The Higher Court in Belgrade has thrown out a lawsuit filed by a pro-regime tabloid editor against N1 News Director Jugoslav Cosic.
The April 18 ruling said that the lawsuit filed by Informer tabloid editor in chief Dragan Vucicevic was unfounded.
Vucicevic filed suit over an article in the November 16, 2012 issue of Belgrade daily Blic, claiming that Cosic expressed untrue, fabricated and slanderous claims which included claims that Informer was a pseudo-newspaper, that Vucicevic negotiated with members of the so-called Zemun crime clan over payments for stories attacking the late Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic which were based on allegedly secretly recorded phone calls between Vucicevic and the heads of the crime group.
The court found that Cosic made the claims about Vucicevic as a metaphor about the state of the media, saying that in his opinion Vucicevic’s reporting was not unbiased but was offering his services.
The court also accepted the claim that Cosic had sufficient reason to believe that the information he published about Vucicevic was accurate. The court said that the defendant had the right to express his views and opinions and to disseminate the information even if there was suspicion about the information being true because his opinions were expressed about the state of society and the media.
“This is a question of public interest and drawing attention to problems in the media and journalism field, that is the behaviour of the plaintiff as the personification and metaphor for biased journalism,” the ruling said and added that Cosic “did not show a lack of journalistic attention bearing in mind that the source of the information was a person in a high state position and that the information coincided with other circumstances”. “The defendant cannot be thought to have blindly believed the source of the information and that he did not act with due attention,” it said.
The court said that Vucicevic, as a journalist and public figure, has to tolerate opinions expressed about his behaviour and criticism of his work to a greater extent than ordinary citizens.
