Cantonal Public Service TVSA Turned into a Megaphone for the "Troika" Authorities!

By: Muamer Bandić, Member of the KS Assembly and Member of the Presidency of the Party of BiH

It is impossible to imagine a modern society without media. Their influence on today's highly technological societies is enormous and primarily serves to connect and integrate them. Today, everyone has the right to information and freedom of speech, so it is a completely normal democratic standard to have multiple different media outlets in societies, with different voices and worldviews.

All societies have retained something we call public services, which are conceived as objective and professional means of information, created in democratic societies with the aim of enabling citizens to hear multiple viewpoints and multiple different, often opposing, opinions on various social issues. The standard of democratic societies is that access to public services is available to everyone under equal conditions. Unlike commercial media, which live off viewership and marketing, public services are created to provide quality services to citizens.

Conversely, in totalitarian societies, public services serve as the mouthpiece of only one political oligarchy, or as megaphones for the ruling party.

We in Sarajevo Canton also have "our" public service. It is Televizija Sarajevo (TVSA), which has the task of providing informational, educational, and entertainment program content for the citizens of Sarajevo Canton. As a public service, TVSA has a responsibility to its citizens to provide accurate and objective information that is in the public interest, not in the interest of only one political option.

As a public service, TVSA should operate independently of political influence to ensure objectivity, impartiality, and reliability of the information provided to citizens through its program content. And this is a key principle for maintaining public trust and the professional integrity of any media house.

Public services, including TVSA, have ethical codes and professional standards that employees must follow. These codes define the standards of journalistic ethics, including impartiality and objectivity in reporting. All of this plays an important role in strengthening democratic processes by providing citizens with access to information that is important for their participation in social and political life.

Unfortunately, the "Troika" parties have completely politically occupied TVSA, and exclusively their views, worldviews, and policies dominate the program content of this cantonal "public" media, which very seriously calls into question the objectivity and quality of information conveyed to the citizens of Sarajevo. Today, this public service has been turned into a private party mouthpiece for the "Troika," which is paid for by the citizens of Sarajevo. TVSA has been brought to such a desperate state that its employees, journalists with professional integrity, cannot do their jobs according to the rules of the profession, but are forced to work according to the dictates of politics, which completely dictates the program content. TVSA employees are living witnesses to what it is like to be a journalist in a dictatorship, when politics takes away your freedom of thought and makes the content of your work meaningless.

I will give you an example of what this "Troika" democracy looks like in reality. As a member of the Sarajevo Canton Assembly, a few months ago I received an invitation to guest on one of TVSA's shows, which I accepted, but my appearance was abruptly canceled just a few hours before the show. According to the information I received from those who invited me, my appearance was canceled at the insistence of the TVSA program director. This information surprised me greatly, given that the new government promised us all transparency, legality, and equality, so I verified it with the director of TVSA, Haris Dučić, who confirmed the truth of this information.

I don't need to tell you that since then I have never again received an invitation to appear on any of the shows of this "cantonal public service," and rest assured that as an opposition member in the KS Assembly, I certainly have a lot to say about the events in our city and its (in)action, especially about the lies of the ruling coalition.

This prompted me to follow the work and content that TVSA offers our citizens. Analyzing the program content during this year, it is noticeable that ministers from the "Troika" parties have exclusive rights to live broadcasts of various institutional activities. Whichever "Troika" minister wishes, they get a TVSA crew to record their activities live or on tape. Although TVSA is a cantonal public service, this rule also applies to the "Troika" ministers in the imposed FBiH Government, whom we see daily on TVSA. The same applies to the various activities of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of BiH, for whom time is reserved in the TVSA news, just as it used to be for President Tito's visits to various non-aligned brothers and friends.

All of this shows that TVSA is exclusively interested in distributing political propaganda of the "Troika" parties and marketing "their" people, rather than providing truthful and objective information to the citizens of Sarajevo.

Here is another example. When it was time to mark the opening of the monument to our people's struggle for survival, freedom, and statehood, the magnificent "Wings of Freedom" on Žuč hill, there was no broadcast of that event on TVSA. Lo and behold, the "cantonal public service" is not interested in the gathering of thousands of Sarajevo citizens, at the site where the key battle for the defense of our city took place!

The "cantonal public service" is not interested in our people's struggle, they are not interested in the bloody history of our city, and they are not interested in preserving the memory of our heroes, thanks to whom we still stand with our heads held high on our land.

The people who bled on these heights 32 years ago and their descendants have today witnessed that instead of a live broadcast of the gathering of Sarajevo patriots and the opening of the monument to our heroes on Žuč hill, the "cantonal public service TVSA" broadcasts Serbian brass bands at the same time.

Unfortunately, TVSA has today become a puppet ventriloquist for the "Troika's" policies in every segment of their political activity:

- Serbian and Croatian trash is allowed, but the beauty of our lilies is not!