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Media images of borders and their control have been one of the most dominant frames in reporting on the migrant crisis in European media and the negative coverage of the topic of migrants, presenting them as a threat to security and public health dominates media narratives around the world. This paper examines the way migrants and refugees have been portrayed on the borders of Serbia, a transit country alongside the Western Balkans migration corridor. The mixed method analysis is based on 300 images published in relevant national and regional print media and their online versions from 2015 until 2020. The results show that the visual depiction of walls, wires, control, law and order, modern technological equipment, security providers, and important political authorities have been often intensified with sensational headlines and tabloid coverage and at the same time confronted with images framing migrants as violent and deviant, threatening borders, people, and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored links between competitive authoritarianism and populism in Serbia under Vučić via mixed methods. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of 228 political cartoons (2013--2017) by Dušan Petričić, a leading cartoonist and government critic, and qualitative visual and contextual analysis of four cartoons that reflected key themes--media freedom violations, unfair political competition, and populist and abusive rule. We found that populism appeared as the 'soft' face of competitive authoritarianism, tolerable to domestic audiences and acceptable to influential international actors because of its reliance on more informal and sophisticated and less repressive forms of authoritarian manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serbia was highly polarized ahead of the 2010 Pride parade in Belgrade, an event marred by violence. It is often assumed that the media played a negative role by uncritically giving voice to anti-LGBT activists. To investigate this claim, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of media reporting as well as 25 in-depth interviews with journalists. We conclude that the media denied extremists direct access to the media. However, due to the high polarization, the media did empower nonviolent opponents of the parade, and hence indirectly contributed to the stereotypical and sometimes derogatory representation of the LGBT population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade represents a critical moment in the story of Serbia's democratisation process and highlights the threat that right-wing extremism poses to democratic rights and personal freedoms. Through a focus on patterns of visibility and visuality in the coverage of different protagonists in the streets of Belgrade, we explore the ways in which distinct communities perform their affinities, their right to be seen in public spaces, and rejection of 'the other'. We conduct a visual framing analysis across four news programmes (RTS, Prva TV, TV B92 and Pink TV), emphasising the stylistic-semiotic choices which work to construct the contested spaces of the city. In shifting attention to how the news images work to create the spaces of political 'appearance' and the potentials for political agency through mediated visibility, the article explores the uneasy ambivalence of the democratisation process for authorities and the resulting marginalisation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how political cartoons reflected and mobilized resistance to growing authoritarianism and the personalization of power in contemporary Serbia. The focus is on the work of Dušan Petričić, the most influential political cartoonist in Serbia, which was published in daily Politika and weekly NIN between 2012 and 2017. Petričić's cartoons offer interesting insights into a dramatic decline of press freedom and the rise of authoritarian personalist rule in terms of both their content and political impact. The authors draw on quantitative content analysis and qualitative multimodal analysis to examine the key representational and stylistic features of Petričić's cartoons, both as a way to understand the relationship between his aesthetics and his political statements, and in order to critically assess some of the ways in which democratization conflicts may be expressed visually. Their analysis also draws on evidence from an in-depth interview with the author. In combining a systematic analysis of key visual patterns across a sample of cartoons with a comprehensive evaluation of how both visual and linguistic features work together to promote anti-authoritarian ideals and resistance, the article offers a framework to understand the political import of aesthetics in Serbia's democratization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine in which way the following factors influence TV owners‟ strategies for the development of television as a business in the turbulent media market of Serbia: 1) the size of the news market and local media environment, 2) the response to technological changes, 3) economic status of the television outlet, and 4) clientelism. For the purpose of this case study, in-depth interviews were conducted with the owners of six local commercial TV stations located in different regions in Serbia. The results show that instead of developing professional resources for a highly competitive media environment, TV owners are fighting for bare survival. However, their strategies for the development of television as a business can be divided into two camps: one group expects the help of the state to overcome financial constraints, while the other seeks to develop e-business and web advertising as models of sustainable growth on the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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