CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY ON THE ONLINE PORTALS IN SERBIA

Abstract

There has been an increase in the number of online portals in Serbia, which results in more competition in the media market. Due to their desire to increase readership, that is, to increase the number of “clicks” on published texts and thus be among the most visited, editors often opt for sensationalism. Such reporting often leads to the violation of the right to privacy, especially when it comes to accidents and misfortunes that are published in the “Crime and accidents” or “Crime and death” section. This is often the case not only in the texts, but also in the headlines or the visual frame of the photos. In this paper, the authors investigate the principle of “Respect for privacy” on the example of a case study of an accident in the brown coal mine “Soko” near Sokobanja. The accident happened on April 1, 2022, and eight miners lost their lives. The case study is based on the reporting of the local online portal from Niš called Južne vesti. The research was conducted from April 1 to October 25, 2022. The unit of analysis is each published newspaper article that dealt with this accident. In the paper, the authors examine whether the Južne vesti portal respected the right to privacy of the victims and their families, as well as other guidelines of media ethics. The corpus is composed of 21 analyzed texts, all of which were published on the Južne vesti portal under the sections “Society” and “Crime and accidents”. Despite the sensationalism trends in the Serbian online media, the findings of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of our case study show that the Južne vesti portal respected the privacy of the victims and their families when reporting on the “Soko” mine accident.