ENCOURAGING PROFESSIONAL MEDIA REPORTING

National Endowment for Democracy, December 2018 – November 2023

This project aims to encourage professional media reporting in Serbia. Through daily media monitoring and bimonthly analytical reports, Fake News Tragač staff will identify false or misleading content and inform citizens about the quality of key print, televised, and online media. The team will report offenses to Serbia’s media regulatory bodies in order to encourage professional media reporting and remedy the spread of false reporting and disinformation in the media. Also, it will further promote media accountability through its fact-checking workshop and training program for emergent journalists and media professionals.

Our team will regularly monitor popular publications, broadcast stations, and portals that have become important sources of information in Serbia. Using professional tools for fact-checking and media analysis, the Fake News Tragač team of a chief editor and journalists will identify instances of false or misleading reporting and publish busting articles on the web platform Fakenews.rs. Upon completion of the training, eight students in their final year of journalism will be engaged to contribute to the weekly articles on instances of false and biased reporting.

In addition, once in two months, our team of researchers will publish a series of five thematic reports on disinformation and fake news trends in Serbia. The reports will include an analysis of the media’s influence on political discourse, the spread of false information, and the quality of professional reporting and fact-checking.