engleski

Critical junctures, media freedom, and illiberal turns

After five years of membership in the EU (since 1 July 2013) the challenges posed by the state to the democratic role of the media in Croatia were growing, instead of diminishing. After having created a democratic media policy and environment in the preceding period, which enabled Croatia to start the EU accession process and to join the EU, the challenges to media freedom in Croatia since the 2015 and 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections rapidly threatened the attained levels of media freedom. The threats identified by the Croatian Journalist Association, and by policy experts, were the worst in the following four areas: an increased number of legal actions against journalists and the media for “shaming” and slander, brought by persons in political power or related to them ; an increased pressure on the independent editorial and journalistic practices of the public service broadcaster, HRT, with a sharp ideological turn to the right ; an unrelenting policy of non-support to the civic sector media, and pressures from the state and non-state actors on new forms of speech in the digital sphere and in the legacy media. All of these important problems were the result of the same illiberal and conservative cultural politics which were being forced on the population by the ruling conservative HDZ, often via the public service media whose control they seized.

media freedom, illiberal cultural politics, critical junctures, Croatia

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