MULTIPLE TARGET AUDIENCES, CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF PRISTINA-BELGRADE DIALOGUE

Abstract

Political actors often use media to convey messages of self-praise to the public. In such cases, they give the media only the information representing their positive side. When the developments in society pose increasing public interest as was the case with the last agreement between Pristina and Belgrade which is treated in this paper, the parties pay more attention to presenting themselves as winners against each other, rather than being concerned with informing the public about the real content of the international agreement. The findings of the paper show that a message giver, which could be either the Serbian party or the Albanian party of Kosovo, has at the same time four groups of message receivers: the country’s opposition, its electorate, the opposing parties and the international mediation party. Considering that their message is addressed to those four different types of public, the findings show that the givers of the message do not hesitate to massage the message in order to impact the four different groups of public, and use media only as a transmission channel of their public relation strategies.