The government, through the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, is preparing a new tranche of money for the moguls. The anti-earthquake campaign is coming, some hundreds of thousands of euros are coming to feed the biggest monster that the Iohannis – Ciucă – Ciolacu regime has created: the bought and anesthetized press. The grand coalition managed to produce the most serious problem for Romania’s immature democracy. Killing the media, i.e. the critical spirit, the heart of any democracy. See in Russia how a population of 140 million was zombified in the absence of a free press. In this way you can understand the imminent danger.
By 2020, the mainstream press, imperfect as it always was, somehow managed to cover much of reality. One part of the press was pro-PSD, another anti-PSD, one part was anti-borfasi, another pro-borfasi, etc. Plus the small segment of the independent press. At the end of the day, the public could piece together the puzzle of society.
2020 was the year when the government and the parties understood that they could buy the press in corpore. With public money. With the instruments invented by Liviu Dragnea, who never got to use them. The Orban government did it under the pretext of the pandemic information campaign and quickly understood that media moguls (most of them prisoners with hard years in prison) respond much more easily to the stimulus of “money” than to the stimulus of “files”. The experiment continued through the PSD and the PNL, which literally ended up buying the press, especially the televisions, with tens of millions of euros paid annually from the state budget.
And it went. The moguls knew the game and happily accepted the money. The owners of the big holdings also left some of the money in the newsrooms, so that the journalists would not have sudden problems of conscience.
Self-censorship is almost total. With the exception of a few independent newsrooms that do not take money from parties or the government, the press has turned into a propaganda organ. International bodies such as the European Commission and the Council of Europe are already saying it, Reporter without Borders is saying it, the 3-4 NGOs still operating in the country are saying it.
The degradation of the press is accelerated and produces Kafkaesque scenes. Invited today to Antena 3, the Minister of European Funds Marcel Boloș was not bothered even with a question about the government’s current rate, which risks losing a tranche of 3 billion euros from the EU because it did not keep its promises. An enormous subject, of certain public interest. Instead of legitimate questions on this topic, Boloș (whom some politicians call the future prime minister) was invited – yes, invited – to tell us what the government does in case of an earthquake. Tremendous moment.
These scenes are repeated daily, several times a day, at the trusts founded or controlled by Dan Voiculescu, Zoltan Teszari, Maricel Păcuraru, the fugitive Sebastian Ghiță, at public stations or in smaller press organs. It’s a disaster locally, the independent press is almost strangled.
The amounts spent by politicians from public money are unimaginable. PSD and PNL annually spend tens of millions of euros from the subsidy from the state budget. UDMR also spends considerable sums, helped by Bucharest and Budapest. AUR does not pay any of the subsidy, but campaigns on social networks or on RTV also have costs. (USR is the only party that does not make contracts with the media at the central level). Add to that hundreds of town halls and county councils, dozens of ministries, hundreds of state-owned companies, plus a few dozen MEPs who buy their press in their own name.
It’s a disaster. Without a free press, the social fabric falls apart, democratic reflexes atrophy, the brain of society is no longer oxygenated. The collective organism enters clinical death because no one questions/criticizes/frightens the politicians, the decision-makers anymore. Democracy simply cannot function without the press. Look at Russia, at Hungary, at the autocratic regimes in Central Asia: the weaker the press, the more the fiber of democracy is destroyed.
Press conferences and talk shows have become pitiful propaganda shows: most journalists are turned into walking recorders.
Journalists no longer send questions to politicians because their employers only send invoices, and with the money collected politicians buy only one product: silence. Romania is under the most sinister self-censorship after 1989, when people died demanding freedom.
ActiveWatch’s latest FreeEx report summarizes the grim reality: “Authorities and political decision-makers control and hide the public agenda (…) Institutional communication and the publication of information of public interest were carefully controlled, while a good part of PSD and PNL subsidies went to the press in “press and propaganda expenses”. Instead, the few journalistic voices critical of political power have become the target of discredit campaigns, initiated either by political actors or by media institutions with a long history of deviations from professional ethics”.
The problem with this monster created by the Iohannis – PSD – PNL regime is that it is an insatiable beast that demands more and more money. The two parties can no longer give up the dependency that works both ways, so it is illusory, unrealistic, to think that PSD and PNL will abolish this corrupt system of buying silence.
Society has no way to change this practice either because society is the first victim: it is uninformed, misinformed, manipulated and does not yet know what is happening to it, except for a minority.
So the only solution comes from the outside: the mechanism of the rule of law, through which the European Commission can condition European funds on compliance with fundamental democratic principles. Brussels must understand the major risk created by this mechanism used by PSD and PNL and demand its abolition. Just as the European Commission insisted through the MCV for justice reform and forced the corrupt power to make reforms against its own will, so it must use the mechanism of the rule of law to force Bucharest to stop the malignant practice of media buying.
There is no more time to waste. The Commission has the rule of law tool at hand, it must use it.
In the absence of a quick solution, Romania risks failing in a gray area, where democratic control over the government will be impossible to exercise. A second Hungary, somewhat more disciplined in matters of security, but just as sick. A rotten social organism that will contaminate other countries in the vicinity.
PS: What an irony of fate: Iohannis leaves behind a country mutilated in terms of democracy, although he himself aspires to a high position at the European level.
