The first radio station in the Balkans and South-East Europe was established in Montenegro with the opening of a transmitter situated on the hill of Volujica near Bar by Knjaz Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš on 3 August 1904.
Moreover, the Electoral Law stipulates the obligation on commercial media as well as on the Radio Television of Montenegro to guarantee equal visibility to all candidates.
Tufik Softic, journalist for Vijesti and Monitor was injured by an explosive device activated in front of his house in August 2013.
A group of small local media outlets from the northern region of the country established their own self-regulation council.
Ethics principles are often breached, e.g. in terms of presumption of innocence, trial outcomes, misleading titles, and discredit of competitors.
RTCG is regulated by the Law on Public Radio-Diffusion Services, requiring it to serve the interests of all Montenegro citizen, regardless of their political, religious, culture, racial or gender affiliation.
[1]: 20 RTCG is managed by a Council of 9 members, who are experts proposed by civil society organisations and appointed by the Parliament by simple majority.
Other media are still allowed to work by the national regulator AEM, notwithstanding their debt situation, raising concerns on favoritism and political pressures.
The government is deemed particularly interfering in the national broadcaster RTCG,[8] but also private Pink M TV has been accused of serving the ruling coalition's interests.
The new owner, Media Nea, by the Greek businessman Petros Stathis, planned to merge it with its other newspaper Dnevne Novine, laying off half of the staff and establishing a new editorial board.
Until ordered to cease doing so in March 2011, one of the country's principal Internet service providers gave police direct access to all forms of communications carried on its servers.
[20] The main objective of such a Law was to regulated the transfer of state owned media to their new private owners, a process that in practice took a decade more than expected to be completed.
[19] Supporters of an abandoned draft law addressing the issue of concentration feared that without specific provisions one owner could own all Montenegrin dailies.
[19] According to the South East Europe Media Observatory, competition between the major TV channels has not produced more quality content, nor can be considered fair.
[19] As for the print sector, is characterised by editorial polarisation of government supporters versus opponents, according to an ownership pattern which is similar to that of the television market.
According to the South East Europe Media Observatory, such Greek acquisitions "secured continuation of favourable editorial policy to their partners in the government".
[19] The media buying market in Montenegro is completely dominated by foreign agencies, in the majority of cases affiliates with Serbian companies.
[19] Control and influence over one part of loyal media and hostile treatments of those with opposing positions has been criticized by the 2015 report of Human Rights Watch.
[3] The organisation recorded the persistence of hostile official rhetoric and serious physical attacks against journalists, whose investigations and prosecutions only rarely led to convictions.
[19] Much more common in recent years is soft censorship, defined as indirect, “often financial pressure, intended to weaken the capacities and even threaten the viability” of media outlets, especially those that criticize the government and the ruling party.
[19][22] In Montenegro, soft censorship is exerted mainly through financial pressure, that is to say through allocation of advertising services by public institutions to favored media outlets, selective distribution of subsidies and other state funds, paid content, and the like.
[19] According to a 2015 report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, in Montenegro public institutions attempt to manipulate media outlets and influence editorial policies and content by selective and non transparent allocation of funds.
The local NGO Human Rights Action (HRA) recorded 20 cases of attacks and harassment against Montenegrin journalists between 2010 and early 2014, all of them reported to the police.
[25] HRA reported that prosecutors would, as a rule, indict perpetrators for lesser crimes, and that judges would sentence them for the minimum terms, besides failing to investigate their motives.
[23]: 25 The European Commission's 2014 Progress Report on Montenegro contains words of concern over the possibility that old and unsolved cases of violence against journalists might soon exceed the statute of limitations.
[23]: 26 According to HRW, the lack of progress in the investigation of old cases "helps maintain an environment in which journalists are yet to feel confident that authorities will respond forcefully to crimes committed against media workers".
Independent journalists still face pressures from business leaders and government officials, who often behave with blatant favoritism towards the supportive media outlets.
The independent media Vijesti, Dan and Monitor have been sued and fined thousands of euros for "insulting" the Prime Minister Milo Đukanović and his family.
The state-owned Pobjeda, instead, appears to push the governmental line and to discredit critics - up to regularly calling the editor of Monitor "a prostitute".
A Bosnian journalist was threatened and smeared by pro-governmental Montenegrin media after she published a critical article about the conference, and was later harassed in person once she returned in Bosnia too.