Serbia’s media market in 2025: A year of “consolidation under pressure”

Prime-time “news” programs played a particularly dangerous role – these shows were not debates, but rather rituals of public humiliation, in which shouting panels mocked dissent and punished deviation from the dominant narrative

The past media year showed that pressure no longer needs to come primarily through direct attacks on journalists. More effective and quieter mechanisms have taken their place: managerial deals, market transactions, and control over distribution. By 2026, Serbia’s media market will continue to function, but within an increasingly narrow space for critical, professional, and investigative journalism.

In 2025, Serbia’s media landscape was not a story of development, innovation, digital subscriptions, or new formats. It was a story of ownership, distribution, and the political economy of visibility. The central questions were not about editorial creativity, but about who controls infrastructure, who owns the cables and signals, who allocates public money, and who decides what content reaches audiences. In this environment, the most consequential changes did not occur inside newsrooms, but within the telecom sector, regulatory voids, and the growing pressure on professional media voices.

The biggest shock of 2025 came from developments surrounding the SBB and United ecosystem, the telecom market, and channel availability, all of which directly affected media pluralism. In September, BIRN documented a series of controversies related to ownership and governance changes, including the fact that the CEO of the company that acquired SBB was granted Serbian citizenship through a discretionary government decision. This took place within the broader context of market concentration and shifts in channel distribution. At the same time, Cenzolovka closely followed Telekom Serbia’s expanding influence through infrastructure control, warning that the “weakening, shutting down, or taming” of media outlets could decimate the independent media scene. In November, the same outlet reported concrete business moves, such as the takeover of Orion Telecom subscribers, further accelerating concentration.

Why does this matter? Because in Serbia, media pluralism is not defined only at newsstands or online. It is also determined by what reaches the television remote control. That space narrowed significantly in 2025, in some cases closing altogether.

In late summer, an audio recording of a conversation between executives of Telekom Serbia and United Group gained international attention and became one of the clearest illustrations of how economic power and political pressure spill over into editorial decision-making. OCCRP published a story about the leaked discussion of “undermining” media outlets that give space to dissenting voices, student movements, and opposition parties. The European Commission explicitly expressed concern in its Serbia progress report about political and economic influence over the media, citing this case as a signal of potential political pressure on outlets critical of the government. Media Freedom Rapid Response partners warned of attempts to impose political control over the “last major independent TV brands,” N1 and Nova.

Taken together, 2025 demonstrated that pressure on the media no longer needs to be loud or violent. It can be far more effective when exercised through corporate governance, market leverage, and distribution control.

The Regulatory Authority for Electronic Media (REM) remained one of the clearest symptoms of Serbia’s corrupted and hollowed-out media system. The year ended without a newly appointed Council, following continuous controversies surrounding selection procedures and widespread public criticism. For more than a year, the media market has effectively lacked a lawful mechanism of oversight and regulation. Amid allegations of non-transparency and violations of the Law on Electronic Media, independent candidates withdrew their applications, and some even resigned from their positions. For media outlets, this means that the rules of the game are increasingly shaped by political will rather than by predictable, legally defined standards.

Public life in 2025 was marked by mass protests and escalating rhetoric, and the media environment reflected this tension. As early as March, The Guardian reported warnings from editors that media freedom in Serbia was at a “dangerous tipping point,” citing harassment, physical attacks, and smear campaigns against journalists. The Associated Press and international actors, including MFRR, pointed to a rise in threats, attacks, and legal pressure, urging the EU to respond more seriously. These dynamics have direct market consequences: security risks and legal exposure translate into permanent operating costs that small newsrooms and investigative teams are least able to absorb.

Another signal of systemic fragility came from layoffs and protests by journalists and editors at Euronews Serbia. Contract terminations, changes in editorial structure, and public statements by employees revealed deep dissatisfaction with professional working conditions, as well as fears that economic and managerial decisions were being used to shape editorial policy. These protests underscored a shift: pressure on journalists increasingly comes not only from outside, but through internal reorganizations, restructurings, and decisions that directly undermine newsroom autonomy.

In theory, public co-financing schemes exist to support media production in the public interest. In practice, 2025 continued a pattern of political bias and opacity. ANEM reported that local project funding often amounts to channeling money to pro-government outlets and to those that avoid sensitive topics such as protests. Cenzolovka documented delays and irregularities in local funding competitions. While the Ministry of Information continues to issue national-level calls and appoint commissions, the core problems remain unresolved: vague criteria, weak oversight, and limited assessment of impact or quality.

As in previous years, pro-government media benefited from stable revenues through state advertising, subsidies, and sponsorships by public enterprises, creating a dual market. One segment enjoys financial security; the other is systematically excluded. Pressure in 2025 was not only about who receives public funding, but also about who is effectively denied access to the advertising market altogether. A system of “economic ghettoization” persisted, in which private companies, even those without direct political ties, avoid advertising in critical media out of fear of tax inspections or the loss of public contracts. This has pushed independent outlets into dangerous dependence on international donors, whose resources are shrinking due to global crises. Donor fatigue has thus turned into an existential question: how to sustain professional journalism in a market deliberately impoverished for anyone reporting in public interest?

