INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: 

The Fall of OBN

Ruined by bad management, misunderstandings and re-aligned international priorities, the most ambitious Western media project in Bosnia collapses.

By Julie Poucher Harbin in Sarajevo (May 2001)

Abandoned by its international founders and financiers six months ago, Bosnia's only independent nationwide television network is struggling to survive in a country still dominated by divided, nationalist-driven institutions.

With $20 million invested over the past five years in infrastructure and programming, the Open Broadcast Network, OBN, was the biggest western media project undertaken in Bosnia, with the US government donating $8.65 million and the European Commission providing 4.5 million euro (around $3.8 million).

But following a negative EC audit of OBN released last autumn, all of its donors have discontinued funding, forcing the London-based OBN International Trust, which controls most OBN assets in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to go into liquidation in January 2001 and search for buyers.

The network may lose its battle and be closed if, as expected, Bosnia's Communications Regulatory Agency revokes its frequency permission within the year owing to OBN's financial problems. The international community, meanwhile, has shifted towards funding the reform of Bosnia's Public Broadcasting System, PBS, as well as continuing to support smaller private stations.

At the station, staffing and other expenditure has been slashed, a key affiliate has abandoned the network, and many observers wonder how the station even remains on the air.

Why has OBN been abandoned, what is at stake, and what are the lessons to be learned?

INDEPENDENT TV FOR BOSNIA. OBN, initially called TVIN, was created in 1996 at the initiative of the Bosnia's top international mediator, the Office of the High Representative, OHR, to break the nationalist monopoly in broadcasting. The OHR's media strategy was to create an independent media regulator, reform the public broadcasting system and develop an independent, commercially viable alternative.

Establishing a new public broadcasting system and an independent media regulator was not possible then, since the three hard-line political parties had divided up state broadcasting and its regulation amongst themselves.

But there was a second problem. With the international community driving hard for Bosnia to hold elections just nine months after the formal signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, a solution for the media had to be found and found fast. As long as all broadcast media were under the control of nationalist interests, it would be difficult to assert that any elections were free and fair.

So with those objectives impossible to meet in 1996, OHR and the international community quickly cobbled together a plan that could create an independent commercial network almost overnight. The solution was to stitch together a network from existing affiliates - and spend.

In light of the importance of the project - at a time when the guns in Bosnia had only recently been silenced - money was seen as no object. Representatives of European donors attending the launch meeting of the project in Brussels were aghast at the huge sums bandied about by the project's boosters. Brushing aside such concerns, one American at the meeting involved in funding scoffed at the numbers as "chump change".

Despite any initial misgivings, once the project was launched, the donor community fell in line. In its first year, the US, the European Commission, the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Luxembourg, Ireland and the Czech Republic gave TVIN a total of $10.2 million in funds, transmission links and studio equipment.

A governing council, comprising representatives of donor countries and organisations which supported TVIN, chaired by an OHR representative, was set up to oversee operations.

The International Federation of Journalists, IFJ, took charge of the financial management, auditing and technical implementation of the project. An international broadcaster, Mike Challenger, was named TVIN's operations director, but other positions were given to local professionals, many of whom had come over from the state-run television, RTV BiH.

Without its own transmitters and frequencies TVIN relied on five regional TV stations to broadcast its programming. Media professionals associated with the project at the time roll their eyes at the money wasted because of the urgency of purchasing new equipment, any equipment, and getting it to Bosnia on time. There was little time for comparative shopping or bidding and suppliers were able to charge top rate.

Other problems were more humorous. In the heady post-war days, advertising sprung up in Sarajevo, on billboards and the sides of trams. Yet the huge banners appearing for "TVIN" turned out to be for a local furniture shop, not the biggest international media project in the region. Clearly the kind of careful market-testing, audience research and image analysis that would be fundamental in launching of any commercial station in the West had not even been considered.

For all that effort and expense, the station failed in its first goal, only going on air the week before Bosnia's first post-war elections in September 1996. It was an inauspicious beginning: in the midst of a discussion programme the first night, someone kicked a plug, cutting the power and taking the programme off the air. Technical problems plagued the entire first week - the very days before the election - with the sound and even the picture often interrupted.

This did not stop Anthony Lake, the then-US National Security Advisor, writing an editorial in The New York Times boasting about the strides taken towards Bosnian democracy in the run-up to the elections - including the launch of the first independent nation-wide broadcaster. He wrote of the "important progress in creating the conditions for successful elections".

