Original scientific paper
Media Principles for Covering Elections in Croatia (1995 – 1999)
Marko Sapunar
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
This essay presents an analysis of the system of coverage of election activities in public media during the period from 1995 to 1999. The analysis has shown that the system has been continuously developed in a democratic atmosphere, and that the campaign and its presentation in public media is becoming more reasonable, more tolerant and, from the journalistic point of view, more professional than it used to be 4 years ago, when the political public and our journalism started to sit for exam of a democratic political dialogue through the interfacing of parties and candidates in the elections. As an evidence for this thesis, positive documents of The Croatian Radio-and- Television and The Croatian Journalist Association have been presented, revealing the development of the journalistic coverage of the elections in Croatia towards a more objective, more tolerant and more argumented one from year to year, and the political dialogue of parties and their candidates towards a more civilized one. On the basis of this analysis of all models of coverage of pre-election activities in Croatia (commercial, national and public television) the author has concluded that, starting from their experience, it is necessary to develop a model of representative responsible television and other public media, because the very concept of “public media” is not operable, nor is it possible to scientifically discover the entity who could objectively represent the category of the public, or manage the public media to the satisfaction of all concerned.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
27981
URI
Publication date:
16.1.2000.
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