Mass Media in Moldova Magazine - About Fake News, Elections and ... the Brain Drain from the Domestic Journalism

A new edition of Mass Media in Moldova magazine was issued. Whether you are active in this area or are far from our inner workings, we invite you to browse it in order to form a realistic impression about the current state of the Moldovan media. The current edition focuses on misinformation and its impact on journalistic guild and consumers from Moldova, and among the authors you will find media experts, lawyers, university researchers, web designers and, of course, journalists.

Thus, lawyer Tatiana Puiu, wonders in her article ‘The Press Law: For It or Against It?’ if this law should be repealed, as some of its provisions are already contained in other regulatory acts. 
The political battles for the regional public broadcaster ‘Gagauziya Radio Televizionu’ (GRT) have been reviewed in detail by media expert Ion Bunduchi, who has watched closely the long-lasting conflict between politicians of different colors from Comrat, who want to control this public station.  

 Researcher Aneta Gonta goes over ways to combat fake news at the European and international levels. According to the author, the phenomenon reached unimaginable proportions, since Pope Francis himself speaks of misinformation as the ‘crafty serpent’ from the Book of Genesis, who, at the dawn of humanity, created the first fake news...’.   
Chairperson of the Press Council, Viorica Zaharia, speaks in her article ‘Gratification: a Poisoned Apple for Journalists or an Innate Public  Relations Tool’ about another ethical aspect - integrity. The author notes that over the years, the Moldovan press, from the university to the editorial offices never got the chance to have an integrity ‘vaccine’.

TV journalist Dorin Scobioala, in his article ‘The Campaign’s Audiovisual Degeneration’, argues, using concrete examples from the recent electoral campaign, that such notions as ‘neutrality’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ are on the verge of extinction in the Moldovan broadcasting world. ‘It does not take a media expert to see how dirty and deplorable some of the coverage was during the very recent campaign for local elections in Chisinau and Balti’, writes Dorin Scobioala, noting that ‘We have come to a point when not a single person seen on  a TV station deserves to be called a journalist’.

And Deutsche Welle journalist, Vitalie Calugareanu, puts the finger on the wound in his article ‘Sincerity Crisis. A Thousand Euros and a Suitcase’, where he reminds about a forgotten issue - the brain drain that also affected the journalistic guild. According to the author, if all journalists who have left Moldova over the past years would suddenly return, ‘an earthquake with a magnitude of 10 would occur in our media field’. ‘The pseudo-journalists would be unemployed and would be censured, the institutions they work for would be boycotted, and the 30,000 Syrians would have no chance of winning any elections in Moldova. But they will not return’, says Vitalie Calugareanu.
In the June edition of the ‘Mass Media in Moldova’ magazine you can also read an interview with web designer Victor Spinu, co-author of TROLLESS app, where you will learn more about the trolls' profile and techniques they use. In the Book Review section, we present the specialised publication Fake News: A Roadmap (Riga, 2018), a brief but compulsory piece of reading for those who want to understand propaganda and media manipulation in order to be able to find solutions.

The June edition of the ‘Mass Media in Moldova’ magazine can be read online in the Publications section of the media-azi.md portal in Romanian, Russian and English. The print version of the magazine will be issued in July, in a limited number of copies, to be distributed to university centers.