Report on the press in Romania

According to the Report, Romanian media often becomes a mouthpiece for specific commercial and political interests, in contravention of the principle of providing accurate, balanced and comprehensive information. Four key subjects, namely basic protection, market pluralism, political independence and social inclusion were used for determining the media pluralism and press freedom risk index. Basic protection stands for the legislative framework; the Report did not identify any significant shortcomings in this respect. Romanian law contains theoretical safeguards for the proper functioning of the media, but compliance with, and adherence to, the letter of the law is often lacking. The Report claims that many of these problems originate from the economic and social environment and the structure of Romanian state institutions (the network of judicial institutions, public administration).

As for the second category, that of market pluralism, the Report ascribes the high risk index (72%) to the absence of suitable legislative frameworks for limiting the concentration of media ownership. An even higher risk index (79%) is attributable to the fact that shareholder groups shape content to meet their commercial ends.

The most problematic category, however, is political independence. The Report calls the lack of political independence the greatest threat to media pluralism in Romania. Its reasons lie in the legislative environment, the irregularities of the media market and the favouritism of state institutions. Three risk indices within this category are above 80%, such as political control over the media (88%), editorial independence (81%) and the governance and financing of public media (92%).

The social inclusion risk index was estimated at 54%. Social inclusion indicators capture the extent to which various groups in society can access media products. The indices relating to minorities and women are average (38%). Gender inequality is evident from news content as well as the number of leading positions held in public media, where women are greatly underrepresented (news editing is the only field with more women than men). A higher risk index (63%) was measured in terms of the access to media products by persons living with disabilities, where the legislative environment suffers from significant gaps, and in terms of parallel communication with sign language or subtitles. Low digital competency levels and limited access to the Internet causes a high risk index (81%) in media literacy.

The Report draws the conclusion that, under the difficult overall economic conditions, there are issues with recruitment, employment and workplace stability in the journalistic profession. This is intensified by the lack of an institutional background to safeguard editorial independence for editors-in-chief as well as large groups of journalists. The existing codes of ethics are not mandatory and, other than public media employees, most journalists are not members in an active industry organization or trade union, which are weakly represented in Romania in general. The authors of the Report conclude that media owners are not under pressure to grant editorial independence, nor are they subject to specific conflict-of-interest criteria. This fact further encourages these shareholders to own media with certain underlying motivations of achieving various political and economic advantages.