On Monday evening, a crowd outside Informer television’s offices in Belgrade grew to about 30 people, who walked into the newsroom, surrounded editor-in-chief and owner Dragan Vučićević and interrupted the station’s live broadcast, as Al Jazeera reported. They chanted “This is how it is in free Serbia” and “Where is Vučić now?”, and called for Vučićević’s arrest. It was the second night Belgrade had spent celebrating the Student List’s election win over Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party, a result ending 14 years of a government Informer had spent building a case for. Vučić, who had resigned the presidency to run for prime minister instead and lost that bid too, posted on Instagram that the intrusion was an attack on free speech and press freedom.
Informer is not an independent broadcaster that happened to back Vučić. It is owned 99 percent by Vučićević himself, through a holding company called Insajder tim, with the remaining 1 percent held by its legal representative, Damir Dragić. Serbia’s broadcast regulator, REM, has classified it as “Captured Private” media continuously since 2022, a label for outlets that are privately held but editorially aligned with the government in exchange for public money, according to the State Media Monitor project run by the Media and Journalism Research Center.
The money is itemised, if not consistently. In 2024 Informer’s publisher won around €273,000 in state advertising and co-financing contracts, the second-largest sum among six national dailies after Politika. In 2025 that fell to about €192,000. The investigative outlet Cenzolovka puts the ten-year total of such municipal co-financing at roughly RSD 82 million, about €690,000, the largest sum of any tabloid it tracked. In the first hundred such competitions decided in 2026, Insajder tim alone took RSD 12 million, about €103,000.
None of that money bought compliance with Serbia’s press code. The Press Council recorded 1,314 violations of the Code of Journalists of Serbia across 805 Informer articles in the second half of 2024, and 1,456 violations across 837 articles in the same months of 2025 — about 1.7 breaches per article published, both years, second only to the tabloid Alo. A public reprimand followed in February 2025 after Informer falsely identified two brothers as Croatian citizens and published scans of their passports; a Belgrade court ordered it to pay them damages in July 2026. REM itself found, on 7 October 2025, that an Informer broadcast on which Vučićević displayed images he said showed a minor protester had broken the rules. It imposed no sanction.
Serbia’s rank, and its neighbours’
The newsroom intrusion landed three days after Serbia posted its lowest press-freedom score in at least 25 years. Reporters Without Borders ranked Serbia 104th of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, down eight places from 96th in 2025, with its score falling to 50.79 from 53.55. RSF lists Vučić among its “press freedom predators” and counted at least 100 physical attacks on journalists covering the 2023–2025 protests, many of them by police officers.
Monday night, in sequence
Vučić had conceded within two hours of polls closing on Sunday; tens of thousands filled Belgrade’s streets for a second night running on Monday. Among those who walked into Informer’s building was Dijana Hrka, mother of one of the 16 people killed when a railway-station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024 — the disaster that started the protest movement in the first place.
Informer’s own live feed showed a crowded studio, phones filming, flags waving, and a shouting match with Vučićević. After the group left the studio floor, riot police moved in outside the building: there were cordon breaches, pepper spray, and an allegation, not independently confirmed, that Hrka was struck with a baton. A separate crowd gathered the same evening outside Pink TV, another private pro-Vučić broadcaster; police cordoned that building off and nobody got inside.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Student List wins election (Sunday) | Second night of celebrations (tens of thousands in the streets) | |
| Second night of celebrations (tens of thousands in the streets) | Crowd gathers outside Informer | |
| Second night of celebrations (tens of thousands in the streets) | Separate crowd cordoned at Pink TV (never entered the building) | |
| Crowd gathers outside Informer | About 30 enter the newsroom | |
| About 30 enter the newsroom | Confrontation with Vučićević, on air | |
| Confrontation with Vučićević, on air | Group leaves the studio floor | |
| Group leaves the studio floor | Riot police move in outside (pepper spray, cordon breaches) | |
| Riot police move in outside (pepper spray, cordon breaches) | Vučićević evacuated, studio resumes (Tuesday) |
Vučićević’s own account of what happened inside, given to the Serbian outlet Euronews Srbija, goes well beyond what the footage shows, and none of it has been independently confirmed. He said a car “full of petrol” was found near the building, that the crowd tried to set the building on fire, that cameras and computers worth “tens of thousands of euros” were destroyed, and that staff’s children were sheltered in a separate room. He said he refused an offer to stop broadcasting in exchange for the crowd leaving, “po cenu života” — whatever the cost to his life — and was evacuated to another location by a different police unit; the station resumed studio broadcasts the next day. Asked to respond, Vučićević told Reuters, “On the very first day of (Student List) power, they want to ban the media. They have said everything about themselves, and nothing about us.”
The Student List, which has no formal leader, disavowed the intrusion the same night, saying it had not called for and did not support incursions into media outlets or state institutions, and that it would pursue media freedom through parliament and existing institutions instead. Ilija Srdanović, the cardiologist heading its parliamentary list, posted on Instagram:
We ask of you to stay calm and dignified until the end of the electoral process, just like you have been until now. Don’t resort to any form of violence. Your Student List and your student movement urge you on this.
The institutional route
By Tuesday, the response had moved from the street to the regulator. The Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia, with other civil-society groups, media associations and journalism faculties from Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš, filed a request with REM to revoke Informer’s broadcasting licence, citing systematic violations of the law and of programme obligations that REM had failed to sanction. That history is not in dispute: it is the same REM that found Informer’s “Kolegijum 2” broadcast in breach of the rules last October and then imposed no sanction at all.
The same day, the Student List demanded the resignation of the leadership of RTS, the publicly funded national broadcaster, over what it called years of selective reporting and uncritical coverage of attacks on protesters. “We demand the resignations of the RTS director general, his deputy, the editors-in-chief responsible for news coverage and all news editors,” the movement wrote, adding it was “particularly unacceptable to uncritically report insulting remarks and messages targeting students and other citizens over their views.” In Vojvodina, the editor-in-chief of the regional state channel had already resigned by Monday, and one of its presenters apologised on air: “The public broadcaster has failed to fulfil its role for many years.”
Informer’s licence has survived complaints before. REM’s council is still the one Vučić’s parliament appointed, and will stay that way until a new one is seated. Whether that council revokes a licence it declined to touch after finding a rule violation a year ago, and whether Belgrade’s incoming city administration keeps signing the co-financing contracts that have paid Informer for a decade, are the two numbers worth watching once the cameras leave the newsroom.