ABSTRACT

Serbia emerged on the international news agenda in early 1990 and immediately positioned itself very high on the list of newsworthy places in the war-torn former Yugoslavia. The media spotlight may have moved away from the other new small Balkan states in the mid- or late 1990s, but this was not the case with Serbia, where a volatile internal political situation continued into the 21st century. An army of foreign correspondents was kept busy by landmark events that ensued: a three-month long grass-roots protests against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in the winter of 1996– 1997, a three-month long NATO bombing of the country in 1999, the toppling of the regime in 2000, and the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. For some, Serbia became a low-interest country only after 2008, when it formally stepped on the European Union accession course. By then, occasional hiccups, mostly linked to arrests and extradition of those indicted for war crimes or the Kosovo issue, could not reverse the firmly established decline in foreign media coverage that the country was receiving.