of contingency of any norm. Ethics and resistance to external influences (politicians and media owners) define journalistic freedom as freedom to, and journalism as it should be. To understand journalism and journalistic freedom as it is experienced and exercised in the realm of everyday practice, one has to move to the process of articulation of freedom in the specific context. Our case studies of recent developments in Serbia and the Czech Republic show striking discrepancy between what journalists perceive and what they know. The perception going along the lines of what journalism should be, a freedom to, and their experience on the ground, a need for freedom from. The second includes notions of independence and autonomy. At the beginning of this article, we have suggested that untangling the notions of freedom, independence, and autonomy in journalism is needed in order to conceptually identify their properties. Our study indicates that freedom in journalism can be understood as journalists’ right to control their own work and ability to do so; autonomy refers to journalism collective, being a newsroom or news organization, its right to self-govern and ability to do so and independence refers to journalists’ institutional right to work without interference from outside and its ability do so.

In all three cases, journalists are positioned toward the other – being other journalists, editors, managers, sources of information, politicians, or business – with some differences when it comes to the values and practices attached to this relational process. In all cases, it is a matter of degree from which the idea is embraced. A cry for freedom in Serbia – Vukašin Obradović’s hunger strike and the closure of Vranjske – demonstrated both the power of individual journalist to define freedom and the journalistic field’s inability to respond to ongoing political interference. Journalism in the Czech Republic follows the similar route, but the shrinking sense of freedom is attributed to the increasing influence of business, or more precisely media owners (one of the owners being the prime minister too). One might ask if Czech and Serbian journalists would have the same responses to the perceived level of journalistic freedom in 2018, as they had in 2012–2014 when WJS data were collected. For the perception of journalistic freedom in normative terms, 4 years might be a relatively short period of time to identify change. But examining journalistic discourse of freedom as a process, as this study has shown, highlights the change regardless the timeframe.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Verica Rupar

Notes

Author biographies

Verica Rupar (PhD, University of Waikato) is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research focuses on journalism as a form of knowledge production in historical and comparative context.

Alice Němcová Tejkalová (PhD, Charles University) is a Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague. She is a former TV sports journalist. Her primary research and teaching interests are in journalism studies and sports journalism. Since 2012, she has been a principal investigator of the Czech branch of Worlds of Journalism Study.

Filip Láb (PhD, Charles University) is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Science, Charles University in Prague. He specializes in visual culture, visual communication, photojournalism, theory and praxis of traditional and digital photography, transition from analogue to digital photography, and new functions of visual materials in media.

Sonja Seizova is PhD candidate at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Her professional and research interests are in comparative media systems, media policy, and journalism studies.

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