Media and Corruption Cover Image

Mediji i korupcija
Media and Corruption

Author(s): Jovan Ćirić
Subject(s): Media studies, Civil Society
Published by: Centar za unapređivanje pravnih studija
Keywords: writing about corruption; political responsibility; media manipulation; presumption of innocence; morality of politicians; transparency of media ownership; Serbia

Summary/Abstract: Usually, it is said that media play very important role in the fight against corruption. Their main role is to discover cases of corruption and to write and inform about those cases. In that sense, the free media should be critics of negative social phenomena, and especially corruption. This leads to the establishment of political responsibility. But by itself the political responsibility has many shortcomings. The author of this text holds that without real criminal sanction there is no real responsibility, and because of that the significance of the media is not so great. On the other hand, there are many media manipulations. To disqualify certain politicians, media can invent corruption scandals and, by that, they can jeopardize the presumption of innocence. All this exerts a negative impact on the morality in a society, because people starts to reason that all politicians are a like. This leads to the fact that those who are really immoral start to be engaged in policy. So that example shows that the role of the media in the fight against corruption does not have to be positive. A particular problem is corruption within the media, tied to the property over media, i.e. whether it provided transparency of media ownership in Serbia. †hat is a serious problem when it comes to functioning of media and their fight against corruption.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 3-4
  • Page Range: 64-76
  • Page Count: 13
  • Language: Serbian