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The IJC Executive Director, Nadine Gogu, said that during the last week of the campaign, media outlets had an increasingly biased behaviour. ‘We can say that during that week, that 6 out of 10 channels favoured or disfavoured a candidate. This is more than half – the majority’, said Nadine Gogu.
Thus, according to IJC Report, the public TV channel Moldova 1 covered the election campaign in an accurate and impartial way, and the broadcasters Jurnal TV, Pro TV and TV 8 covered the activities of most of the candidates in a neutral way, ensuring a relative pluralism of opinions without favouring or disfavouring a certain election candidate.
The private broadcasters Prime TV and Publika TV have covered the activity of the majority of election candidates, except for the candidate of ACUM/PPDA/PAS, Andrei Nastase, who was the protagonist of most negative news. Nadine Gogu gave as example a piece of news broadcast by Prime TV, about an opinion poll, which focused largely on the fact that ‘... the party led by Andrei Năstase would not reach the Parliament’, if early parliamentary elections were organised, with the reporter repeating this statement several times in the same piece of news.
The IJC Executive Director added that the failure to observe the right to reply is still a constant problem. Although journalists claim that they make requests and call the sources and that the latter do not answer them, Nadine Gogu says that when a certain statement is used in all news, this means that the reporters do not make additional efforts.
NTV Moldova and Accent TV promoted openly the PSRM candidates, especially Ion Ceban, and favored him by offering him a lot of airtime and by covering him in a good context during his appearances. The large amount of airtime allocated to news about an with the presence of PSRM representatives and the disregard for other election candidates reveals the biased behaviour of Accent TV, which is against the ethical provisions.
RTR Moldova allocated more airtime to cover the PSRM candidate, Ion Ceban, who was clearly favored both by the large number of news and the positive context of the appearances, while his counter-candidates were covered in short contexts or ignored.
Last but not least, Accent TV had a biased attitude towards Renato Usatii, a PPPN candidate for the position of mayor of Balti municipality. In a piece of news the candidate is mentioned only in a negative context, accusations are made against him, both through the representatives of the PSRM, as well as through the labels and comments made by the journalist.
The Central Television continued to be involved in open partisanship in favor of the candidates of the ‘Sor’ Political Party and slightly disfavoured Ion Ceban (PSRM).
Asked by journalists during a conference, if the violations found in the report are subject to sanctions by the regulatory authority, Nadine Gogu replied that the BC could definitely fine the mentioned channels for the facts found by the civil society monitors.
‘We are positive about this, because we are talking about impartiality, about ensuring the right to reply. As far as I know, there are specific provisions in the current legislation that the Broadcasting Council could use in order to apply sanctions’, mentioned Nadine Gogu.
She added that the IJC would monitor the behavior of TV channels in the second round of the election campaign. ‘The campaign goes on. In the upcoming period, the things may get even more interesting because there are only two candidates in Chisinau, and in our opinion, some aspects may take shape’, noted Nadine Gogu.
It should be mentioned that the Chair of the BC, Dragos Vicol, announced during the hearings in the Parliamentary Committee for Mass-media that the regulatory authority cannot apply sanctions for violations in terms of favouring or disfavouring certain election candidates, but only for the lack of the party concerned. This vision was strongly criticised by the Executive Director of the Electronic Press Association, Ion Bunduchi, who mentioned that the BC has enough levers to sanction the broadcasters, including in such cases.
By monitoring the media, IJC aimed to inform the public on media outlets behavior during the election campaign and election candidates’ access to mass media. It also aimed to notify the regulators on the trends that might affect media performance or compromise its ability to provide accurate, unbiased and pluralist information to the audience.
A total of 10 broadcasters were monitored. Moldova 1, Prime TV, Publika TV, Jurnal TV, RTR Moldova, NTV Moldova, Accent TV, Pro TV, TV 8 and Central Television. The channels were selected according to the following criteria: audience/impact (national, regional), type of media (broadcaster), form of ownership (public, private), broadcasting language (Romanian, Russian).
