Brash & Frank in Yugoslavia

"I have noticed," said President Tito, "that the newspapers are crammed with stuff they should not contain." What annoyed Yugoslavia's boss was a full-length portrait of a blonde bathing beauty that appeared directly over his own picture on the front page of Politika Ekspres. And then there was that center spread of a nearly nude Carroll Baker that distracted readers from proper appreciation of a front-page cut of Tito surrounded by smiling workers. But the official complaints were notably mild. All Yugoslavia accepts the fact that a frank and breezy tabloid press has become firmly established.

The drastic change in newspaper styles can be traced directly to the Yugoslav Communist Party's plain and plodding official newspaper, Borba. Five years ago Borba founded the tabloid Vecernje Novosti (Evening News), and the new paper has grown more popular as it has grown brasher. Soon the staid morning daily, Politika, got into the act with its own tabloid, Politika Ekspres. Literary quarterlies and enter tainment weeklies followed suit. Now, from the Moslem regions of the deep south to the neat towns of the Austrian border, Yugoslavians are enjoying their cheesecake as never before.

Western-Style Competition. While op erating on the principle that the more unfit a story may be to print the better it will sell, the new Yugoslav papers are indulging in full-scale competition-Western-capitalist style. They sponsor every imaginable promotion gimmick from beauty contests to lotteries. They take unprecedented liberties with the party speeches and production figures that are the standard fare of most Communist journals, and the space they save is larded with crime, sex and show business. Every clay, Vecernje Novosti devotes its center spread to busty beauties, and often adds a disingenuous caption: "What the decadent Western press is sending us."

Crime was supposed to disappear under Communism, and most of the East European press behaves as if it has. But last week Vecernje Novosti featured a fatal stabbing in a Serbian family feud, Politika Ekspres headlined: "READER CAPTURES DANGEROUS CRIMINAL FROM PICTURE IN OUR PAPER."

Taboo Subjects. Hemmed in by the crime and the cheesecake, though, there is some good, investigative reporting. It was Yugoslavia's tabloids that first reported indications of the Sino-Soviet split; they were also first to pick up rumblings of Mao's cultural revolution. They are openly proud of the fact that they are officially "uncensored." But they still know what subjects remain taboo. Usually those subjects involve Tito. The papers do not discuss his private life or his personality. Nor do they discuss his opponents. No paper has spoken up for Milovan Djilas, Tito's former friend, now serving a sentence for advocating that his country take the Western road. And, though it was a top story in the Western press, no Yugoslav paper had anything to say in defense of Mihajlo Mihajlov, the 32-year-old writer who just began a one-year sentence for trying to start a magazine in opposition to the regime.

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