Rakocevic: Reporting by some Western media means giving up on dialogue and surrendering the situation to force

The recent reporting by the British Telegraph on Kosovo is actually one of the sparks on the Balkan powder keg, Zivojin Rakocevic, the president of the Journalists' Association of Serbia, says for Kosovo Online, adding that the messages from some Western media represent a kind of giving up on dialogue and surrendering the situation to force and foreign policy.

"Our experience shows that it is fundamentally important how we are seen, represented, depicted, and shaped by Western media in front of their politicians and their public. The images that have left from here have fundamentally determined our destiny, the systems in which we live, and to a large extent, charted the future of this area. The destinies of millions depended on the images they sent, reports, and texts they wrote from here, and unfortunately, in the past few decades for us, it has mostly been negative and has turned out tragically in many cases. It turned out that falsified and fake news were enough for bombs already hung on bombers to be dropped on us and for our lives to look completely different," Rakocevic says.

As he points out, today, everyone has become media, and the possibility of consuming images and media content has reached an incredible level, so it is extremely important how this area and the freedoms of individuals and groups are represented in the media.

"Because all these misfortunes began as a fight for human rights, as an inability to reach agreements, and as an open possibility for there to be some force. Essentially, things are such that the majority of Western media follow what their foreign ministry wants, and very often you will hear from our colleagues correspondents, 'Paris, London, Washington, Moscow ordered me this'," our interlocutor believes.

Despite examples like the recent reporting by the British Telegraph, Rakocevic emphasizes that we should never forget the other journalists who have seen the situation on the ground and sent their truth.

"We met one such journalist in recent days who thoroughly studied, for example, Racak, so when we look at that, we see that person, and we see the Telegraph's reporting, we come to the position where we say 'this is not reporting'. A person in body armor in the hills in northern Kosovo is an ominous harbinger of disaster, do not believe in their truth, do not let them represent a picture of us in that way, provide them with another image. No one can forbid them, nor should they forbid them from speaking, but their speech is actually one of the sparks on the Balkan powder keg," the JAS president says.

He adds that the role of journalists in all of this is not to give up on defending the truth but to insist on that truth.

"Or, perhaps even more importantly, to live at the heart of that truth, always looking at the other side and always letting the sanctity of dialogue into our lives, into our public space, into the profession. Because the moment dialogue disappears, this profession also disappears. And the messages of Western media and the reporting of Western media have actually been a kind of giving up on dialogue and surrendering the situation to bombs, force, and foreign policy," Rakocevic concludes.