TEETHING PAINS. If politics appeared to have driven the project more than programming, nevertheless, the station did mark a breakthrough, providing an alternative to the television stations under the control of the Bosniak (Muslim), Bosnian Serb and Croat nationalist hard-liners. This was at a time when the Bosnian Serb station ran reports about events in Sarajevo under the banner "Foreign News", and bias, stereotyping and even hate speech were common.

In this context, TVIN was something fresh. The public welcomed a new professional television network apparently free from ethnic and political influence. Opinion remained divided over whether it was truly a "Bosnian" institution or an internationally controlled creation. But it did attempt to provide something not always readily available on other stations: reliable information.

Although it succeeded in breaking the nationalist monopoly, problems were rife with OBN's affiliates. The affiliates received substantial donations of TV equipment, and were only required to broadcast TVIN's main evening news, but remained dissatisfied with their contracts.

The centre was not especially happy either. Especially at the start, the quality of reports was patchy. The idea was that the affiliates themselves would produce reports, which would be transmitted to the centre in Sarajevo and broadcast through the network. But for all their status as "independent" media, many of the stations had strong political leanings anyway, and poor professional standards. At the start, the station even lacks both a Bosnian Serb and a Bosian Croat affiliate, without which the whole idea could hardly make sense.

Material produced by the hub in Sarajevo had its limitations, too. The bane of post-Yugoslav television are the endless reports on press conferences highlighting - just like the old, pre-war days - every utterance of the party leaders, and for footage filming the obedient journalists scribbling down every word. The nationalist-dominated stations stuck closely to this format for the respective Serb, Croat and Bosniak party leaders. In form, TVIN was not always that different, just that it lent such reverent, and dull, coverage to the international representatives running Bosnia.

Quality gradually improved, however. Following the split in the Bosnian Serb leadership, the environment in Banja Luka became more open, and a new affiliate, ATV Banja Luka, was created to provide a leg for the network in Republika Srpska. International trainers, programming assistance and other support was provided. The station's flagship evening news programme, TV INFO, began to take its place as an important component of the Bosnian media scene.

Nevertheless, two stations left the network by the end of 1997, saying they were being used merely as transmitters and were losing viewers. Studio 99, the Sarajevo station popular with the international community and locals for its independent reporting, had left the network after only 12 days for similar reasons.

"I didn't want to be an instrument of domestic or foreign politicians," says Adil Kulenovic, Studio 99 director. He had stinging words for the international community and said he does not consider OBN "a private station" but "an international station financed by internationals".

GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD. OBN's relationship with its affiliates was not the only problem. Both the1996 and 1997 IFJ audits showed that although the funds received from donors were used for their intended purposes, "dependence on donor contributions without clear commitments on when funds will be received" had contributed to a weak financial position.

The International Crisis Group, in a March 1997 report, questioned whether a business plan that completely relied on donors could work. The report noted that OBN's concept had "the greatest potential to challenge the predominance of the nationalist media". But it added that "by all objective criteria TVIN (OBN) is a disaster which should be scrapped." The report concluded: "If it was a business, it would already have folded, and, unless radically reconfigured, further cash subsidies will simply be throwing good money after bad."

According to OHR Head of Media Development Chris Riley, there was "difficulty in coming up with a strategy that would ensure it was self-sustainable". OBN "was not set up as a viable on-going business concern, it was set up to break the news monopoly." In other words, having got the station up and running for political reasons, no one seemed to have much idea how to keep it going.

But EC spokesperson Frane Maroevic said that, since the beginning, all of the business plans indicated that TVIN would grow into a commercial network within five years. That is also what the US government, TVIN's biggest donor, believed. But the plans were not working.

The first serious legal and management changes were made in 1997-98 to address the problem of viability. Until then, TVIN had not been a legal entity and had only been allowed to broadcast on the basis of a special memorandum of understanding between the OHR, international donors and local politicians.

TVIN was renamed OBN, and OBN Bosnia (OBN dd) was finally legally registered in Sarajevo as the trading company that operated OBN TV. At the same time, OBN International Trust was set up to take over the role of the IFJ. The trust is a limited liability company incorporated in England to act as a holding company for donations, and is the legal owner of OBN's assets. The trust owns 48 per cent of the share capital of OBN Bosnia, with a few local OBN managers owning the remaining 52 per cent.

