Ranko Vujovic
Program Participant
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Ranko Vujovic is Executive Director ofthe Union of the Independent Electronic Media of Montenegro (UNEM). He came to Washington in January for an ICFJ media training program and sat down with Peter Graves, Executive Vice President at ICFJ, to discuss his experiences in the post-war Balkans and his time here in the United States.

UNEM was founded in 1999 with a staff of three and counts among its members 13 radio and 12 TV stations. The organization serves to "protect the interests of the members...their rights [and] freedom of expression," Vujovice told Graves. He added that the group began developing a code of ethics for journalists in Montenegro.

Vujovic worked for state television in the 1990s and left after upsetting editors by producing a story critical of the government.

"I was against this war and against [the] Serbian politics at the time, especially Milosevic’s politics, and [the Montenegrin] government at that time was completely under his control," he said and did not return to media advocacy until the end of 2000, when he was asked to apply for the Executive Director position at UNEM.

Vujovic's trip to the United States allowed him to meet people working in similar fields in the US media market, including print and broadcast journalists. After attending a conference in Strasbourg hosted by the Council of Europe, he was interested in learning about how the US media is regulated. Among the most useful information that he gained was what he perceived as the media's being, "divided on liberal and conservative" grounds in the United States; he saw this as representative of a larger trend that included Europe.

Graves asked Vujovic what organizations like ICFJ can do to help in achieving UNEM's goals and he responded that, in Montenegro, there is an "urgent...lack of professionalism in media."

Vujovic graduated from the Faculty of World Literature and Theory of Literature at Belgrade University.