About the MSI
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IREX designed the MSI to measure the strength and viability of any country’s media sector. The MSI considers all the factors that contribute to a media system—the quality of journalism, effectiveness of management, the legal environment supporting freedom of the press, and more—to arrive at scores on a scale ranging between 0 and 4. These scores represent the strength of the media sector components and can be analyzed over time to chart progress (or regression) within a country. Additionally, countries or regions may be compared to one another. IREX currently conducts the MSI in 80 countries, and produced the first Europe & Eurasia MSI in 2001.
MSI Overview [9] | Africa [10] | Asia [11] | Europe & Eurasia [12] | Middle East & North Africa [13]
MSI Methodology [14]
Download the Complete Croatia MSI Chapter (PDF): 2013 [15] | 2012 [16] | 2011 [17] | 2010 [18] | 2009 [19] | 2008 [20] | 2006/7 [21] | 2005 [22] | 2004 [23] | 2003 [24] | 2002 [25] | 2001 [26]
MSI Croatia - 2013 Introduction
Overall Country Score: 2.44
During the two most recent MSI panel discussions, landmark events have unfolded to interrupt the proceedings. Two years ago, the panel was interrupted by news of the arrest of the former Croatian prime minister, who had escaped a warrant in Zagreb only to be caught by the Austrian police. Last year, it was a combination of the signing the Croatia’s EU accession treaty (confirmed in an EU referendum in January 2012), and a sweeping victory of the opposition social democrat-led coalition.
Shortly before the 2013 MSI panel convened, a ten-year sentence was handed down for the former prime minister, Ivo Sanader, for corruption, with other cases still pending. Days before this came the verdict on Radimir Čačić, the omnipotent first deputy prime minister in the Croatian government, who was sentenced to 11 months in prison by a Hungarian court for causing a fatal car accident near Budapest. Čačić resigned the same day.
But still, the most dramatic event in 2012 was the “not guilty” verdict handed down by appeals court judges for the Hague Tribunal for generals Gotovina and Marka. on Nov 16, 2012. Taking into consideration that the two generals had been found guilty of heading a “joint criminal enterprise” and sentenced to 24 and 18 years respectively by the Hague tribunals for Yugoslavia in 2011, expectations of an acquittal were in short supply, and the emotional response to the “not guilty” sentence was almost unparalleled. “The war belongs to the past. Let us turn to the future,” said Gotovina to tens of thousands gathered on the main square in Zagreb. The verdict fostered hope in society that a calm message would help in closing the book on the politics of the war, leaving it to historians, and, where necessary, criminal prosecutors.
As for the media, 2012 brought a fatal decline of brand names such as the daily Vjesnik and the weekly Nacional. Sales and circulations are half of what they used to be only five years ago. Advertising revenue follows the same path. Broadcast media share the trend. Content quality, social relevance and professional standards have been compromised by the surge of trivial, tabloid, low-quality journalism. Hundreds of journalists have been laid off.
Journalists are facing hard times again, but it is no longer about setting the basic pillars of independent media, as in the 1990s. Now, it is about preserving professional standards, and even the dignity of journalism, against a tide of market decline and industry leaders that have come to see journalism as a means of gaining power, rather than holding it accountable. As such, Croatia in 2013 achieved the ignominious feat of repeating its overall MSI score from 2001, suggesting no lasting progress has been achieved on media sustainability in the intervening years.
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