A day after Serbian strongman’s fall, protesters storm the office of a pro-govt outlet

On October 26, less than 24 hours after Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in the snap parliamentary elections against the student-led Students’ List, dozens of protesters stormed the offices of Informer, a pro-government tabloid and TV network.

Among them was the mother of one of the 16 victims of the Novi Sad railway station disaster, according to AFP. For context, the deadly collapse of the railway station roof in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, in November 2024, was widely blamed on corruption. It triggered Serbia’s largest student-led protests since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, which eventually snowballed into the political movement that ousted Vucic.

Protesters interrupted Informer’s regular broadcast, and in a video circulating on social media, one man demanded that editor-in-chief Dragan Vucicevic “apologise sincerely to his free Serbian people.” After brief clashes with police, the crowd dispersed.

For months, pro-government outlets like Informer cast protesting students as dangerous actors conspiring to destabilise Serbia. On Sunday, those students won.  

According to the BBC, with 97 percent of polling stations counted, “students had won 2.25 million votes (53 percent) and the former ruling party 1.67 million (39 percent)”, on a near-record turnout of almost 70 percent, quoting Serbia's election commission. Vucic, who had resigned the presidency to run for prime minister, conceded less than two hours after polls closed.

A tabloid with the record

This is not the first time protesters have gone after Informer. In March 2025, students gathered outside its headquarters for a rally. One speaker at the rally, as reported by N1 TV, said Informer is “a political newsletter disguised as a media outlet.” Her sharper point was that hatred is its main rhetoric, creating an atmosphere in which violence becomes legitimate. “They don’t inform, they persecute,” she said. Students read out provisions of the Code of Journalists of Serbia and hung parts of it on the gate.

The protester wasn’t wrong. In a June 2026 Reuters Institute report, Snjezana Milivojevic, a retired professor of public opinion and media studies at the University of Belgrade, writes that pro-government tabloids have often been used to “discredit dissenting voices, run smear campaigns” and amplify nationalist and anti-EU narratives. 

Informer, she notes, was among three tabloids the Press Council named for infringing the Code of Ethics in the second half of 2025, with 1,456 violations in its case. Since launching a cable news channel in November 2024, it has reached 14 percent of the report’s survey respondents weekly offline and 12 percent online, with the lowest public trust of any brand surveyed at 19 percent. Reach without credibility is seemingly the business model. 

Again, sounds familiar? 

How the press was captured

Milivojevic writes that Serbia’s media landscape has “deteriorated significantly during the ongoing political crisis.” Reporters Without Borders tells the same story, ranking Serbia 104th of 180 countries in 2026, down from 96th in 2025, with the political indicator sliding from 141st to 151st. In its survey, RSF had called Vucic a “press freedom predator.”

The government, Milivojevic writes, responded to the protests by “tightening control over the judiciary, media, and universities,” with “over 1,636 arrests reported between June and September 2025.” The media ownership structure tells the rest of the story. 

According to Milivojevic’s report, all national commercial channels are owned by companies tied to the political elites, which “effectively closes the mainstream media to reporting critical of the government.”  State-owned Telekom Srbija has bought more than 30 TV channels in a year and became, in her words, “the major delivery platform, and one of the top advertisers in the country.”

The two critical channels, N1 and TV Nova, are owned by United Group, “an international telecom and media company”, according to the report. Vucic regularly targeted them “as anti-Serbian or even terrorist media,” notes Milivojevic. A leaked conversation from August 2025 caught United Group’s new CEO agreeing to dismiss its media head at Vucic’s request. On April 6, 2026, N1’s director of news, Igor Bozic, was replaced, and journalists’ unions and media watchers said steps like these could lead to the “neutering or shutting down of N1.”

What we have here is concentration of ownership, state money as leverage, owners who flinch, and a prime-time chorus that brands dissenters as enemies of the nation. If you’re a consumer of mainstream TV media in India, this all seems rather too familiar. 

Furthermore, RSF counted at least 100 physical attacks on reporters covering the 2025 protests, many by police officers, and noted illegal phone hacking of journalists by the intelligence service and police. 

None of this makes Monday’s scenes simple. A crowd entering a newsroom, even that of a propaganda outlet, is a troubling image, and press freedom groups will rightly say so. But the anger at Informer’s door was built by an outlet that treated fellow citizens as targets.

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