Roumanie : les médias réduits au silence ?

Plusieurs magnats de la presse étrangers tentent actuellement de
bâilloner les journalistes roumains, écrit Tom
Gallagher dans Transitions Online.

Romania is entering a year of volatility after the unexpected
victory of Traian Basescu, an outspoken reformer and populist, in
the presidential elections of 12 December 2004. Basescu has
promised to break the tight grip on power of the Social Democratic
Party (PSD), the successor of Romania’s Communist Party. After his
election, Basescu appointed a non-PSD government with somewhat
tenuous support in parliament.

Parliament, the judiciary, the secret services, and recently
privatized state firms will be the main battlegrounds for the
removal of PSD influence. But a furious struggle has already
erupted in the media–the arena where Adrian Nastase, the
autocratic boss of the PSD, may have lost his bid to become
president of Romania. 

An effective opposition

The biggest thorn in Nastase’s side had
been Evenimentul Zilei, the flagship of a shrinking
band of independent newspapers. It painstakingly chronicled how
those inside or near the PSD transferred the most lucrative state
assets into their own hands. And since funds from the EU have
started to flow in preparation for Romania’s accession as a full
member in 2007, the paper has also shown how much of this money has
been systematically looted.

In November’s stormy election campaign, Evenimentul
Zilei played a vital role in ensuring that the democratic
process in Romania worked, however imperfectly. It reported news
that the electronic media–the sole source of news for most
Romanians–were prevented from carrying by official
interference. 

On 25 November, the PSD paid an inadvertent tribute to the
paper’s tenacity by ordering as many copies as possible to be
bought up and destroyed before they could be sold to the public,
after Evenimentul Zilei had disclosed transcripts of
PSD strategy meetings in which plans to derail the justice system
and rig the elections were openly discussed.

Editor Dan Turturica and his team of journalists were on a roll
as the danger of Romania falling under the complete control of a
party contemptuous of the democratic process receded. Circulation
had risen to well over 100,000, with as many as 720,000 people
reading the newspaper as it passed from hand to hand.

On the evening of his victory, Basescu made a point of visiting
the newspaper’s offices to thank staff for ensuring that the
contest had been genuine. He was following in the footsteps of
ambassadors from several EU states who had shown public solidarity
with journalists from the paper who had been beaten up after
reporting how PSD figures were buying judges or diverting state
money into their own pockets.

But then, on 23 December 2004, Turturica was summoned to a
meeting with Thomas Landolt, the Bucharest representative of
Ringier, the Swiss owner of the newspaper. He was told that he
would be reassigned to the city of Bacau to carry out a feasibility
study for the launch of a free newspaper there, and that an interim
editor-in-chief would be appointed. 

Turturica’s banishment to this outpost in the poverty-stricken
province of Moldavia, a PSD stronghold, was seen by some as the
equivalent of being sent to Siberia; but it was also clear that
Ringier wanted Turturica’s “reassignment” to attract as little
attention as possible.

It badly miscalculated.

A few days later, most of the paper’s journalists demonstrated
in front of the Swiss and EU embassies, and on 5 January, more than
30 journalists resigned in protest. And within just two weeks of
Turturica’s removal, circulation dropped by over 40 percent.

Ringier’s move was the culmination of a campaign to tone down
the paper’s critical coverage of the government’s work. In early
September, the paper’s journalists had issued an open letter
protesting Ringier’s interference with its editorial line. A few
weeks later, Cornel Nistorescu, one of the country’s most prominent
journalists, resigned as editor after disagreements over a
restructuring plan Ringier wanted to push through. The plan was
believed to be intended to move closer to the PSD ahead of
Romania’s elections

To read the full text of the article, visit the Transitions Oline website.