I would have appreciated a lot if no politician, mogul or official of the Romanian state, who had such a small contribution to the degradation of the Romanian media landscape, abstained at least today, May 3, from the World Press Freedom Day.
At least today I would have liked to hear you die from the care of us, the independent journalists, after you dusted and dusted a good part of the Romanian press and turned it into an infernal propaganda device generously paid with public money. .
But you have not refrained even today, in your limitless hypocrisy. You did not have the slightest decency to spare us the festival of hypocrisy, the ode to the independent press, the empty sermons about our role in society, in which not only do you not believe, not only are you forced, afraid and horrified by free journalists. , but you did everything you could to kill any genuine journalism.
The choir of hollows was opened by Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, with a pomelnic de lozinci and commonplaces meant to cover the media scandal of which he is the protagonist.
Accused of plagiarism by journalist Emilia Șercan, who later claimed that she was targeted by a denigration campaign with information leaked even from the police, thus suspecting the involvement of the state, the government did not present the expected clarifications even today.
Instead, Prime Minister Ciuca “strongly condemned any attempt to intimidate or influence the way in which a journalist or newsroom in Romania exercises its constitutional rights of free expression.” What exactly did his government do to find out who was behind the campaign to denigrate journalist Emilia Șercan?
In mid-March, Nicolae Ciuca himself asked the interior ministry and the defense ministry for an “urgent investigation” into an attempt to intimidate the wife of the editor-in-chief of G4Media.ro by an employee of the National Defense College. Police opened a case the next day and the defense minister set up an “emergency commission” to clarify the situation. A month and a half has passed, obviously nothing has happened. At rest.
But here’s the other big naughty daring to open his mouth instead of hiding in a snake hole to bribe the press with millions of euros during the 2020 election campaign.
The former prime minister, Ludovic Orban, reproached Nicolae Ciucă for “talking about the rope in the hangman’s house”. Only the hanged man, that is, the press, put his head in the rope or on a leash, as you wish, lured with the money put on the table by Prime Minister Orban.
While Orban was party president, PNL bought with hard money editorial content from the subsidy received by PNL from the state budget, in great competition with the PSD led by Marcel Ciolacu, as revealed in the series by Radio Free Europe .
With millions of euros in the budget subsidy, the big parties managed to align a good part of the press, to colonize it perfectly as not even Liviu Dragnea had succeeded and to buy his peace in this way.
The press is bought to keep quiet or look elsewhere when awkward revelations about power leaders appear, and this happens frequently in Romania.
It is, perhaps, the greatest harm done to the Romanian press and democracy in recent years. The phenomenon also came to the attention of the organization Reporters Without Borders, which notes in its latest report: “Using public funds to buy positive media coverage is a widespread political practice.”
In a country where the Prosecutor’s Offices have completely paralyzed, in which we no longer see any relevant investigation carried out by prosecutors, the head of the General Prosecutor’s Office, Gabriela Scutea, woke up to send “a message of unconditional support of journalists’ activity and freedom of the press.”
“Not infrequently, as a result of such press materials, the Public Ministry notified itself, succeeding in prosecuting the perpetrators of some crimes”, Scutea also stated in her message.
I would say that the reality is a bit upside down: most of the time the General Prosecutor’s Office did not notify or, worse, killed investigations. I’d just mention it here filing file with journalists, denied even by the general prosecutor Gabriela Scutea. Concrete actions in support of independent journalists, zero. Ribbons on the mouth, hard.
Well, if you want to completely ruin your day, take Dan Voiculescu’s message from here. The founder of Antenelor did not miss this moment to claim, among other things, that he is a martyr of freedom of expression and to remind his employees that he was imprisoned for them, not because he stole 60 million euros that the Romanian state he has not recovered them today.
“Today is World Press Freedom Day. To what extent is the press free? What is the role of the owners, but of the journalists? How important is press freedom? Is the press the watchdog of democracy? Surely it would be worthwhile to organize serious debates in order to reach a consensus. On the other hand, is it worthwhile for someone to make sacrifices for press freedom? My answer is that both the freedom of the press, which means real democracy, and the true honest journalists, of character, with dignity, honor and courage, deserve great sacrifices “, Voiculescu wrote on the blog.
How I wish he was silent too, at least today.
Dan Voiculescu already knows the answer to all the nice questions above: millions of euros received from the government and from the subsidy from the parties. That would be the short answer. You can find the answer in detail Reporters Without Borders report.
So, you better keep quiet, just like the whole press you bought is deafeningly silent. The most treacherous form of censorship, experienced by a large part of the Romanian press, transformed into the horn of power, is economic self-interest, self-censorship, voluntary abdication from serving the public interest and hiring politicians.
Hard to fight with such a thing, when all parties are satisfied: politicians see their business quietly with public money, the watchdog stops barking, busy with his bones thrown from the table of power.
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