“The price of the freedom we are about to lose is high and we, the journalists, not the politicians, are going to pay it”

Journalists in this country used to be fighters until 2009. They would take up the barricades, united against a common foe – the communist leadership. There were several publications with an unbiased editorial policy, carrying out inquiries and investigations, which would not spare local authorities and political parties; the journalists would do their job, risking being hit with a crowbar in the head or being dragged into courts and humiliated there by corrupt judges who would apply the law as they wished. The newspapers would arise from ashes after they have been shut down. Indeed, there were also the obedient ones, who would gladly serve the interests of their masters against pay.
 
However, when I look back, it seems to me that the journalists were aware that one day we might end up with the microphones and cameras turned off and with useless pens in hands. And it would make us stronger. I would protest whenever they tried to gag us. We were critical, we investigated, and we never gave up, both as employees of the public media institutions and of private ones. In 2008, at a journalism school in Sweden, I was talking about press investigations we had carried out to disclose the names of the high-ranking Communist officials involved in various business schemes. The journalists from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan asked me then whether we felt free to criticize the President. "Yes," I replied. And I felt some sort of professional fulfillment.
 
Then blood-stained April 2009 happened.
 
Later, news TV channels were launched, talk shows became the trend. We got the chance of learning more about our politicians: how they speak, how they think, how they dress and what cars they drive. Undergraduates crowded at journalism departments, cherishing the dream of being shown on screen someday. We got a sniff at the freedom of speech, we felt free to decide what and how we wrote, we began informing the audience in real time about what the officials – the people we have voted, the people whom we made our leaders, whom we supported by paying from the money we earned by hard work – were doing. We started to show the luxurious life of the lawmakers, judges, prosecutors, officials of various ranks, who officially had relatively modest salaries...
 
It was then that the mechanism that seemed to work perfectly started to hiccup. Something got broken somewhere.
 
While more and more countries open the doors of their supreme fora to the public, not to mention the journalists, the media were removed from Parliament and Cabinet in Chisinau; more and more public institutions close their doors to journalists. Requests for information are ignored or journalists get nothing but vague answers. The lawmakers produce laws meant to gag the media, to subdue it, to make it work as they want.
 
The public can no longer watch how MPs vote, how they run their businesses from their soft leather seats, how they reach agreements or fall asleep during meetings, tired of so much hard work. The press was enclosed in a ‘fold’ and is fed only what somebody up there, in the high ranks, wants.
 
The politicians bring the media under their control under the same roof and twist them around their little finger. Critical opinions running against the statements of the politicians are not welcome anymore. Even the media controlled by politicians no longer fight with each other.
 
There are many more journalists now than until 2009; we have many more opportunities and tools to take action to defend our opinions, and it is a freedom that was not easily obtained. But our voice is not heard. The politicians no longer fear the power of the media. Why is that? Which piece of the mechanism has yielded and where, so that we do not care anymore that the system that is being built now by the politicians is going to crush us any day now? The price of the freedom we are about to lose is high and we, the journalists, not the politicians, are going to pay it.
 
 
NOTE: the Independent Journalism Center (IJC) holds awareness raising events under the slogan “We Want Access into Parliament” on all days when Parliament holds plenary meetings. The Campaign aims to ensure free access of the media to Parliament meetings, so that the media can freely perform their duties.

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The We Want into Parliament! campaign is conducted within the Advocacy Campaigns Aimed at Improving Transparency of Media Ownership, Access to Information and Promotion of EU Values and Integration project, implemented by the IJC, which is, in its turn, part of the Moldova Partnerships for Sustainable Civil Society project, implemented by FHI 360.