PROBLEMS OF THE MEDIA IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CROATIAN SOCIETY
2015-03-06
IVAN TANTA, PH.D., SVEA KRŠUL, PROF.
University of applied sciences VERN’, Zagreb, Croatia
Key Words: Education, Communication, Journalists, Publishers, Transition
Summary
The problems of Croatian media are not just a global recession and a relatively small market for a relatively large number of media outlets, which leads to a well-known phenomenon called "the terror of success", but also the lack of education of journalists. Education of people working in the media, on the other hand, arises from the mirror image of the entire society in which no less than 40.37 percent of the population older than 15 years of age has only complete or even incomplete primary education. Moreover, 47.06 percent of the population has a complete or incomplete secondary education.
The sum of these two data points to the profile of the consumers of the media, which confirms the thesis that the media cannot be qualitatively better either. In other words, the media have conformed to a stereotype that many owners and editors repeat as they shape the media content that consumers require. Subsequently, they consciously create an inverted spiral in which all products are constantly adapted to a simpler program for the uneducated market. The conclusion imposes itself, uneducated journalists supply information to the uneducated market. It will take us many years to break with this tradition, and start moving in the opposite direction.