BIRN: The State Paid Slavko Stijaković’s Media for Articles Featuring Invented People
(Source: NovaS, Author: BIRN) A network of 24 online portals owned by retired officer Slavko Stijaković has received nearly half a million euros in grants for media financing since 2021, even though articles published within these publicly funded projects contained plagiarized material and even nonexistent interviewees to whom statements from other people were attributed, BIRN reports.
“My first daughter was born when I was 24. Honestly, I was scared of what kind of parent I would be, even though I was financially secure. That was my first reaction. However, when my daughter was born everything changed. I realized that nature arranges everything in its own way, and I wouldn’t trade that feeling for anything — the moment a small being is born, whom you are a father to and who is your little copy.”
This statement was given in 2025 by a person referred to as Branko Đurić for the portal Ramonda.
Word for word, the same statement — except with the number 28 instead of 24 — was given by someone called Marko Petrović for the portal Šest žica a year earlier.
Both articles, in which these statements appear, were funded from the state budget, BIRN writes.
The parenting article on Ramonda was published as part of a project titled “My Dad and I,” financed by the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications, while the article on Šest žica was part of the project “My Dad, My Hero,” financed by the Municipality of Soko Banja.
Both websites belong to a network of 24 online portals owned by retired JNA officer Slavko Stijaković, which in the past five years has received close to half a million euros in grants from the state and local governments for media financing.
Stijaković’s media have previously drawn public attention, and in May this year Cenzolovka reported that his portals received around 200,000 euros from competitions just this year.
An analysis of the content funded by these grants shows that taxpayer money was used for articles containing invented interviewees, plagiarized statements or sentences, and even entire passages copied from other websites. Identical articles or variations of them were also published across different portals — and thus paid multiple times from different projects.
Gordana Novaković, Secretary-General of the Press Council, reminds that plagiarism and inventing interviewees represent serious violations of the Serbian Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
“Plagiarism is unacceptable and is considered a serious violation of the Code. This offense is regulated by Chapter Nine, which concerns authorship. It states that media republishing someone else’s content must indicate the source and authors. Inventing interviewees is also a serious violation — although it is not separately listed in the Code, it falls under accuracy of reporting regulated by Chapter One. By inventing interviewees, the media publish false information and thereby mislead the public,” Novaković said.
BIRN attempted to contact Stijaković through his company Tourist Television, which owns all the portals.
The company’s director, Živodarka Vitasović — who is also editor-in-chief of three of the network’s sites — refused to comment when the journalist presented the findings and explained that the topic concerned editorial policy and professional and ethical standards of the media owned by her company.
“I have no comment,” Vitasović said briefly.
She also refused to provide Stijaković’s phone number.
“I will forward your number to Mr. Stijaković,” she said.
Stijaković did not respond before publication.
The Ministry of Information and Telecommunications also did not respond to BIRN’s inquiries, including whether it carried out any audits or controls of the projects funded for Stijaković’s portals, and whether any measures were taken if irregularities were found.
This year, the Ministry did not only allocate funds to Stijaković’s media for reporting, but also for training others in journalism — the portal Peto tri 1941 received one million dinars to organize a two-day expert event titled “Methodology for Improving Journalism on Portals and Working in Online Media.”