The Romanian example - then and now

If you ask yourself, you'll find easily a common point between Spain's and Romania's recent history. They both have experienced a long period of dictatorial regime, which means the biggest disease the media of a country can suffer: censorship and repression.

As freedom is an essential part of an idealistic media landscape, one just cannot think about a totalitarian system that permits the free fluctuation of information. Or maybe worse: the darkest side of that kind of situations is that, in fact, there is some information that flows freely… the one that is spread by the main party or the government. It creates a polluted environment where the inhabitants can’t distinguish the truth from propaganda and corrupted data. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who owns the power, whether they are communists or capitalists, as long as they own it exclusively. Unfortunately, this situation is still alive in some countries.

If we talk specifically about Romania, we’ll see that the media had been on governmental hands until democracy came to the country. All the newspapers were under public control, and they were only able to say what the political leaders wanted to be known. That’s why journalism wasn’t a very honest job in that time: those professionals were only used to transmit ideological contents.

During the Romanian Revolution and the fall of the communist regime, television was a vital element through which thousands of citizens were able to see what was happening at the moment in the “hot spots”, where the action was.

So, after all the repression, lots of newspapers were born, as a result of the new freedom around everything, and around the media too. Some of the former publications changed their names and started broadcasting in a new and different way. Those were the days, because people were willing to be informed, as they had been years listening and reading what others wanted them to read.

In this panorama, some of the entrepreneurs saw that, actually, printed media could be a very profitable business. It also led to another commercial explosion: the emergence of tabloid newspapers, which started competing with general news.

Another positive point to remark is the fact that journalists aren’t marionettes anymore –or that’s what I’d like to think–. The profession grew up, and now Romania can boast of its journalism’s maturity.

So here you have two good examples of how a country can recover from such political disasters. Journalism itself is meant to be an essential tool for freedom, and never a weapon against population.