The parliamentary commission on culture, education, research, youth, sport and the media rejected the report for 2018 presented by the Audiovisual Council on July 3. The commission decided to constitute a working group that will check to see if the Council members meet the criteria for holding the posts. One of the members of the commission proposed that the Audiovisual Council should resign en masse, IPN reports.

In the meeting of the commission, Audiovisual Council chairman Dragoș Vicol said that no matter who is in power and who is in the opposition, any political force has at least the temptation to subdue the Audiovisual Council and this is against the Council’s prerogative.

ACUM MP Maria Ciobanu said that by his statements, the Council’s chairman admitted that the institution was politically biased. “When I say this I refer first of all to the only public television channel we have, Moldova 1, which during the last few years established ferocious censorship. Not a single opposition leader has been invited by this channel for years,” she stated.

Dragoș Vicol replied that this censorship is evident, but there is a rule that the Audiovisual Council cannot intervene in the editorial activity of a TV channel .

ACUM MP Lilian Carp said the advertisements in the election campaigns are presented as social advertisements. It is a problem when some of the politicians who own TV channels directly or through other persons are involved in activities that are presented as social ones when these actually pursue political goals.

Octavian Țîcu, of the Bloc ACUM, noted the Audiovisual Council is a captured state institution that is an accomplice to the institution of monopoly on the media market by one person as part of a holding that suffocated or subdued all the media outlets. He suggested that the Council should resign en masse.

Audiovisual Council member Olga Guțuțui requested MP Octavian Țîcu to analyze the work of each member separately when speaking about the Council’s activity. “During four years on the Council, I had a position that didn’t depend on the political affairs and I thus ask you not to generalize,” she stated.

The report that is to presented in Parliament was rejected by six votes, with one abstention.

It was proposed creating a working group that will monitor the mass media, including the work of the Audiovisual Council, will examine the financial situation of the national public broadcaster “Teleradio-Moldova” and the way in which this used the public funds and will also determine the compatibility of the Council members with the held posts.