Press in the Election Campaign: Why it is easier to tell the truth and how a journalist can stay at a distance from his/her own political proclivities?

Aneta Grosu, editor-in-chief of Ziarul de Garda (ZdG) weekly newspaper, said that in current election campaign the editorial office decided not to accept election advertising from any electoral candidate. This is because in the past years, when ZdG published such materials, many readers were revolted to see some political players on the newspaper’s pages. ‘It was difficult to explain to them that the newspaper had current expenses that must be covered from advertising’ Aneta Grosu says. Another consideration underpinning this decision was that ZdG is an investigative newspaper that writes about corruption and politicians’ businesses. ‘We asked ourselves how could we accept political and election advertising from parties that, as proved by ZdG, operate with unlawful unreported money?’, the journalist wondered.
According to Aneta Grosu, the number of ZdG subscribers increased and editorial office received letters of gratitude from readers for the lack of election advertising.

According to senior editor of Agora.md, Victoria Dumbrava, online advertising does not provide them a stable income because many clients prefer to contact directly Facebook, Google and other large platforms rather than the portal. Furthermore, some unwanted advertising materials enter the site through Google despite the restrictions applied by the editorial office. She said that Agora.md managed to block the advertising of an election contestant who reached the main advertising banner on the site through Google. Victoria Dumbrava also referred to a case of pressure by a candidate, who paid for election advertising and then asked the editorial office to remove a fragment from another material that put him in a less favorable light. ‘We told him clearly that election advertising is one thing, and the editorial content is a totally different thing and these two directions are separated in our company’, said Dumbrava.

Newsmaker.md is another publication, stated in the media organisations monitoring reports for the balanced presentation of facts during the election campaign. Evghenii Solari, editor of the political department at Newsmaker, stressed that ‘it is much easier to write in a balanced way, because it is “more pleasant to tell the truth”’. In his opinion, the Moldovan society is polarized and politicised, and this fact is felt even more during the election campaign. The same can be said about the journalists’ guild. At the same time, Solari believes that ensuring political equidistance and political pluralism during the election campaign largely depends on the journalists’ power to distance themselves from their own political preferences, because only in this way they will be able to objectively assess all politicians.
Ana Gherciu, chief editor at the Moldova.org portal, told that some parties did not offer election advertising, being ‘upset’ with the portal, but portal was not saddened by this. ‘Practically, they made our life easier during the election campaign because we knew that there were three parties having money to pay for election advertising, and they were controversial and it would have been strange for us to accept them’, Ana Gherciu says.

Press Council Chairperson Viorica Zaharia urged journalists to have a critical approach to the election promises of all candidates. She suggested them to add other information to the background for more objective news, even when it reflects the event organised by a single candidate. For example, certain number of candidates run in elections X, or something else to make the news more balanced, featuring more than just one single character. ‘In such a way the reporter does not seem to favour a certain candidate’, Zaharia explained.