Serbia
The media landscape in Serbia has deteriorated significantly during the ongoing political crisis this year. State ownership of the media increased, along with greater financial and political influence over the market, which together with constant hostility towards independent outlets, have led to a decline in media freedom and journalistic safety.
The crisis in the country erupted following the deadly collapse of the railway station roof in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, on 1 November 2024, killing 16 people. The tragedy was attributed to corruption and sparked widespread protests led by students, who blockaded major universities and mobilised citizens in a prolonged anti-government movement. Unrest escalated after use of an unidentified sonic weapon against peaceful demonstrators in Belgrade on 15 March 2025. After no success in bringing those responsible to account, protesters demanded early general elections, which the authoritarian regime of President Aleksandar Vucic continues to resist.
Instead, the government intensified repression against ‘rebellious society’, tightening control over the judiciary, media, and universities. Police violence increased, with over 1,636 arrests reported between June and September 2025.1 Repression peaked during efforts to suppress student activism and reopen universities. Protests continued until the March 2026 local elections, which were characterised by serious irregularities and, according to the European Federation of Journalists, an unprecedented level of violence against journalists, making Serbia one of the most dangerous places for them outside of active war zones.2
In the highly but asymmetrically polarised media landscape, television remains very important with a large audience and political influence. There are two PSBs, national Radio Televizija Srbija (RTS) and regional Radio Televizija Vojvodina (RTV), four national commercial channels – RTV PINK, RTV Happy, TV Prva, and TV B92 – and over 200 local and cable channels. All national commercial channels are owned by Serbian companies tied to the political elites, which effectively closes the mainstream media to reporting critical of the government. Meanwhile, state-owned Telekom Srbija, the major telecom operator, has acquired over 30 TV channels in the past year, thereby becoming an important media company, the major delivery platform, and one of the top advertisers in the country.
According to the 2025 Ipsos Media Landscape, total advertising spend has grown by 8% in the past year, reaching €296m, but that is still insufficient to sustain the number of media outlets. Television attracts 45% (+1.5%) of advertising spend, while print has just 4% (-13.9%) compared to the rapid growth in online (+ 23.4%), which now accounts for 32% of total advertising revenue.
Two critical cable television channels, N1 and TV Nova, are among the top sources of news offline in this year’s survey. Both are owned by international telecom and media company United Group and have been regularly targeted by Aleksandar Vucic as anti-Serbian or even terrorist media. In early 2025 the United Group sold its telecoms business SBB but retained N1 and TV Nova in a new company, Adria News Network, while promising to defend their independence. However, in a leaked conversation revealed in August 2025, the new CEO of United Group, Stan Miller, was heard agreeing to dismiss the head of its media division at Mr Vucic’s request. Then on 6 April 2026 N1 announced that its director of news Igor Bozic had been replaced. Journalists’ unions and media watchers fear that this might lead to the neutering or shutting down of N1 and taming of the remaining critical media.3
The newspaper market is dominated by the tabloid press. Pro-government tabloids in Serbia have often been used to discredit dissenting voices, run smear campaigns, and amplify nationalist and anti-EU narratives. Informer was among three tabloids which the Press Council named for infringing the Code of Ethics in the second half of 2025, in their case with 1,456 violations.4 In November 2024 it launched its cable news channel and now has 14% weekly reach offline and 12% online, but the lowest level of public trust (19%) among all the brands surveyed.
There are signs that audiences are rewarding investigative and community media for scrutinising corruption and covering protests. New digital multi-media outlets such as Masina and Zoomer are attracting audiences with their engaging live reporting, while investigative journalism portals such as KRIK and BIRN specialise in exposing crime and corruption. The fact that our Serbian respondents see ‘organised crime’ as the third largest influence on media at 47%, behind media owners and government/politicians cited by 64% and 63% respectively, suggests the extent of public concern about corruption and possible criminal links in parts of the media.
Snjezana Milivojevic
Retired Professor of Public Opinion and Media Studies, University of Belgrade
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
TV remains an important news source particularly for older Serbs but social media and online are in the lead with news websites/apps growing in the last year.
Pay for online news
7%
(-)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
53%
(+7)
Trust in news overall
22%
(-5)
Global average: 37%
Overall trust has fallen – by 5pp – in the past year to just 22%, likely influenced by the severe political crisis and highly polarised media. The more critical media – N1, Nova, Danas and Vreme – have the highest levels of trust, ahead of widely used pro-government brands such as Informer and PINK.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
104/180
Score 50.79
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.bgcentar.org.rs/izvestaj-o-stanju-ljudskih-prava-u-srbiji-u-2025-godini/
2 https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2026/03/30/serbia-brutal-assaults-on-journalists-reporting-on-the-local-election-require-urgent-response-from-authorities/
3 https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2026/04/07/en-serbie-la-derniere-television-independante-fait-face-aux-pressions-du-pouvoir_6677943_3210.html
4 https://savetzastampu.rs/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Izvestaj-FINAL-2025.-1.pdf