The Iron Curtain in the memory of the Serbian Newsprint Media.

Milojevic, A., Ugrinić, A. (2012). The Iron Curtain in the memory of the Serbian Newsprint Media.. Zimmermann, Tanja (Ed.). Balkan memories : media constructions of national and transnational history, 233-245Bielefeld: Transcript.

Abstract: In the era of mass media most of our experience is intermediate, and all but recent history or only events close enough to us for direct sensing, do we acknowledge directly. Moreover, even events close to us in time and space, we see only in limited ways. In fact, for most of what we learn, we find ourselves at the “end” of a very long processing chain. Our historical facts have gone through many more than just primary and secondary sources, as well as our news facts, which are the most common and dominant form of informing. In these relay chains, some people have greater power of modifying and interpreting our reality. The institutions, agencies and especially journalists make the filters or lenses trough which we see and comprehend our world. That’s why the study of messages and conditions under which they are produced, processed and distributed, as well as study of what various receivers do with them, is crucial for understanding our current and historical social phenomena. Most of our resent history has been recorded and represented by the mass media. Those recordings and representations are not just historical facts and documentary material, but also indicators of media freedom, journalism standards, which tell us a lot about the nature of political regimes, or state of different societies as well. The fall of the Berlin wall (FBW) is very interesting to investigate in both of these senses. It was a breaking point in recent history, an event that marked a clash of two worlds (East and West), two major ideologies and two ruling political systems, but also an event that got extensive global media coverage. This event was observed through a wide prism of the print media in Serbia, not only as an important historical event but also as a framework through which we can judge the state of media and society at that time. Daily news papers were selected for content analysis because they are a relevant indicator of continuous monitoring of current events.