The world is on fire. Amid burning forests, people fleeing, and wars, one thing is often forgotten: the media landscape is in a critical state. Anyone who steps outside the bubble of the eternal ‘now’ realizes that this crisis is not without precedent. What did previous generations learn from the media crises of their time? What might be useful today? Larisa Ranković reflects on her socialization in the Balkans to explore these questions.
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Serbia’s media landscape has sharply declined, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, recently published, notes. Overall trust in media has decreased to just 22% due to deep political polarization. The report also states that rising state ownership, coupled with intensifying financial and political control, has created a hostile environment for independent journalists, severely compromising media freedom and safety. This is not the only crisis that Serbia’s media and their audiences are experiencing at the moment. They also share the AI crisis with the rest of the world.
In a recent Facebook post, someone compared the relationship between AI and journalism to that of a raspberry thief. The argument ran something like this: a journalist spends months on an investigation, takes personal risks, earns barely enough to survive. The outlet publishes the piece. AI scrapes it instantly. A reader asks AI about the topic, receives the journalist’s findings repackaged and unattributed, and never clicks through to the original. AI doesn’t pay anyone anything. Then came the raspberry metaphor: You spend months tending your crop. The moment you harvest, someone takes all of the produce – yours and every other farmer’s in the world. They sell it. What exactly do you grow the next season with?
“Generation X” in Serbia
For my generation, this media crisis is just the latest in a series. This generation in Serbia, born roughly between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, has now lived through three distinct media collapses. We didn’t choose to become experts in information warfare. History chose it for us.
Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” was published in 1991. The Serbian translation arrived in 1997. I have a photo of myself holding the book, taken near a lake in my hometown of Valjevo during the 1999 bombing. By then, we had already lived through a delayed, inverted version of everything the novel described. While Gen X in the West processed economic disappointment and ironic detachment in a broadly functioning media landscape, we were learning something more urgent: how do you stay oriented when the shared reality dissolves?
The answer was not irony. It was a set of skills. Uncomfortable ones.
You had to read between the lines, literally, when it came to state television. What wasn’t said was often more informative than what was. You developed an instinct for source and register: who is speaking, from where, and with what interest. You found the independent outlets – B92, Vreme, Naša Borba, Danas, and youth magazines – as sources of what was happening within and beyond the borders of the country under sanctions. We read them with hunger and pride. And as guardians of our sanity.
The student protests of 1992 and 1996 were organized by individuals who had learned this the hard way. Once the official story is clearly false, you stop asking what it is and start asking who benefits from it being told this way. That question is now taught in media literacy courses across Europe. We learned it on the street, at twenty, out of necessity.
What was lost in the first collapse
My teenage years in the mid-1980s coincided with what many journalists in Yugoslavia would later refer to as the golden age of the press. At the time, I didn’t know that, but I knew the media around me felt alive. Start magazine combined erotic photography with interviews with Susan Sontag and analysis of the Iran-Iraq War. Svijet published serious criticism alongside fashion and film. Weekly papers published in-depth reports and analyses. Journalists were specialists who spent enough time on stories to truly understand them. There were also media outlets that appealed to vastly different tastes.
By the early 1990s, the media in Yugoslavia was a different thing entirely. It started around 1987, with Politika – a paper that had a good reputation, and then turned into something else. Radio Television Serbia was declared a public enterprise and handed to the state. Journalists became employees who were required to follow instructions. At 7:30 in the evening – the time when families had gathered around the television for years to watch the news – what came out of the screen was no longer the same story as what was happening outside.
Professionalism was replaced by a ‘patriotic’ mission. Some journalists wore camouflage. Even the language was a victim. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ was presented as a way to restore national dignity.
Meanwhile, a Second Serbia of independent media and peace initiatives was emerging – B92, Vreme, Naša Borba, and Danas – and its members continued to report despite being labeled traitors. Starting in the late 1990s, journalists and students used the Internet to share news both internationally and within the country after the B92 news station was seized by the regime. This revealed a crack in the state’s monopoly on information. Political change followed in October 2000.
The second collapse was supposed to be the repair
Slobodan Milošević fell. Then Zoran Đinđić was shot on the street in broad daylight. After all of that, the internet felt like a genuine second chance. First blogs, then social networks. Then all of it. The promise was structural: no single point of control, no transmitter to seize, no editor to threaten. What dissidents once had only dreamed of had become possible.
I was part of that moment. I blogged. I won European journalism competitions for it. I watched journalists and editors across the continent work out what this new form could do. The excitement was real and not entirely wrong – some of what was promised came true. Independent journalism found new channels. The lateral-reading instinct turned out to be useful in a fragmented media landscape.
In a piece I published in 2008 on the portal of the Sarajevo Media Center, I wrote: “Media outlets around the world are constantly finding strategies to mitigate the threat of the rapid development of the internet and turn it to their advantage. Some of these are hybrid media, elements of Web 2.0, and an increasing amount of content produced by media users themselves.”
And in the section about Serbia, I wrote this from the perspective of an internet enthusiast: “Although the websites of more up-to-date daily newspapers are refreshed with new news multiple times a day and have recently introduced several new user features (it is possible to leave comments, there are overviews of the most read news, those with the most comments, and those most frequently shared, or a ‘good news only’ page), the internet does not offer information that cannot be found in print editions. Interactivity with website visitors is, in a large number of cases among media outlets in Serbia, highly limited.”
What we did not see clearly enough was the infrastructure beneath the openness. The platforms were not neutral. The algorithms were not indifferent. The same forces that had learned to seize transmitters in the 1990s learned to shape feeds in the 2010s, and especially after that. The decentralized network was re-centralized – not (only) by governments but by advertising logic. It looked different from what we had seen before. It felt exactly the same.
The second collapse, unlike the first, we shared with everyone.
The third collapse, and why familiarity is not comforting
By the time we reached the third crisis, the media environment already looked a lot like it did in the nineties. In a sense, AI-generated content is having a similar effect on the information environment as hyperinflation had on the economy in Yugoslavia in 1993. It is destroying the unit of value. The lies are the problem, certainly. But the deeper problem is that the concept of truth itself is being destroyed.
The numbers confirm what the feeling already suggested. In newsrooms in Serbia, just like elsewhere, journalists increasingly experiment with using AI. They do so without training, ethical guidelines, or editorial direction, according to the 2025 findings of the BIRN report “Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence.” Based on a survey of 124 journalists and editors as well as focus group interviews nationwide, BIRN found that the use of AI is widespread yet barely discussed. Many respondents described the AI tools they use as “useful, but unreliable,” and reported having ethical dilemmas about such technology. A large majority said they had received no AI training, and only a few said their newsrooms have internal guidelines for the use of such tools.
For our generation, our first collapse was a sudden shock: closed borders, hyperinflation, and wars fought in our name several hundred kilometers away. Not to mention the entirely new social and media reality. This collapse is slower, quieter, and easier to ignore. People can remain in their social media bubbles for years without facing anything. But it catches up.
We have been here before. We know what the next chapter looks like. We would prefer to be wrong. Serbia’s Gen X can place this into a context that some commentators in the West lack. We know what it looks like when a society’s shared reality splits apart – not in theory but in daily life, over years, with specific costs: political violence, economic collapse, and the sustained psychological toll of living inside a story that you know is false but cannot escape. We know that the skills required for survival are uncomfortable. They are the skills of people who have been failed by the very institutions that were supposed to render those skills unnecessary.
We were either unlucky enough to live through our own crises more than once or to share some with the rest of the world. Still, I sometimes think that a new golden age of media – probably unlike anything we’ve seen before – might be just around the corner.