The annihilation of the press: the biggest threat to national security in Romania. The monster created by the Iohannis – PNL – PSD regime

The government, through the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, is preparing a new instalment of money for the media moguls. Here comes the anti-earthquake campaign, here come some more hundreds of thousands of euros to feed the biggest monster that the Iohannis – Ciucă – Ciolacu regime has created: the bought and anesthetized press. The grand coalition has succeeded in producing the most serious problem for Romania’s unaccountable democracy. The killing of the press, i.e. the critical spirit, the heart of any democracy. You see in Russia how a population of 140 million has been zombified in the absence of a free press. That is how you can understand this imminent danger.

Until 2020, the mainstream media, as imperfect as it has always been, somehow managed to cover much of reality. Part of the press was pro-PSD, part was anti-PSD, part was anti-Democrats, part was pro-Democrats, 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 tools invented by Liviu Dragnea, but who never got to use from it like them. The Orban government did it under the pretext of the pandemic information campaign and quickly understood that media moguls (most of them convicts with long prison sentences) respond much more easily to the „money” stimulus than to the „dossiers” stimulus. The experiment continued with the PSD and the PNL, who ended up literally buying the press, especially the TV stations, with tens of millions of euros paid annually from the state budget.

And it worked. The Moguls understood the game and gladly accepted the money. The bosses of the big holding companies left some of the money in the newsrooms, lest journalists have sudden problems of conscience.

Self-censorship is almost total. With the exception of a few independent newsrooms that don’t take money from the parties or the government, the press has become a propaganda organ. International bodies such as the European Commission and the Council of Europe already say so, as does Reporters Without Borders, as do the 3-4 NGOs still operating in the country.

The degradation of the press is accelerating and producing Kafkaesque scenes. Invited to Antena 3 today, European Funds Minister Marcel Bolos was not even bothered with a question about the government’s current failure, which risks losing a 3-billion-euro instalment from the EU for not keeping its promises. A huge topic of obvious public interest. Instead of legitimate questions on the subject, Bolos (who some politicians are calling the next prime minister) was invited – yes, invited – to tell us what the government is doing in case of an earthquake. Shocking 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 the public TV stations or in smaller press organs. Locally, it’s a disaster, the independent press is almost strangled.

The amount of public money politicians spend is unimaginable. The PSD and PNL spend tens of millions of euros a year in state subsidies. The UDMR also spends considerable sums, helped by both Bucharest and Budapest. AUR pays nothing from the subsidy, but campaigns on social media or RTV also cost money. (USR is the only party that doesn’t contract with the central media). Add to that hundreds of city and county councils, dozens of ministries, hundreds of state-owned companies, plus a few dozen MEPs who buy their own press.

It’s a disaster. Without a free press, the social fabric falls apart, democratic reflexes atrophy, the brains of society stop oxygenating. The collective organism goes into clinical death because nobody questions/criticises/expects politicians, decision-makers. Democracy simply cannot function without the press. Look at Russia, Hungary, the autocratic regimes in Central Asia: the weaker the press, the more the fibre of democracy is destroyed.

Press conferences and talk shows have become pathetic propaganda shows: most journalists are turned into walking reporters.

Journalists no longer send questions to politicians because their bosses send only invoices, and the money they receive buys only one product: silence. Romania is under the most sinister self-censorship since 1989, when people died demanding freedom.

ActiveWatch’s latest FreeEx report sums up the grim reality: „Authorities and policy makers control and hide the public agenda (…) Institutional communication and publication of information of public interest has been tightly controlled, while a good part of PSD and PNL subsidies went to the press in „press and propaganda spending”. Instead, the few journalistic voices critical of political power have become the target of discrediting campaigns, initiated either by political actors or by media outlets with a long history of misconduct.”

The problem with this monster created by the Iohannis – PSD – PNL regime is that it is an ever-insatiable beast, demanding more and more money. The two parties can no longer let go of the dependency that works both ways, so it is delusional, unrealistic, to believe that the 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 outside: the rule of law mechanism, whereby the European Commission can make European funds conditional on respect for fundamental democratic principles. Brussels must understand the major risk created by this mechanism used by the PSD and PNL and demand that it be abolished. Just as the European Commission has insisted through the CVM on justice reform and forced the corrupt power to make reforms against its will, so it must use the rule of law mechanism to force Bucharest to stop the malignant practice of buying the press.

There is no time to waste. The Commission has the rule of law instrument at its fingertips, it must use it.

Without a swift solution, Romania risks being stranded in a grey area, where democratic control over government will be impossible. A second Hungary, slightly more disciplined on security issues, but just as sick. A rotten social organism that will contaminate other countries nearby.

PS: How ironic: Iohannis leaves behind a country crippled in democracy, even though he himself aspires to high office at European level.

Translated by Ovidiu H.