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Precarity can be conceived as a fundamental condition of present-day journalism. This notion has primarily been utilized to describe the transformations that occurred with changing employment conditions, market flexibilization, and financial insecurity. While this has become the norm, it often overlooks nuances of precarity that journalists face, such as its bodily and political aspects. In this paper, I explore the extent to which proximity to the events and individuals journalists report on configures their experience of political precarity. To that end, I employ the concept of affective proximity, which refers to how locals navigate and reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country and community. The profession of journalism has traditionally been thought of as predicated on distance. However, this is not often the case for local journalists, who are not only working in but also representing and participating in the community they report on. Being physically present and belonging to that community, these journalists encounter the people they write about in streets, grocery stores, and restaurants. This paper will be based on ten semi-structured, in-depth interviews with journalists working in local media in Serbia. Centered around questions of journalists’ status in the community, the research will shed further light on the perils and risks to their political and social personhood.

News about the war in Ukraine is still present on the daily agenda in Serbia and the world, more than a year after the Russian invasion commenced. In times of crisis, such as this, citizens increasingly rely on the media for truthful and relevant information. However, the media have experienced a decline in trust in the last decade, and the circulation of disinformation and fake news has become part of everyday life. This is particularly the case in Serbia, where the political polarization has spread to editorial policies, media reporting and the selection of the news. This paper focuses on citizens’ media habits and perceptions of journalistic reporting regarding the war in Ukraine. It is a part of a broader research, which aimed at providing a comprehensive understanding of citizens' relationship with news, especially in the digital environment. It was modeled according to the questionnaire for Digital News Report developed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The basic questionnaire for 2022 was utilized, along with some questions from the previous years and a supplementary questionnaire on the conflict in Ukraine. A quota sample was used, consisting of a total of 2,027 adult citizens of Serbia. The results show that people in Serbia rate the media's work much worse than citizens of other countries when it comes to the war in Ukraine. However, respondents who are closer to the Russian side in the conflict evaluate media reporting more positively. Unlike other countries, where people turn to television as the main news source, the results indicate a significant use of apps and websites of mainstream media in Serbia in this regard. The importance of this research is that it provides insight into how citizens assess reporting on the war, a perspective often missing when discussing the media and conflict.

Contemporary right-wing actors in Serbia are exploiting social media logic in order to disseminate a particular pseudohistorical, populist “us” against “them” reconfiguration of the nation’s past. Its mythmaking foundations – e.g., the contentious question of ‘who was here first’ – are traceable and reminiscent of the dominant separatist narratives emerging from ethnic tensions in ex-Yugoslavia, which manifested in one of the most frightening conflicts on European soil after World War II. The online content of these pseudohistorians has gained hundreds of thousands of views on different platforms, especially YouTube, with channels like Srbija Global, HelmCast, and BALKAN INFO rapidly earning a dedicated fanbase. Despite the extensive literature on the discursive strategies of the far-right in the construction of collective memory and national identity in post-socialist countries, little has been done in applying the narrative approach to the analysis of populists’ storytelling practices in regard to the present sociopolitical moment. The aim of this article is to uncover the nationalist underpinnings behind the symbolic geo-political spaces and proposed alternative historical timelines of the Balkans. I rely on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, which posits the influence of time-space conjuncture on identity, to follow the plurality of cultural and mythical narrative threads woven into the national fabric. Drawing inspiration from a rich storytelling heritage, the historical revisionism of the Serbian far-right borrows elements from the classical Ulyssean motif of “a home long lost” and the biblical tragic character arc of “a banished Jewish tribe”. This intruder syndrome is formed in an anxiety-filled vacuum between the crisis-driven present and the glorified past. This is why I also utilise Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue and Boym’s understanding of nostalgia as historical emotion to reveal the ideological connectedness between the opposing historical topographies. T

The socio-political context in Serbia is oversaturated with ideologically charged resources utilised in the construction of populist identities, such as the semiotic network around the concept of ‘fascism’. The practices of signifying a ‘fascist’ threat have become more complex with the surge of multimodal digital platforms. The media combine various expressive repertoires in materialising the multiplicity of meaning. Thus, social semiotics serve as a fitting theoretical starting point. One of the objectives of the research is to identify the plurality of discourses floating around the constructed ‘fascist’ constellation. In this research, content published on the websites of Serbian daily newspapers Danas and Informer is examined. The label ‘fascist’ functions as an exclusionary strategy in both instances; however, there are differences in portraying ‘fascist’ actors and institutional responses to its destructive potential. Moreover, respective styles and presentations of information, such as tabloidisation, are used to further legitimise the reality of the ‘fascist’ threat.