In September 1998, Jenny Ranson took over as chief executive officer of OBN. Formerly head of the TV and information department at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she had coordinated FCO support for projects in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere around the world. Gabrijel Vukadin, formerly a technical director of pre-war Sarajevo Television and for a few months OBN's operations manager, was promoted to general manager. Challenger had already removed most of the newsroom staff that year because he felt they were "inefficient and the newsroom was full of nepotism" says Ranson.

Tensions were high: "When I arrived it was obvious that there was a management problem, and it spilled over into finance." She said OBN's managers were either trained in the old socialist system, or were young and inexperienced. Even Vukadin, who "was the best one there". . . and a good man", was not, she says, "used to transparent decision making".

Donors were asked to aid management training but most only wanted to train journalists. According to Ranson, local staff were overpaid, but she had trouble reducing salaries, as Challenger's earlier round of sackings had "caused a lot of bad feeling and insecurity".

Vukadin told IWPR that with average monthly salaries of 1200 DM (approx. $600) the 150 staff at OBN were among the highest paid journalists in Bosnia, a country where the average journalist's salary is between 200-300 DM. Vukadin said his own salary was the fourth or fifth highest salary of all media managers in Bosnia.

Ranson and Vukadin quickly hired several well-known Bosnian journalists and technical staff. This was soon reflected in better programs, which acquired a new audience, and with it, increased political influence. OBN was broadcasting its entire program, 24 hours a day, by satellite to 14 different affiliates, some of which were airing 50-80 per cent of OBN's programs. Even viewers in Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, and in the Yugoslav capital Belgrade, were able to pick up the signal on their cable systems.

A small marketing and advertising department had been established in 1998, but income was low. Vukadin said OBN's advertising revenue could never cover all the station's expenses, especially its biggest expense, the satellite bill of 100,000 DM a month, paid for by foreign donations.

With a financial situation that was still difficult, OBN underwent yet another structural change, with the creation of a new professional board was created to help oversee OBN operations. The 11 members included professional broadcasters representing the EU, the US, Canada, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

The board also included Ranson, Steve Turner, an international broadcasting consultant with considerable experience in the Balkans, and Milan Trivic, a Bosnian producer. Turner and Trivic, who joined as independents, had worked closely with Ranson on Balkan media development issues while she was at the Foreign Office. Three members of the OBN trust resigned at that point, and Trivic, Turner and Ranson also became the new directors of the OBN trust.

The reorganisation of the management structure did nothing to alter OBN's dependence on donor funding, however. According to Ranson, OBN had been set up with donated assets and had only enough cash to operate on a month-by-month basis. With no reserve capital and western funds that often arrived late, OBN's operations were hampered. According to Ranson, the European Commission "was consistently seriously late with donations". She says, "As CEO I knew we were heading for a financial crisis and I threatened to take the network off the air several times."

According to Turner, the member of the OBN board and the OBN trust, in 1999 a five-year business plan for full self-sustainability was drawn up by an American consultant. Paid for by the US, the plan was modified by the OBN board and then agreed to and adopted by the donor's council, the OBN board, and the OBN trust.

The plan envisioned a 20 per cent reduction in dependence on donations each year, from 1999-2004. "There was to be sufficient income generated through advertising sales, sponsorship, program sales and other commercial activity in order for there to be no further requirement for donations," Turner explained.

Whether such expectations were realistic or not, the plan would hardly have a chance. . At the start, the station even lacks both a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Croat affiliate, without which the whole idea could hardly make sense.

SENDING IN THE AUDITORS. By the end of 1999, things had gone from bad to worse. According to European Commission (EC) spokesperson Maroevic, after OBN submitted its final report for the 1998 EC funding, which had been dispersed only in April 1999, Brussels asked, in November, for clarification and justifying receipts.

The EC decided not to disperse the 1999 money until the financial situation with its 1998 donation had been cleared up. It would take OBN until April 2000 to submit the necessary receipts.

Then, in what could end up as the network's death knell, the EC Court of Auditors did not like what it saw and Brussels decided to conduct a full-scale audit that summer.

Maroevic does not blame Ranson for the problems she had inherited. But he insists that no reforms had been undertaken subsequently to run OBN like a commercial business - in particular internal financial management systems.

