Propaganda through the press, the golden apple of the parties – DW – 26.04.2024

The history of post-December press freedom is written and rewritten, taken together with the history of the fundamental institutions of the state. Last September, the European Commission officially closed the cooperation and verification mechanism (CVM) for Romania and Bulgaria, after 16 years since joining the European Union. This after, in July 2023, the European Commission’s annual report on the rule of law showed that Romania had not made any progress, among other things, in strengthening the governance and editorial independence of the mass media.

The lifting of the MCV not only did not lead to the consolidation of the rule of law, but it favored the proliferation of corruption, it led to the taming of the DNA, to the prescription of crimes due to the “carelessness” of prosecutors, to the increase of party interference in the editorial policy of the vast majority of the mass media – the media by financing the big press trusts with money from the budget.

We got rid of the MCV, but not other international bodies for warning the authorities about flagrant violations of the imperatives of the rule of law. The US State Department’s 2023 annual report on the observance of human rights clearly shows that the authorities fell on their backs after the MCV was lifted. A separate chapter concerns the violation of the freedom of the press, in which the case of Emilia Șercan is also mentioned, who revealed that she was threatened and subjected to blackmail attempts after she published an investigation showing that former prime minister Nicolae Ciucă had plagiarized in her thesis doctorate. It is known that the plagiarism file is still in court.

Editorial politics with party money

Most of today’s media is not free, not because it is censored by politicians, as it was crudely manipulated in the first post-December decade and later by more sophisticated methods, but above all because it is paid by parties for propaganda with money from the budget.

Beyond a few isolated cases in which a journalist was harassed by agencies and political agents, the most relevant example being the public enemy of plagiarists Emilia Șercan, press freedom is corrupted from within, in other words, press trusts self-censor to please payers. The exceptions are few, including a few online publications and the Romanian-language departments of Western media.

Almost half (48%, according to Expert Forum) of the money allocated last year from the state budget for party financing was directed to the press and propaganda. In black and white, of the total subsidies of more than 45 million euros that the parties received in 2023, more than 20 million went the way of television and radio stations, print and online media.

Explicitly, they turned into fake news, into rigged opinion polls, commissioned by some television stations, newspapers or websites so that the results would please the party paying the bill, in the omission of compromising news at the address of a party, a politician, a political client in the eyes of the DNA.

This year, with four rounds of elections, the budget allocated for party financing is much more generous, amounting to 63 million euros. We still don’t know how much the parties poured into the media coffers.

Parties prefer press propaganda to field work

The most serious thing about Government subsidy spending, which has not been debated in the media, is that the parties have allocated for political activities only 8.5% (4.2 million euros) of the money received from the state budget.

We are facing the same gulf between the people’s elected officials and the people who voted for them. After seeing each other with their bags in the cart, the MPs stamped into the voting booth for a four-year mandate suddenly forgot about those who elected them. Territorial offices are most often locked with seven padlocks. Or, in the best case, only the secretaries are still living in the offices of the constituencies where the deputies and senators should be at the disposal of those who elected them, but also of those who did not elect them. Political activities spill over into popular festivals, secret dinners with local barons, parties with privileged businessmen and even underworlders.

A party with all the neurons in it should spend at least half of the money from the budget for the connection with the voters, for the political education of those with the right to vote and especially of the teenagers who will vote for the first time, for the financing of NGOs or even of well-trained people in the field to monitor and help reduce discrimination based on ethnic, religious or sexual criteria.

Why don’t their parties make a cadre school

But the most important political activity that parties should finance with public money, generous amounts, is cadre training. The education of young politicians by settling the expenses for university courses, doctoral studies above what the universities pay, by sending them to advanced political studies abroad would be a huge benefit for the substance rebranding of the parties.

Why don’t political leaders do this? Because they fear that the chair will be pulled from under their feet even in their sleep. And because the institution of clientelism does not need people who can do politics without using the crude embroidery of the cord.

Under these circumstances, parties prefer to spend almost half of the public money allocated by the government on press and propaganda. It is a much more effective trick for manipulating the masses, a second-hand reality served to the public. As I said at the beginning, a large part of the media is self-censoring – more precisely, the patrons set the tone to please the party that pays with public money.