Radio Free Europe published on Thursday, January 6, an investigation under the signature of journalist Cristian Andrei, which reveals the large sums of money pumped in 2021 in some televisions and online publications by the PNL led by Ludovic Orban, but also by PSD.
It should be noted that the PNL sent to Europa Libera only the sums spent by the party during Ludovic Orban’s term as president, without specifying the amounts paid during Florin Cîțu’s term as president. PSD declined to say in detail with which media institutions it signed contracts in 2021.
What is certain is that during the political crisis of October and November 2021, the two major parties launched almost 20 million lei (4 million euros), representing public money. In the first 11 months of 2021, PNL and PSD together exceeded the threshold of 10 million euros – money spent on contracts with the press. This money, once again, is money from the generous subsidy received by the parties from the state budget.
The millions raised from the parties add to the tens of millions of euros also spent on the press by the Orban government in the 2020 election campaigns, a real electoral bribe camouflaged in a so-called pandemic information campaign.
The tens of millions of euros invested in the last two years by the big parties in the Romanian press have transformed her from a watchdog of democracy into a stray wagging her tail next to the power table for a thicker bone.
Castrated, with a perfectly politically controlled editorial agenda, most news television and websites behave deplorably. Some stand out especially for what they do NOT say, for the topics of maximum public interest that they refuse to address.
So don’t be surprised if you only see the Free Europe investigation taken over in the relevant press by a site like G4Media.ro. If you are wondering why other important revelations about politicians from PSD or PNL are no longer making waves in the press, you can also find the explanations in the tens of millions with which the big parties have bought their silence.
For example, the revelations about the head of the Legal Commission, Laura Vicol (PSD), who flies by private jet to Monaco, where she spends her holidays in a luxury apartment, or about the Minister of Finance, Adrian Câciu (PSD), a great Huawei propagandist before to enter the Government, you only read them on G4Media.ro, taken over by two or three other sites.
As we anticipated, with the formation of the great PNL-PSD coalition, with the blessing of President Klaus Iohannis, a deep silence was left over Romania. A bought silence, the culmination of irony, with public money. The big parties paid the press to shut up or attack on demand, but especially to shut up.
There is a small legal issue here. If in the case of government bribery they used the pretext of the pandemic and camouflaged the services provided in a so-called information campaign (with zero effects as we have all seen), in the case of millions of euros paid by parties outside the election campaign things get a little complicated.
What did PNL and PSD officially buy with the money from the subsidy? What did they write in the contracts concluded with the televisions and with the sites paid with thousands or tens of thousands of euros per month? Did they purchase editorial content? Deeply immoral if they did such a thing. The audience is deceived, fooled, pulled over, because they are not warned that the presence of a minister in the studio or a certain news item appears as part of a contract.
If they haven’t bought editorial content, then what? Political advice? What exactly did the service provide, and how can it be proven on paper? How far did the press go to advise parties or politicians?
The Court of Auditors and other institutions that have access to these at least immoral contracts will one day have to clarify what the parties bought outside the election campaigns. If we were in an election year and if the parties had marked in their advertising space the content promoted on websites or televisions, we would not have had a discussion. Election advertising in an election year is natural.
Completely abnormal is the situation now, when two major parties in power, PNL and PSD, buy the press, especially to ensure their peace, to control what appears and what does not about them, about the government or about President Klaus Iohannis.
It wouldn’t be the first time this had happened. Former mayor of Sector 1, Daniel Tudorache, poured heavy money into the mayor’s budget. Meanwhile, the Court of Accounts found that it damaged the budget by over 850,000 lei, money spent on the broadcast of an advertisement promoting a hospital project.
There are publications and journalists who have lived or live from public money and political orders. But it seems that the press has never been silenced on such a scale as it is today. Economic and self-censorship has never been tougher. It’s as if money has never been punched in the mouth more brutally than in recent times.
In addition to the fact that the public is lied to, by omission or deliberately, there are major distortions in the media market. Media companies that subscribe to party or government money compete unfairly with the very few who function properly in the marketplace.
Much of the media today has become the accomplice of politicians, their trusted partner, their happy companion dog with a handful of bones thrown from the table of power.
An extremely dangerous phenomenon, the control of the press by politicians ultimately affects democracy itself. Justice and the press are the basic pillars on which any democracy rests. A country where the two powers in the state are controlled by politicians will inevitably lead to major social frustrations, corruption and abuse of power.
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