"They were far more focused on 'How do we get more money out of the donors?' rather than 'How do we make more money ourselves?'" he says. On several occasions, he adds, "OBN was told: 'You need to pull your socks up. You really need to reform.'"

According to OBN, it was the donors who were in default. According to Turner, by summer 2000, only 7.2 per cent of that year's pledged funding by all the donors had been received. There was a particular problem over late payments from the EC, "from whom no cash had been received in 2000 and some amounts were still owed from 1999, 1998 and 1997.

"This shortfall had serious implications in what had been a planned and managed cash flow, based on the pledges agreed by donors," says Turner. "Because of this, the management effort at OBN had to be diverted from running and development of the network to financial independence, fire-fighting the creditors and keeping the network on-air."

Maroevic explains that while the audit was in progress no money could be dispersed. During these years, Brussels did experience considerable problems with late payments - to such an extent that one of the region's most famous broadcaster's, Veran Matic of B-92 Radio in Belgrade, took to saying that after Slobodan Milosevic his greatest enemy was the European Commission. The current Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, has led a special drive to clear up the payments backlog and institute new, more efficient procedures.

Maroevic nevertheless defends the EC's "lateness" by explaining that budget years are usually implemented later in the same year, or the following year, and funds relating to them can be disbursed in up to three years.

In a final effort to streamline and strengthen management, the chairman of the OBN board, Belgian broadcaster Robert Stephane, took over from Ranson as chief executive officer in summer 2000. Stephane was determined to have his go at the network, but by then it may have been too late.

The conclusion of the EC audit, which was completed at the end of August 2000, is harsh: "No written procedures of internal organisation nor internal control exists. There are no official procedures for tendering, purchases, orders, approval of invoices."

OBN's accounting procedures were called into question. The auditors, according to Maroevic were especially critical of the handling of a payment for an overdue satellite bill. In April 2000, OBN's satellite bill was overdue and, according to Ranson, the network was about to be taken off the air.

As she explains it, the payment was scheduled to be paid out of the EU donation, but it was late. So at the last minute, OBN management secured a cash donation from Sweden that was used - with the full consent of the Swedish government - to pay the satellite bill pending receipt of the EU money. It was planned that when the EU money was received it would be accounted for against the satellite bill as originally intended, freeing up the Swedish money.

EC auditors, however, found that OBN did not properly document that exchange. According to the audit, OBN submitted the satellite bill to the EC for payment after the Swedes paid it.

Ranson denies that there was anything amiss with OBN's accounting. Ranson said OBN's usual annual audits were carried out by international Belgian accounting firm Moore Stephens, which was "satisfied" with OBN. She notes that their reports had been made available to the international community.

Turner agrees. "The EC audit found no irregularities, no mismanagement of funds and nothing that warranted more than suggestions for future changes in financial management and some training for locally employed staff," he says.

"No one's accusing anyone of fraud," says Maroevic. "But these kind of procedures are completely unacceptable when dealing with public funds."

PULLING THE PLUG. When the network's donor council met in Brussels in October 2000, the EC announced that it no longer supported continuing donations in line with OBN's business plan. The EC said further funding of the network would be conditional on improved financial management, including changes recommended in the audit. The Brussels wanted specific assurances that further money would not be used to pay off debts, since EC rules forbid retroactive funding.

Maroevic stated that the outstanding 900,000 DM from the EC's 1999 budget for OBN is still available to OBN until the expiration of the commitment at the end of 2001 - if OBN can demonstrate that its finances are in order. But Turner considered the offer disingenuous. "It was clear to everyone at this meeting, including the EU representatives, that OBN - by then close to bankruptcy - had neither the resources nor the time to implement those changes," he says.

Once the EU withheld and withdrew funding, no other donor was prepared to make donations to the OBN, including the Americans.

The US reacted to the EC announcement of the audit results and its decision to suspend funding to OBN with surprise and disappointment. The US said it was left with no choice but to discontinue funding as well.

According to the US Embassy in Sarajevo, although there were rumours that the EC audit would point to "something approaching malfeasance, if not malfeasance", the EC did not notify the Americans of the audit results and their plans before the October meeting - nor did they ever give them full access to the audit.

"All the sudden I get this kind of bomblet dropped on my desk", Ambassador Thomas Miller told IWPR. "We kind of were left out there hanging." The US Embassy immediately asked the EC for the audit, but was told it was "an internal document" and it "wasn't finished yet."

