Brankica Stanković has headed Insajder – Serbian TV station B92’s flagship investigative TV programme – ever since its creation in 2004, paying a high price for daring to expose corruption and shed light on the links between the criminal underworld and Serbian politicians and businessmen. The threats against her have grown with the passing years, to the point that a four-member police detail has accompanied her everwhere since 2009.
The interior ministry ordered this inconvenient but necessary security measure at a time when she was the target of an extraordinary number of threats and insults, especially on social networks. After an Insajder episode about the judicial system’s failure to address crimes by Belgrade football club Partizan’s extremist supporters, an effigy of Stanković in the form of an inflatable doll was brandished in the stands of Partizan’s stadium during a European match on 16 December 2009, as supporters chanted that “the whore Brankica” would suffer the same fate as Slavko Ćuruvija, a journalist murdered in 1999. They finally stabbed the doll.
Stanković has not let up in her investigative reporting, despite the continuing threats and the constraints of her police escort, and wrote a book entitled Insajder: My Story in 2013. Last year, she was profiled in the Reporters Without Borders list of “Information Heroes” and received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
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