MANJINE I MEDIJI NA ZAPADNOM BALKANU - RRPP

other communities in the country. It especially focuses on the extent to which the public
service fulfills its legislative ‘mission’ to satisfy the informative, educational and cultural
needs of diverse communities and to acts as cohesive factor in the overall society. The
methods applied in the study is media content analysis and in-depth interviews with
journalists, editors, experts and representatives of public institutions. The main conclusion is
that the programs of the public television act in the direction of social disintegration rather
than cohesion. Ethnic hierarchization and uneven allocation of resources among different
sections are the main characteristics of the organisation of the MTV Second program service.
Ethnocentrism characterizes majority of the reporting and general professional reporting
standards are at a low level. Ethnic-cum-political clientelism amounts to a wide spread
culture of auto-censorship. Some of the commercial media share these characteristics but
their reporting has many particularities - most notably - the more common usage of sources
which are not a part of the ruling political elite. These sources in most cases however,
disseminate an ethnocentric rather than a civic view of society.
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