Brent Sadler, a seasoned journalist who reported as a CNN reporter from wars in Chad, Israel, and the Falkland Islands.
However, the 75-year-old Belgrade-based journalist is now involved in a very different struggle, namely the one surrounding the Serbian media market.
Sadler has been officially appointed Chief News Executive of the Adria News Network (ANN), a new structure within the Netherlands-registered media and telecommunications group United Group (UG). In his role, Sadler will oversee a dozen UG media outlets in the former region of Yugoslavia.
In Serbia, this could become particularly challenging, as ANN runs the television stations N1 and Nova S, the daily newspaper Danas, and the weekly magazine Radar. All of them are known for their critical stance toward the government in Belgrade, that is, toward authoritarian President Aleksandar Vucic.
Critics accuse Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of monopolizing the Serbian state, distributing jobs according to party favoritism, establishing a system of corruption, and manipulating elections.
When Serbia’s students started demanding new elections in late 2024, UG media outlets became all the more important, as they are among the few outlets in Serbia — alongside social media — where critical voices about Vucic could be heard at all.
Business with Serbian Telekom
However, initial doubts about UG’s future already popped up early last year. While the media group kept N1 and Nova S, it sold its Serbian telecom assets, including the Serbian cable provider SBB — and also handed over all sports rights to state-owned Telekom. As a result, their biggest competitor at the time became the TV sports monopoly not just in Serbia but also in neighboring countries.
Remarkably, Telekom Serbia is considered Vucic’s central instrument for dominance in the media market. In recent years, the company has invested around €2 billion ($2.32 billion) in sports rights, the acquisitions of smaller operators, and the financing of pro-government broadcasters.
On many of these channels, such as the tabloid TV Informer, protesting students and other government critics are defamed as “foreign mercenaries”, “traitors” or “Nazis”, and the protests as a whole are portrayed as a “colour revolution” allegedly controlled by the West.
Concerns about the remaining free media in the Western Balkan country are also growing after the recording of a friendly phone call between the United Group CEO and Telekom Serbia CEO was made public last summer, in which they discussed business in Serbia.
Officially, UG says that the “illegally” recorded conversation was “taken out of context” and that there was no deal with the Serbian government, as well as that the editors-in-chief will keep their powers, and no layoffs are planned. In contrast, the introduction of ANN as well as Sadler’s appointment were made “specifically to ensure that there can be no undue influence from the government, political actors, shareholders, or UG management,” the company told DW.
UG: Promise to stay independent
In turn, editors-in-chief of UG Media in Serbia are cautiously optimistic. “We have heard from the new management that they guarantee editorial independence — and that is the least we expect,” Slobodan Georgiev, head of news at Nova S, told DW. But behind closed doors, the tone is somewhat different. “There is no particular panic among us, no one is rushing to find a new job. But we are keeping a low profile,” a journalist who wished to remain anonymous shared.
Another DW source added that staff are actually continuing to work exactly as before.
However, Rade Veljanovski, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade and a specialist in media legislation in Serbia, considers it “naive” to believe that the government and a corporation would set so many mechanisms and so much money in motion without anything changing in the reporting. “It seems to me that a final showdown is being prepared in which the government will completely suppress the possibility of independent journalism,” Veljanovski told DW.
Government wary of elections
While it is still unclear whether Vucic will permit early parliamentary elections this year or early next year, polls have indicated for months that it could be significantly more challenging for him to maintain power this time around.
This is primarily due to the country’s popular student list. The candidates of the protesting students are not yet known, however numerous well-known academics, activists, and experts who have not been actively involved in politics have already announced their candidacy.
Veljanovski remains certain that the government “does not want to tolerate any media that continue to report critically before the next parliamentary elections, whenever they may take place,” he said. In his view, silencing the UG media would be the icing on the cake of Vucic’s already extensive control over the media in Serbia.
The Serbian president, who made around 400 live appearances in the media in 2025, could hardly hide his schadenfreude over the developments at UG. Vucic has attributed all the problems at ANN to alleged financial problems at the parent company and claimed that there would soon be “a bit of staff reduction.”
“Then we’ll help place some of these people here or there, maybe we’ll take some on as PR people,” Serbia’s president remarked.
This article was originally published in German.