HRT spokesman Janos Roemer said earlier today the HTV News Programme decided that Ladisic would no longer edit and conduct Otvoreno due to oversights, notably in shows about the extradition of business tycoon Hrvoje Petrac and Ivica Rajic's plea agreement with the Hague war crimes tribunal.
Roemer did not say which oversights Ladisic was guilty of. He did say that Ladisic was not suspended and would continue to work in the HTV News Programme.
The HND protested against the dismissal of Ladisic, describing him as a renowned TV journalist and one of the founders of the HND corps of electronic media journalists who for years advocated the transformation of HTV from a state into a public television.
The HND said Ladisic's dismissal was the result of recently increasingly strong political pressure on the independence of public television and not the result of breaches of ethical or professional principles of free and responsible journalism.
The HND said the replacement followed a show in which viewers where legitimately asked if they believed that Croatian units had shelled Sarajevo together with the Chetniks in the 1990s. Fifty-four per cent of the viewers who called in answered in the affirmative.
The HND said it had notified the International and European federations of journalists of the dismissal.
Ladisic today declined to comment on the decision or why he was fired from the show. He said he would present his position to the HTV, but underlined that opening all topics and freely expressing different positions was the point of journalism and editing, and that accordingly he had conducted and edited his shows freely and openly.