In late October 2026, Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV) captured global attention when its news anchor, Goran Eror, opened the evening bulletin with an extraordinary live apology to the people of Serbia.
After President Aleksandar Vučić’s ruling coalition suffered a historic electoral defeat to the youth-backed Student List, Eror admitted to years of partial journalism. He told viewers, “For years, we failed to fulfil our duty. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask the necessary questions. For that, we owe our viewers an apology.”
Shortly thereafter, Nenad Ćaćić, RTV’s acting editor-in-chief, resigned. Across the capital city of Belgrade, demonstrators who had endured nearly two years of relentless media vilification following the 2024 Novi Sad railway station tragedy marched directly to the headquarters of pro-regime broadcasters like Informer TV and Pink TV, demanding accountability from networks that had long functioned as propaganda extensions of the state.
The collective outrage aimed at Serbia’s legacy media outlets was the result of prolonged, orchestrated propaganda.
Whenever citizens mobilised against corruption and institutional negligence, pro-Vučić tabloids and television channels routinely ran segments branding student demonstrators and opposition candidates as “terrorists,” “enemies of the state,” and “Ustaše” (a reference to a Croatian fascist, terrorist, and ultranationalist organisation active from 1929 to 1945).
National outlets systematically claimed that the Student List was financed by Western intelligence agencies to orchestrate a revolution and destabilise Serbia.
Worse still, regime-aligned media regularly leaked the private personal data of student leaders, civil society organisers, and independent journalists, exposing them as targets for online harassment, death threats, and physical stalking.
This strategic design led to the weaponisation of the press. As the media scholar Snježana Milivojević documented for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Serbia’s commercial television channels were consolidated in the hands of businesses with deep political and familial ties to the ruling elite.
According to the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR), independent editors in Serbia became the exception as media owners appointed loyalists to gatekeep news. State subsidies and state advertising were weaponised to reward pro-establishment outlets while starving journalism critical of the regime.
In a landscape marked by acute polarisation and low critical media literacy among marginalised communities, the state-backed public broadcaster RTS maintained the widest reach even as overall public trust in the news plummeted to 22 per cent in 2026, driving 53 per cent of Serbian citizens to actively avoid traditional news.
Watching Goran Eror’s live confession and the sudden reckoning across Belgrade’s media studios, an uncomfortable question arises for the Indian media ecology: how long before the anchors of India’s prime-time television networks are forced to issue the exact same apology?
Separated by thousands of miles, the structural capture of legacy media in Serbia under Vučić and the transformation of mainstream journalism in India over the past decade read like translations of the same authoritarian manual.
The rhetorical playbook used to delegitimise citizen dissent in both nations is virtually identical. Where Serbia’s pro-regime broadcasters branded the youth-led Student List as “terrorists”, “Ustaše” and “foreign-funded”, India’s dominant satellite news channels have spent years deploying an equivalent lexicon of defamation.
Whether covering university students protesting the NEET examination paper leaks, farmers marching on the capital, opposition demands over electoral roll revisions, or indigenous communities in Assam and the Northeast resisting ecological displacement, defamatory labels such as “Anti-Nationals,” “Urban Naxals,” “Dimagi Naxals,” the “Tukde-Tukde Gang,” and recently “Naraj Fufa” are regularly deployed.
Just as Belgrade’s tabloids blamed Western intelligence for domestic anti-corruption protests, Indian broadcasts reflexively attribute civic outrage to shadowy “international toolkits” and foreign conspiracies designed to derail India’s economic rise.
Furthermore, the practice of broadcasting the personal details and profiles of student organisers, civil society activists, and independent journalists on national television, exposing them to coordinated online harassment and intimidation, has become a routine instrument of public shaming.
Parallel to Serbia’s weaponising of state advertising, the Indian state utilises government advertising as an instrument of control, rewarding compliant networks while financially strangling critical national and regional voices.
The stark credibility crisis is highlighted by the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, which shows that overall trust in news in India has declined to 39%, while 52% of surveyed individuals now consciously avoid traditional news, and 58% express deep concern about encountering fake news and synthetically generated misinformation online.
Beneath this synchronised hostility toward the citizenry lies an identical infrastructure of crony ownership and fiscal discipline. In Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2026 World Press Freedom Index, where Serbia sits at 104th, India languishes even lower at 157th out of 180 countries, falling six places into the “very serious” category.
RSF explicitly attributes this crisis in the world’s largest democracy to highly concentrated corporate media ownership, persistent legal harassment, and outlets exhibiting overt political alignment.
According to the report, legal frameworks in India are more frequently weaponised, causing increased judicial harassment of independent media, driven by the rising application of criminal laws, including defamation and national security regulations, aimed directly at journalists.
The sudden unravelling of Serbia’s media fortress offers a sobering meditation on the fragility of state-sponsored journalism. For over a decade, Belgrade’s compliant editors and prime-time anchors operated under the comforting delusion of the everlasting rule of President Vučić and undying belief in manufactured propaganda.
Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that political eras are finite. Today, as India’s traditional media giants become more deeply embedded in corporate-political alliances and impose soft censorship internally, they are dealing with the same erosion of authority.
The haunting image of Goran Eror apologising to a betrayed nation should warrant an urgent introspection across India’s legacy media and editorial boards. Otherwise, a belated two-minute repentance on the evening bulletin may record the end of an era, but it will not redeem the fourth estate that has traded its constitutional conscience for the transient comforts of power.
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