There is little money to pay anyone. The surviving media have had either to reduce salaries to their staff or fire a number of journalists. For most of the unfortunate ones, local authorities used the state of war to shut them down. Many stations have been shut down on the pretext of lacking frequencies, even where their paperwork has been in order, or fined. Other media have had to close because they ran out of money.
Financial pressures are of course part of the regime strategy.
Still other media faced more crude forms of suppression. Ivan Novkovic, a TV producer in Leskovac, was sentenced to thirty days' imprisonment for airing a message, during a basketball match July 1, on the anti-regime demonstrations in the town. With both Draskovic and the SPO flirting from one day to the next with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, its output has been seen has unreliable. The situation in the press is similar. Meantime, Several independent papers, such as Blic and Danas dailies, and the weeklies Vreme and NIN remain bright stars in the Serbian media scene, even if some of their sparkle has also been dimmed through the months of bombing.