While the market consolidated, audience behavior shifted. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 notes that Serbian citizens are among the heaviest users of social media for news in Europe, especially younger audiences. This reshapes the attention economy and forces newsrooms into competition with algorithms. The shift is not neutral. When audiences depend on platforms, distribution itself becomes editorial policy. In Serbia, this trend overlaps with local political pressure and infrastructure concentration.

At the same time, the online environment introduced new challenges. Beyond traditional broadcasters, the digital space was flooded with so-called ghost portals, ad-hoc platforms without clear ownership or with fictitious editorial teams. Their sole function is to launch coordinated smear campaigns that are then amplified by national broadcasters, creating the illusion of widespread coverage. This process has been further automated through AI-driven bots, particularly on X, a platform where algorithmic changes favor paid accounts, allowing disinformation to dominate narratives before professional media can verify facts.

Alongside infrastructural consolidation, Serbia experienced a semantic collapse of public discourse. Obscure cable channels, online portals, and even some national broadcasters continued to normalize hate speech, disinformation, and public humiliation as legitimate journalistic practice. Throughout 2025, these outlets functioned as tools of political targeting, attacking opponents, activists, journalists, and citizens through false accusations, context manipulation, and direct threats, largely without legal consequences.

Violent rhetoric spilled from screens into reality. When a national TV host labels students as “foreign mercenaries” or “terrorists,” it creates an environment in which physical attacks become normalized. This dynamic operated on two levels: it created a parallel reality for audiences consuming only these channels, while simultaneously exhausting critical audiences who must constantly fact-check and resist waves of falsehoods. Over time, this normalization of deception eroded the public’s ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, verified facts from rumors, and public interest from political campaigning.

Prime-time “news” programs played a particularly dangerous role. These shows were not debates, but rather rituals of public humiliation, in which shouting panels mocked dissent and punished deviation from the dominant narrative. The result has been catastrophic for information quality. Younger audiences largely abandoned these channels, while older demographics, especially outside major cities, remained trapped in echo chambers saturated with structured disinformation. This deepened generational and geographic divide, leaving parts of society living in fundamentally different informational realities.

The consequences for journalism are direct and severe. Young talent avoids investigative reporting, experienced journalists move into public relations or retreat into self-censorship, and newsrooms lose institutional memory that cannot be quickly rebuilt.

The media developments of 2025 may appear bleak, but they are part of a longer trend of systematic erosion of media freedom, legal frameworks, and market mechanisms. Given ongoing political instability, attempts to silence critical media voices are likely to continue, increasingly through economic tools rather than overt censorship. Critical outlets may face reduced cable availability, higher distribution costs, or “technical problems” with broadcasting, as infrastructure owners apply selective access.

REM is unlikely to become an independent regulator in 2026. The more probable outcomes are either continued paralysis, which suits those who benefit from a rule-free market, or a formal takeover by politically loyal appointees, thereby institutionalizing existing practices.

International actors are likely to continue issuing warnings without consequences. EU reports and resolutions will persist, but without sanctions or meaningful conditionality, allowing authorities to maintain a strategy of minimal reform sufficient to keep accession talks alive.

Legal pressure will increasingly replace physical attacks. As international scrutiny grows, overt violence becomes reputationally costly. Instead, SLAPP lawsuits, aggressive inspections, and prolonged court proceedings will serve as tools to exhaust critical outlets financially and professionally.

National brands such as N1 and Nova may survive through international visibility and support. Local media, however, already dependent on opaque local funding, are far more vulnerable to closure or self-censorship.

Younger audiences will continue turning to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for news. This creates opportunities for new formats, but also deepens dependence on algorithms and disinformation trends, further straining traditional business models.

Prolonged protests have accelerated the speed and coordination of Serbia’s disinformation ecosystem. Fake news, manipulated footage, and coordinated smear campaigns now operate at near-industrial scale. In 2026, AI-generated deepfakes and automated bot networks will likely make disinformation cheaper, faster, and harder to detect.

Future political triggers, including continued protests or elections, will test media control mechanisms. These moments may expose the full extent of “quiet” pressure through signal blocking, mass lawsuits, or sudden ownership restructurings. Early 2026 reports of multiple new local outlets registered under the same owner and editor offer a preview of what may come.

For Serbian media, 2026 may not bring dramatic collapse, but rather a gradual closure of space through economic and regulatory tools. The market will function, but with ever less room for critical, professional, and investigative journalism, not through mass shutdowns, but through growing irrelevance, inaccessibility, and financial unsustainability.

Still, the resilience of parts of the journalistic community, the growth of platform-based initiatives, and the civic awareness forged during last year’s protests suggest that space for quality journalism has not disappeared. The fact that serious journalism continues to be produced, shared, and read demonstrates that media freedom in Serbia has not been defeated. However, it must increasingly find new arenas for survival and resistance, online and beyond formal media institutions. The year 2025 showed how far this space can shrink, but also that it continues to expand wherever there is an audience, solidarity, and the will to defend the truth.