Maroevic insists that the Americans were briefed. They "never formally requested the audit report in official written form . . . but asked for it verbally", he says, stressing that the EC cannot release the report until the beneficiary has had the opportunity to comment.

In any event, the Americans were not happy. "We have always acted above board when it comes to OBN", says Miller. "The way this whole thing proceeded put us in an impossible situation."

The US government decided against transferring the remaining $900,000 for the year 2000 to OBN. By way of explanation, it cited "lack of EC support, and lack of a viable plan to make OBN self-sufficient, [which] persuaded us that further support would only delay the inevitable".

OBN threatened to go off the air twice before the November elections, and asked the Americans for money to pay their satellite bill. The US embassy tried to get other donors and NGOs interested in supporting OBN through the elections, since they could not give OBN any more money. No more money came.

OBN ON THE BLOCK. Bosnia's unstable political and economic situation has made it hard for any commercial television network to survive strictly on the market. But many observers would say OBN scarcely tried. For five years it relied mainly on foreign donors to support its infrastructure, programming and running costs, including expensive 24-hour satellite usage. Now that the money from donors has dried up, the greatest surprise is that OBN has remained on air at all.

Since the crisis erupted, programming and air-time have been reduced, running costs have been slashed from 10 million DM (approx. $5 million) in 2000 to 4 million DM in 2001 [approximately $2 million], salaries have been reduced by one one-third, and staff numbers have been halved. The use of satellite transition has been rationed.

OBN's affiliates, 13 private stations which had entered into broadcast sharing arrangements with the network, have not been paid since last summer. Vukadin, OBN's general manager, fears he may lose them. In December he lost his only affiliate in Republika Srpska, ATV Banja Luka, which cut its ties with the network over "big debts it incurred by being part of the network". ATV's departure was a big blow, at a stroke reducing the networks coverage from 80 per cent of the country to between 60 to 70 per cent.

Vukadin is bitter about the loss. He has accused "a certain NGO funded by a certain government" of trying to create another network with the participation of ATV Banja Luka and others. This statement appears to refer to the American non-governmental organisation the International Research & Exchanges Board, IREX, as several western diplomats said there were rumours that IREX was trying to create an alternate television network with funds from the US government through its ProMedia project.

A spokesperson for ProMedia in Washington denied it was trying to create an alternative network to OBN, stating simply that its mission in Bosnia was to support an independent commercial media sector.

Miller, US ambassador to Bosnia since 1999, insists while some people may have talked to him about creating an alternative network, no plan was under consideration. "I want to make sure that if there is going to be a network, that it eventually can transition to a self-sustaining mode," he says.

Meanwhile OBN's local management is pursuing new projects with commercial networks in several Balkan states to increase the possibilities of extra revenues. OBN expects to sign a contract with Serbia soon for a Sarajevo-Belgrade co-produced quiz show.

OBN continues to provide a forum for democratic discussions and its news reports remain politically balanced. Bosnia's High Representative, Wolfgang Petritsch, recently made a well-publicised appearance on an OBN call-in show to discuss recent nationalist disturbances in the country.

A media expert close to OBN said two options were under consideration - to be sold, or to become a "news provider" for the new public television. The expert says there are a few interested buyers, including "an international group which has already invested heavily in Eastern Europe", but no contracts have been signed.

Trying to sell the network has not been easy. The only candidate to demonstrate interest in buying the station towards the end of 2000 was Gavrilo Bobar, a wealthy Bosnian Serb businessman. Bobar withdrew from the deal at the last moment, after the European Union mission in Bosnia raised questions about the ownership of OBN property, while others in the international community questioned Bobar's business ties to Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb leaders who have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

COMPETING AGENDAS. The donors and the managers will continue to engage in their chicken and egg dispute: whether late grant payments or poor financial controls were the primary problems, and how much the one exacerbated the other. Clearly the project was desperately flawed by the absence of clear thinking and meaningful planning at the outset. Nevertheless, the broader explanation for the demise of OBN seemed to be competing - and shifting - international agendas. Initially created as a weapon against nationalist propaganda, rather than as a commercial operation, OBN received everything it needed from the donors until the well dried up and the Public Broadcast System became the priority.

