The SNS candidate list for Belgrade election has received the most coverage in daily press, with 245 positive media reports which is 70% more than all the candidate lists put together – the analysis of the six weeks of election campaign, conducted by Transparency Serbia, has shown.
According to the analysis, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, after whom the SNS’ candidate list is named, is the reason for the extensive media coverage. His image appeared 155 times on front pages of the Serbian daily newspapers, out of which 135 was in a positive context, 7 in neutral context and 13 in negative context.
Sinisa Mali’s name appeared 33 times in a positive and 3 in a negative context in the newspapers, Goran Vesić was mentioned 11 times in a positive and once in a negative context while candidate Zoran Radojicic was mentioned 11 times, all in a positive context. In total, the leader, candidates and the SNS appeared 283 times on the front pages with 245 of them being in a positive context and 10 in a neutral one. The negative coverage they received (28 articles in total) appeared on the front pages of the Danas daily.
Dragan Djilas takes the second place in the number of appearances in the Serbian dailies – out of 110 articles in which he was mentioned, 64 had a negative tone (58 of them were tabloids).
Aleksandar Sapic had fewer front pages, but also received more negative publicity – 9 out of 30 articles about Sapic were in a positive tone and 12 in a negative. The candidate list of Dosta je Bilo and Dveri appeared 20 times on front pages of Serbian dailies, out of which 7 in a neutral context and 5 in a negative one. There was no negative front page coverage of the candidate lists helmed by Vojislav Seselj from the Radicals and Ivica Dacic from the Socialists.
There have been no significant changes in relation to the media coverage analysis published by Transparency Serbia after four weeks of the Belgrade election campaign.
(Nova Ekonomija, 26.02.2018)