Interview: Romanian media face crisis of confidence

"On the one hand we monitored the political media coverage, that is, how newspapers and television reported on political parties and top politicians. In doing so we observed that there are indeed big differences in the way individual media outlets cover politicians. In Romania – as in other countries in South East Europe – there is a tendency towards much polarised, less balanced media coverage," Christian Spahr explains.

Simultaneously to the monitoring of political media coverage, KAS commissioned a survey on the Romanian public’s trust in the media. "We found that only a small fraction of Romanians believe the media are independent – 20 percent. That is an alarming finding," Spahr notes.

Without a doubt there is media freedom in Romania, the KAS expert explains. However, in his view, one has to make a difference between the freedom of the press guaranteed by law, and the situation in practice. "The very conditions under which the media operate often limit journalists in their freedom." Reasons for that are mainly to do with the structure of media ownership: "Media are often misused for exercising political or economic influence, whereas they should be understood as a public service."

Spahr then compares media freedom in Romania, which ranks 45th in the latest Reporters Without Borders (RWB) ranking, with the situation in Bulgaria (rank 100). "In Bulgaria, we observed a deterioration of the state of media freedom in practice," says Spahr. However: "The basic problems of the countries are the similar – the structure of media ownership is unbalanced and journalists are less free in their everyday work as journalists in Germany or other Western and Central European countries." In Bulgaria the public is even more sceptical towards the media than in Romania. Only 14 percent of Bulgarians think the media are independent, as another opinion poll of the KAS Media Program shows.

The complete Interview is available here (in German).

More about the studies here.