Milanka Opacic, a left-leaning lawmaker from Croatia’s ethnic Serb minority, is no stranger to intimidation. The former social policy and youth minister has had her share of vitriol from Croatian ultranationalists. But nothing like the venom she received while out and about in Zagreb two years ago.
For the first time, she felt scared.
“After 28 years in politics, I’ve received different types of threats, but never before have people attacked me on the street,” said Opacic, a long-time member of the Social Democratic Party and an ex vice-president of parliament.
It was only after she complained to police and a friend Googled her name that she discovered what was behind the abuse. Members of the public had been incensed by a photomontage of Opacic published on an online news portal called Dnevno.
Dnevno, a far-right news provider with web outlets in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, had a reputation for promoting wild conspiracy theories and hate-mongering. Critics accused it of vilifying migrants, liberals, feminists and members of the gay and lesbian community.
Under the slogan “We write what others hide”, Dnevno also specialised in stoking ultranationalist tensions in a region scarred by ethnic conflict. Never mind that this meant pitting its own audiences against each other, especially Croats against Serbs and vice versa, depending on the website.
The photo of Opacic published on February 15, 2017 on the Croatian site, Dnevno.hr, seemed designed to raise hackles.
It showed the lawmaker wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Serbfest” and four Cyrillic letter C’s (pronounced “S”). The letters stand for the well-known slogan “Only Unity Saves the Serbs” — used by Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Many Croatians see the four C’s as a provocative reference to Serbia’s World War II ultranationalist Chetnik movement. Opacic was adamant that she had never sported the emblems.
A police investigation concluded the photo had been doctored.
Dnevno withdrew it, but not before its publication had ignited anti-Serb fury among Croatian far-right thugs. Opacic was physically assaulted twice on the street. Finally, she was placed under police protection for three months.
“Such portals are not there to inform people but to spread hate and misinformation,” Opacic told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).
Opacic said she considered suing Dnevno but a month later the company that published the site, Portal Dnevno, filed for bankruptcy.
At the time it went under, it had 47 pending lawsuits against it, according to a report (in Croatian) of the bankruptcy trustee of Zagreb’s Commercial Court.
More than a year after the bankruptcy, Dnevno is still in business — but under new management.
Marija Dekanic, a marketing specialist and entrepreneur whose other interests include socks and sunglasses, says she personally bought the rights to the brand in the autumn of 2017 for an undisclosed sum after she sniffed a commercial opportunity.
Vowing to drag Dnevno to the centre-right, she said her aim was to turn it into a responsible organ of journalismwhile making money through advertising sales.
“A big problem is that we weren’t being taken seriously,” she told BIRN in an interview, a year-and-a-half after the Opacic incident. “We were being treated as fake news… We’re working really hard to change this. This is our final goal: to be relevant, to write the truth, to be sure that we are writing the truth.”
As one of Croatia’s most notorious news providers tries to shed its bad-boy image, not everyone is convinced by Dekanic’s commitment “to write the truth”.
While some media analysts see the demise of “old Dnevno” as welcome proof that fake news does not sell, others regard new Dnevno as a poster child for newsrooms run by ideologically agnostic marketing experts.
The danger, they say, is that whatever drives clicks will always win out in the end — and in the Balkans, as elsewhere, what drives clicks is often anger, intolerance and sensationalism.
Same stories, different rants
Dnevno, which means “daily”, was founded in 2010 by Michael Ljubas, a controversial Croatian entrepreneur with a catalogue of ventures — mainly in construction and real estate — and a reputation for threatening journalists.
In 2008, he snatched a newspaper photographer’s camera and threatened to bash him over the head with it outside the Municipal Court in Zagreb, where he faced abuse of power charges related to his construction business. He later apologised in court for the incident.
Sasa Paparella, a journalist who was covering Ljubas’ business dealings for financial news magazine Business.hr, said the entrepreneur called him in 2009 and threatened to make his life a misery if he continued publishing “false” information about him, media reported (in Croatian).
Ljubas, who again made headlines in 2015 after he was mysteriously shot in the legoutside a Zagreb petrol station, did not respond to repeated phone and text messages requesting an interview.
Several journalists who have worked for Ljubas told BIRN he started Dnevno as a vehicle for free advertising for his other businesses. Ljubas is the director or founding member of more than 20 Croatian firms, according to Poslovna.hr, a company information service.
Whatever his reasons for branching into media, Dnevno’s three news portals — Dnevno.hr in Croatia (launched in 2010), Dnevno.ba in Bosnia (2012) and Dnevno.rs in Serbia (2013) — soon drew ire.
Critics took umbrage at the sheer cynicism of the business model, which played on readers’ mutual animosities in neighbouring countries that speak the same language but are divided by the resentments of recent and historical conflicts.
Sometimes Dnevno simultaneously served up different treatments of the same story on its different websites, accompanied by identical photos but with rants and historical revisionism tailored to respective audiences.
News on Dnevno.hr often came with anti-Serb diatribes and glorification of the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state during World War II run by the homegrown Ustasa fascist movement. Readers of Dnevno.rs got anti-Croat rhetoric and praise for the wartime Serbian Chetnik movement.
Coverage of Croatia’s annual celebration of Operation Storm, a 1995 military action in which Croatian forces seized back territory that had been under Serb rebel control, offered plenty of scope for such journalistic gymnastics.
“Storm blows away dreams of Greater Serbia from Knin and Krajina,” trumpetedthe headline (in Croatian) on Dnevno.hr in 2015, referring to a self-proclaimed Serb-run statelet in Croatia during the 1991-1995 conflict and a town within it.
“Twenty years after the Storm over Krajina: A column [of refugees] two decades long,” reported Dnevno.rs on the same day, evoking memories of long lines of Serb civilians who left Croatia during and after the operation.
Readers of Dnevno.ba, the politically tamest of the three Dnevno sites, got a more balanced diet reflecting antagonisms between Bosnia’s Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic communities.
The Bosnian portal often reminded readers of Serb wartime aggression while tending to be critical of the more nationalistic voices representing Bosnia’s Croatian minority, although it stopped short of accusing Croatia of annexing parts of Bosnia during conflict in the 1990s.
“It seems paradoxical that despite their writing, their [journalists’] ideological loyalty doesn’t seem to lie exclusively with the conservative, right-wing values they promote,” said Hajrudin Hromadzic, an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Rijeka.
“The very fact that there are three web outlets … which have for years been publishing three types of ‘truths’ on the same topics, each ‘truth’ in respective countries, and that they did it through war-mongering, hate-filled speech that aimed to create animosity towards the other two nations, illustrates this rather clearly.”
Meanwhile, Dnevno writers including the popular Zrinka K attracted readers with headlines such as “SHOCKING: Italian scientist claims to have discovered the cause of homosexuality. If your child is gay it’s because of this vaccine” or “30 million people vaccinated with a living cancer virus”.
Zrinka K, who still works at Dnevno.hr, also espoused “chemtrail” conspiracy theories, alleging that the vapour trails seen in the sky behind planes are bioagents spread by nefarious forces. In one article in 2015, she questioned whether the earth is round. Two years later, she wrote: “Earth is hollow and occupied by Nazis and Vikings.”
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