Journalists on Media Freedom: Textual Analysis of Metajournalistic Discourse in Online Media in Serbia

Journalists in Serbia have been in a continuously challenging position in recent decades (Freedom House, Nations in Transit 2022; Kulić, 2020; Milutinović, 2019; Milivojević et al., 2011). The expectations that the change in the country's political system at the beginning of the 21st century would bring significant improvements in media freedom have been disappointed. Over the last decade, the media freedom index has been steadily declining, placing Serbia among the countries with a "problematic situation" regarding media freedom (Statista, Press Freedom Index). This study aims to analyze the metajournalistic discourse (Carlson 2016; Vos Ferrucci, Nelson and Davis 2020) in texts published in online media and address the research questions: RQ1: How do journalists in Serbia interpret "media freedom" through the discourse published in online media texts? and RQ2: What is the tone of that metadiscourse? The analyzed texts were published in ten online media outlets in 2021 and 2022. The texts were collected using the news-generating website naslovi.net, using the keyword "media freedom." A total of 230 texts were selected in which journalists served as sources of information, either through statements or in authored texts (columns, commentaries). Through further analysis, the texts were categorized into four categories, created based on the dominant discourse prevailing in the text. The majority of the texts fell into the category of "pressures and attacks" (142), followed by "state and media" (63), "ethics and the law" (22), while three texts were related to the "market." The results indicate a predominantly negative discourse, which is in line with the axiom that gaining media freedom in challenging political systems is a daily effort.