[Translation prepared by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

SSP Loznica: Rio Tinto and party media are financed with the money of Loznica citizens, 19 June 2025

It is no news that in the competition for co-financing media content, which the City of Loznica announces year after year, the largest funds go to media outlets that act as an extended arm of the SNS government, spreading political influence and SNS propaganda. Nor is it new that propaganda for Rio Tinto and a positive narrative about opening a lithium mine are openly financed, since last year with 700,000 RSD the citizens of Loznica financed the portal “Vidik sa Cera” and their project “The Jadarite Mine – For and Against”, which published texts promoting the opening of the lithium mine in Jadar.

This year again, under the guise of a polemical title...“What is Rio Tinto to us, and what are we to them”, Mirjana Čvorović Gubelić, PR of Television Program Production “Publicinfo” Šabac, received 300,000 dinars...Altogether, Lotel and Podrinje, two media outlets owned by the same person, were allocated 3,100,000 out of a total of 6,980,000 of our money, so this year again almost everything went to the promotion and propaganda of SNS and Rio Tinto...

Since SNS came to power, the citizens of Loznica have been completely deprived of objective information, despite the fact that media content is financed with their money. By all parameters, we live in a country where there is no media freedom nor normal and encouraging conditions for journalists to work, and thus the results of the competition for co-financing media content, published on June 17, 2025, are a mirror of the autocratic SNS government.