Serbia wields its media influence to spread narratives and disinformation, employing bombastic headlines regarding Montenegro's development as a country.
Many articles from Serbian outlets cast Montenegro as an expensive and unsafe tourist destination with dirty beaches and aggressive locals, featuring headlines such as: “Tourists massively cancel their vacations in Montenegro” and “Snakes came out from the sea and went after people on the Buljarica beach.” Similar discourse has been observed in prior years, but so far it has not impacted the number of Serbian visitors or the overall tourism economy.
[9] The June 2020 plenary session of the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska consisted of nationalistic and anti-Montenegrin remarks, along with heavy insults against the highest officials of Montenegro.
[14] In September 2022, the Montenegrin Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded that Serbia removes explicit material, pushing the narrative that Montenegro tried to ethnically cleanse Serbs, from its textbooks.
[17][18][19][20] Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, religious figures of the Serbian Orthodox Church, including the late Metropolitan Amfilohije and Patriarch Irinej, and, to a lesser extent, their successors Joanikije II and Porfirije, dispute the existence of Montenegrins as a nation, calling them "the bastards of Milovan Đilas".