At the meeting in June, the Press Council examined a number of complaints and challenges submitted by media consumers, two public associations, a blogger and a politician, IPN reports.
The public association “Media Center for Youth” requested the Press Council to assess a feature report produced by Realitatea TV about the hearing where three minors were found guilty of killing a teenage girl in Straseni. According to the association, the report was based, incited hatred and neglected the principle of presumption of innocence because neither the convicted minors nor their legal representatives were interviewed. Invited to the meeting, Dina Perciun, director of the news department of Realitatea TV, explained that the editorial staff acted in the public interest when they covered the trial in this case. The judge decided that the hearings will be open, showing thus that the public interest in this resonant case prevails over the right to protect the identity. Moreover, the given minors weren’t victims of violent actions or abuses. At the same time, Dina Perciun confessed that the reporters forgot to mention that the convicted minors and their lawyers refused to talk to the press.
In its decision, the Press Council said the journalists are obliged to present the positions of all the sides involved in conflict situations and in trials, while the position of convicts or their legal representatives should be made public, including the refusal to pronounce. The Realitatea Group was urged to take this aspect into account in the journalistic content in the future.
The public association “Project Casa Mare” complained about a feature broadcast on the public TV channel Moldova 1. This was about the deinstitutionalization of persons with mental health problems. The association said that in the feature that presented video sequences of the third congress on community psychiatry, staged by a number of organizations in partnership with “Project Casa Mare”, the journalist didn’t mention the congress and its organizers, while a vocational center managed by this association was presented as being launched by the Government. The members of the association also complained about the difficult communication on the issue with the director of the TV channel.
Notified by the Press Council, the administration of Moldova 1 channel responded that they aimed not to cover the congress, but to address problems in the field and to elucidate the solutions proposed by specialists, while the feature was complex and well compiled. When examining the content, the Council established that mistakes were made in collecting facts for the feature and this is a deviation from the Journalist’s Deontological Code. It recommended the channels’ administration to additionally train journalists in terms of accuracy and the fact-finding process.
Blogger Eugeniu Lukianyuk submitted a complaint against Jurnal TV, saying his statement was denatured and presented as ironical in a feature article on this channel. The Council decided that by partial citing, Jurnal TV didn’t denature the message transmitted by the blogger through social networking sites, but noted that the use of the adjective “ironic” in relation to a source that isn’t interviewed live runs counter to the deontological principle.
Another complaint was filed by politician Andrei Nastase against the channels Publika TV, Prime TV, Canal 2, Canal 3 and the radio station Publika FM. Nastase said he was the target of a campaign aimed at denigrating him by manipulating the public opinion and distorting the reality in the news bulletins of these stations. In particular, he referred to a feature where he is labeled as liar and the public is misled by montage showing that the participants in the protests of 2016 voted for the introduction of the uninominal voting system to choose MPs. In reality, this was only a demand formulated in his speech by one of the participants, but this wasn’t adopted and included in the resolution of the protest.
The representatives of the mentioned stations didn’t respond to the Press Council’s notification and didn’t present their opinion about the accusations made against them. The Council determined that Publika TV, Prime TV, Canal 2 and Canal 3 violated a number of provisions of the Journalist’s Deontological Code, including those that refer to the presentation of information in an honest way, asking for the opinions of all the involved sides and others and recommended refraining from becoming involved in discrediting campaigns. The complainer was recommended to ask for the right to replay to the assertions referring to him that were contained in the broadcast feature articles.
The Press Council also examined several other challenges.
