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Only three television broadcasters out of ten monitored during 5 – 11 May 2018 reflected the local election campaign in an unbiased and neutral way, while others continued to be involved in political partisanship, according to the third monitoring report on mass media behaviour during the election campaign, presented by the Independent Journalism Centre on 15 May.
The main conclusions arising from the monitoring reveal partisanship behaviour of most broadcasters in relation to certain candidates in the new local elections of 20 May 2018. Most frequently, these broadcasters advantaged certain candidates and disadvantaged others, using opinion polls data to influence the image of electoral candidates in public perception.
Thus, Prime TV, Canal 2 and Publika TV national broadcasters should have not reflect the election campaign, according to the statement submitted to CEC, but they continued broadcasting multiple electoral materials directly and indirectly in their newscasts. Most of them largely favoured the independent candidate Silvia Radu, and disfavoured Andrei Nastase, the PPDA/PAS/PLDM candidate.
NTV Moldova and Accent TV broadcasters, as previously, promoted openly Ion Ceban, PSRM candidate for Chisinau Mayor’s Office, and Alexandr Usatii, the candidate of the same party for Balti Mayor’s Office, and disfavoured Silvia Radu and Andrei Nastase. One could notice the slight favouring of PSRM candidate, Ion Ceban, and of Reghina Apostolova, from Sor Party, on RTR Moldova channel.
Jurnal TV continued reflecting press events organised by the candidates in an unbiased manner, while in other electoral news, one could notice the disfavour of the independent candidate Silvia Radu and the favour of Andrei Nastase, the PPDA/PAS/PLDM candidate.
The public television channel Moldova 1, as well as Pro TV and TV 8 private channels, revealed a balanced behavior providing news access to the majority of election candidates, and did not favour or disfavour any candidates registered in the campaign for the new local elections.
As per opinion polls, some televisions presented the results related to elections as an accomplished fact, not as respondents’ voting intentions, thus leaving room for the risk of manipulating the electorate. From this perspective, electoral surveys remain a subject with a high manipulative burden in case they are reflected in bad faith.
The monitoring of mass media conducted by IJC aims to inform the public on media outlets behavior during the election campaign and the election candidates’ access to mass media. It also aims to notify the regulatory institutions on trends that might affect media performance or compromise its ability to provide accurate, unbiased and pluralist information to the public.
