How the media swapped sides

Demonstrators attack Serbian TV's chief editor

As opposition protesters took control of the streets of Belgrade, even the most staunchly pro-Milosevic media switched their allegiance to Vojislav Kostunica.

State-owned Serbian TV went off the air for several hours after demonstrators stormed its Belgrade headquarters on Thursday afternoon, returning later with a written message saying: "This is the new Radio Television Serbia broadcasting."

Several hundred staff had earlier gone on strike and a group of journalists demanded that the RTS director stop the TV from being no more than a "collection point for bizarre hallucinations".

The old management left the editorial office without farewells

Vecernje Novosti

Opposition leader Nebojsa Covic, one of the first guests of the new-look TV, said RTS "is from this moment liberated, belonging to all of you and primarily to the truth".

The TV began to refer to Mr Kostunica as "the newly elected president of Yugoslavia" and use reports from the independent radios B2-92 and Index.

Tanjug switches

The state news agency Tanjug also abandoned its hardline stance, issuing a statement on Thursday evening informing the Yugoslav public that "it has sided with the people of the country".

The agency said it would "now report exclusively on the basis of professional principles, truthfully and objectively, and in compliance with the fundamental interests of the nation and the country whose agency we are".

The storming of RTS TV was a turning point in the Belgrade uprising

At Belgrade Studio B Radio and TV, where employees went on strike earlier in the week in support of Kostunica, a journalist said he and his colleagues had taken control of their old premises and equipment and had started broadcasting an "uncensored programme".

Similar developments took place at media outlets around the country, with state-owned broadcasters changing their editorial policy and independent media that had been jammed or on strike returning to the airwaves.

The pro-Milosevic Yu Info TV station, broadcasting from military bases in Montenegro, shifted the focus of its reports from the activities of the Socialist Party of Serbia to the demonstrations in Belgrade, the "liberation" of the state media and the reactions from European capitals.

In the southern town of Leskovac demonstrators stormed the state-run TV building to demand the resignation of the director and hung a Democratic Opposition of Serbia flag from the window.

"Return to truth"

By Friday the press was also celebrating the uprising.

The highest circulation Yugoslav newspaper, Vecernje Novosti, proclaimed itself "its own and the people's newspaper".

In an introduction headed "Return to truth", the paper said its old management "left the editorial office somewhat after 1700, without a farewell".

"Understanding the moment of change in our society," it went on, Novosti journalists "rushed to their editorial office in those minutes and decided to remove from page makup the edition prepared by the previous management."

The decision was made, it said, to reorient editorial policy to "the truth and readers".

Similarly the former Milosevic mouthpiece Politika told its readers it would endeavour to "publish a better, different, more objective and more informative" newspaper.

Its main story, on the Belgrade demonstrations, was headlined "Serbia on the road to democracy".

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.