‘Glorifying violence’: Serbian protesters blame mass shootings on shock reality TV shows

The two mass shootings in a space of a week in Serbia were a shockingly rare occurrence, even if Serbia has Europe’s highest rate of firearms possession.

With 19 people killed, including children in a nursery school, the shootings prompted Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s vow to “disarm” the country.

But for many of the demonstrators on the streets of Belgrade on May 8, sections of the media share a significant part of the blame for last week’s tragedies.

“There were many calls for the heads of the media regulatory body to resign, as well as calls for the media to stop promoting violence,” said Aleksandra Krstic, an expert on the Serbian media at Belgrade University who took part in the demonstration.

This anger at the violence relayed on television screens is reminiscent of the endless frustration at the violence on TV and in video games blamed for many of the mass shootings in the US.

“These tragic events come out of a social context in which the media increasingly glorifies violence,” said Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, an expert on authoritarianism at Belgrade University.

Over the past decade, an alternative media reality has risen to the fore in Serbia, characterised by “rampant hate speech against any political opposition to the government, alongside the promotion of violent content”, Vladisavljevic continued.

‘More and more violent’

He singled out reality TV shows, which have become ratings machines dominating Serbian broadcasting. Zadruga on Pink TV and Parovi on Happy TV have pushed the genre’s boundaries, taking trash TV so far that they make the likes of Big Brother look like broadcasts of philosophical discussions.

The French public got a taste of this in 2016, when the Serbo-French dual citizen Zelko recounted how he managed to escape six months of hell in Serbian reality TV. As a contestant on Parovi, Zelko was regularly beaten and humiliated by the other contestants. Then the production team refused to let him go, placing him in solitary confinement.

In 2019, another former Parovi contestant, Andelina Nikolic, told Serbia media how she had self-harmed and swallowed detergent in a desperate effort to leave the Parovi set – even if this escape attempt sent her straight to hospital. But the producers just filmed the whole episode, forced her to vomit, and put her in isolation.

These are hardly isolated cases in Serbian reality TV. “These shows promote violence on various levels,” Vladisavljevic said. “They show it on screen; they invite convicted criminals to participate; and they talk about violence as if it were completely normal.”

In 2015, a Bosnian NGO launched a petition against the Serbian reality TV show Farma, accusing it of inciting ethnic violence just two decades after the Yugoslav Wars tore the Balkans apart.

Nevertheless, Vladisavljevic lamented, vociferous criticism of Serbian reality TV has changed nothing – in actual fact, “the programmes have become more and more violent”.

It is no co-incidence that these reality shows have only increased in popularity since Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party came to power in 2012. Analysts see Serbian reality TV as almost part of a political vicion of media manipulation inspired by the regimes of authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Media ‘essential to maintaining power’

By making violence acceptable to viewers, these vicious shows allow the state media to increase hate speech against opposition figures without causing much of a stir.

“You’ve got to realise that Vojislav Seselj, the former Serbian deputy prime minister accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has become a regular on TV and uses it as a platform for very violent speeches,” Vladisavljevic said.

“These reality shows are part of a system where violence is omnipresent at all levels,” Krstic said. Contestants fights each other and these fights become “the talk of the tabloids controlled by people with ties to the governments, and then they are made into clips relayed on social media where young people – who are too young to watch the programmes on TV – are able to watch these violent extracts over and over again”, she continued.

This media culture could be seen as a factor in last week’s shootings because it has “created a generation of young people whose heroes are criminals featuring in reality TV shows, which lends a certain legitimacy to the use of violence”, Krstic said.

She expressed hope that last week’s tragedies will open people’s eyes to the dangers of this dynamic – and that Monday’s demonstrations will put pressure on the government and the media to make changes.

“We’re asking for the head of the media regulator to resign, because this organisation is supposed to deal with the broadcasting of violent content but has actually done nothing about it,” Krstic said.

There is a decent prospect that Vucic will “react” in response to the protests, Vladisavljevic added, because the president “knows that large gatherings like this create risks for the government”.

The “huge protests against [then Serbian leader] Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s played a role in the end of his reign”, Vladisavljevic continued. “The education minister resigned on Sunday and others could follow.”

Yet Vladisavljevic concluded that Vucic is unlikely to make any substantial changes to Serbia’s media landscape because the media are “essential to maintaining power” in an “authoritarian regime like his”.

In the meantime, public anger has not gone away, with further protests planned for next Friday to try and push the government to make more concessions.

This article was translated from the original in French.