Riley from OHR explains that the development of the OBN did not take place as was planned owing to donor fatigue, complicated aid dispersal regulations and Bosnia's slower than anticipated economic recovery. "One of the great lessons from the OBN experiment is . . . you have to make sure that the station that you are getting involved with can afford to meet its own payroll. You don't protect them from the harsh economic reality," Riley said.

There were additional questions raised throughout the project by the EC and the OHR as to whether OBN's development as an independent commercial broadcaster suited the aims of the international community and the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord, since there are very few requirements for a commercial broadcaster to act as a provider of public information.

In fact, before the results of the EC audit were even known, Petritsch tried to find a compromise solution. He sent a letter to OBN's board and donor country ambassadors on July 3, 2000, urging them to support folding OBN into Bosnia's public broadcasting system.

"Despite the success of OBN and the continued support of the donor community, it continues to struggle for survival in an economic environment that has failed to develop sufficiently to allow the withdrawal of international aid in the foreseeable future," Petritsch wrote.

In the letter, he said he had to "re-evaluate" his media strategy in line with the May 2000 declaration of the Peace Implementation Council (the international body coordinating Bosnia's peace implementation process). This meant "taking into consideration the continuing decrease in international donations to this country and the requirements for setting up PBS", he wrote.

"I therefore deem it prudent to consider folding the OBN into the PBS project, thus guaranteeing its survival regardless of the state of economic developments in the private sector, and ensuring the citizens have access to a nationwide service insulated from party political control," the High Representative concluded. "Current donor support for OBN must continue to the end of 2001, or we run the very serious risk of failure by destroying OBN without setting a fitting PBS successor in place."

But Ranson, Turner and Vukadin accuse the EC of using the audit to get rid of OBN, and focus on PBS. "The European Union tried and found a reason to leave the project because they decided to support the introduction of the Public Broadcasting System," says Vukadin. "I really cannot understand that the international community has any interest in destroying something that so much was invested in."

Says his colleague Turner, "They had to justify the new course of action in a way that would also justify throwing away everything achieved to date."

Maroevic defends the EU's action and says the EC had allocated money for both OBN and PBS based on a decision taken at the end of 1999. He said the money originally slated for OBN would not be used for PBS but would be returned to the donor countries.

He stressed that unlike with OBN, the EC was not funding PBS salaries, telephone, electric and satellite bills, as, but was only providing technical infrastructure, such as transmission equipment and cameras. Maroevic said he was now refusing projects that covered running costs. "If you give man a fish, he'll feed his family for a day; give him a net and he'll fish for a year, or forever," he says.

Turner disagrees: "OBN was on plan, had a good chance of becoming self-sustainable and had to close not because of any shortfall within but because of the international community that established it."

Ranson says OBN's decline "is all because diplomatic amateurs who know nothing about the media all wanted to take their own pet schemes forward, and could never agree among themselves as to the model to be followed."

Michael Adler, a special assistant to US Ambassador Miller, said when he carried out a review of the OBN board, he could see the competing agendas the board had to balance. The US, at the time, had been more interested in developing OBN as a private commercial network, while the Europeans were thinking more about turning OBN into a public broadcaster.

According to Miller, the balance of public and private media, and the tension between the two philosophies, is the kind of struggle that the US will continue to have with its European colleagues. Americans have tended to fund commercial/private broadcasters, and the Europeans are more interested in funding public broadcasters. Similarly, at times quite bitter tensions have erupted between Washington and Brussels over the development of television in Kosovo.

Miller says the US was not interested in underwriting private stations that only broadcast entertainment. But Washington was, he says, ready to support private media, like OBN, which at the same time provided objective, fair and critical news coverage, and entertainment and sports programs that attracted viewers and advertising revenue.

Without the EU report, the US would probably have continued to fund OBN for some time, Miller say, adding that if Vukadin "wants to be upset, he can be upset at the EU. They're the ones who started this whole chain of events."

Miller stresses that the main responsibility for OBN's fate lay with OBN, not with outside donors. "First and foremost I would say to OBN, 'Why didn't you clean up your own house if the [EC] allegations are true?'" But he adds, "I don't think we're doing the media in this country any favours by perpetuating a sense of dependency, and the question is at what point should you start making a transition and at what point you cut the lifeline."

Julie Poucher Harbin is a former editor of Bosnia's independent news agency, ONASA

source: www.iwpr.net 
published by: Roland Brunner rbr@medienhilfe.ch date of release on this site: 16-08-2001

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