- What brings you here? Asked the waitress from the restaurant of the hotel from Bistrita. I told the woman that we intend to organize media literacy training courses with high school students from the city - to teach them to understand mass media and to make a difference between quality journalism and entertainment, as well as to recognize manipulation.
- Are you organizing such courses only for children?
- For whom else should we organize them? I asked.
- For people like me, the waitress answered promptly, pointing both hands at her chest, to reinforce her identity.
It was for the first time when such a clear and specifically formulated request came “from the people”: we need such courses to understand mass media. Almost two years have gone by since that dialog and I still owe that woman a course.
There are 20 years since the journalists and media analysts make a ping-pong play with the “guilt”, for the tabloidization of Romanian mass media. The analysts blame editorial teams and media owners, their “greed” and pursuit of profit. The later, in their turn, blame the public and provide figures to support their position. Indeed, if we look at these figures, “this is what the public wants”. The opinion surveys indicate, year after year, that Romanians are not happy with the quality of TV programmes (particularly) and that they want to have quality informative broadcastings, tasteful entertainment and “educational programs”. The same surveys, year after year, are contradicted by rating figures, which show that a small number of people, often close to zero, watch such broadcastings, while the tabloid and scandal broadcastings are largely appreciated.
It is easier to attribute this paradox to human hypocrisy, to conformity pressure - the one that makes you answer questions not the way you think is right, but the way you think the interviewer wants you to, to make a good impression. This is it, this is what the public wants!
But then comes the necessary or even mandatory question coming: what did we do to teach these people to want something better? How about the mass media? Or the state?
Let’s take them one at a time. The state – let’s start with it, because it is simpler. It did nothing. Mass media education does not represent a priority for the Romanian state. It is not even a subject. The attempts of NGO’s to develop pilot high schools mass media education curriculae faced the huge indifference of the Ministry of Education.
Not even those who aim at educating critical thinking – which can use mass media as a “research area” were well received. Instead, religion classes – for which manuals full of stereotypes and intolerant attitudes are used - have been, until this year, mandatory throughout the 12 years of school. There are professors across the country who try, on their own account and responsibility, to teach classes of media literacy, based on pupils’ interest in public communication. Their efforts are admirable, but in most cases, they are affected by the lack of adequate means and by a superficial understanding of the phenomenon, obligations and freedoms of the journalist.
The media companies state that it is not their duty to educate – their sole responsibility is to the shareholders who are interested only in the profit. It is true, there are some attempt on the part of journalists to explain to the public why they made a certain editorial decision, why it is good (or not) to disclose the names of people involved in actions you write about. These attempts, in most cases, take the shape of editorials written by editors-in-chief and bear the weight of their name: informal leaders of the society. It happens in Botosani, Deva, Cluj, Craiova… Generally, the local print (or online) press applies such a method. It is a good thing to do, because it enforces the relationship with a public that is in search of a compass and the guide in an increasingly complicated world.
Even if there are not so many of them, NGOs make the most important efforts. There are programs meant for young people and professors like the ones carried out within the Centre for Independent Journalism (Romania). There are also the ones meant for communication experts, to teach them to meet the needs of their public, and the ones for NGO activists to help them maintain a relation with their public.
These efforts are isolated, few and unsustainable – you do what you can, where you can and with the few resources that are available to you. The results become visible in time - a luxury that the institutions providing fund for such programmes are not willing to offer you.
This way we come back to the only one who has resources and the benefit of continuity: the state, with its mechanisms. It has everything, but no vision and desire to educate its citizens to think on their own - even if that means citizens will become more critical and careful in managing communities. A difficult task for the state…
Ioana AVADANI,
executive director of the Centre for Independent Journalism from Romania
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This material is published within the project "Freedom of expression and media development in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and South Caucasus", implemented by CIJ during the period May-September 2015, supported by Deutsche Welle Akademie and financed by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The opinions expressed in this material belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the financer’s opinion.
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