The Cartelisation of Kosovo’s Press

AJK’s silence after the vandalism wasn’t neutrality; it was complicity, proof of a cartelised press that protects its patrons, punishes critics, and abandons journalism’s first duty.

I have spent the past fifteen months doing what good journalism always does at its most unfashionable, asking the press to look in the mirror¹. The weekend of 11 October 2025, when vandals smashed the windows of my family’s unoccupied house in Kosovo and desecrated our memorial car², only proved why that mirror is necessary. Nothing was stolen. The point was fear. After months of reporting on Serbian espionage and disinformation networks, after a season of online death threats from circles close to long-entrenched political and media figures, the message was simple: stop. I will not. But what matters, for the record and for the profession, is how we got here and why the people who should have stood first, Kosovo’s Journalists’ Association and the capital’s biggest newsrooms, chose silence.

The chronology is blunt. In July 2024 I documented calls for my killing and the coordinated smear³ that followed an investigation into U.S. diplomats operating as political influencers in the Balkans. T…