BCC adopts Concept on covering July 29 elections

The Broadcasting Coordinating Council (BCC) has adopted the Concept on covering the electoral campaign for the early parliamentary elections of July 29, at a public sitting on June 16, Info-Prim Neo reports. They largely preserved the text of the Concept for covering the April 5 elections, but BCC chairman Gheorghe Gorincioi has insisted modifications were inserted into the document, after recommendations of international observers and the local civil society. The key difference from the previous concept is that the broadcasters will have to separate, through signs and sounds, the block of “Electoral News” in newscasts. Gheorghe Gorincioi suggests that the elections coverage concept wants “to create equal conditions for all the electoral contestants to have access to electronic media, not to create restrictions for broadcasters in covering the run-up.” When asked by Info-Prim Neo to say how the adopted Concept is going to meet the opposition parties' complaints about not having access to Teleradio-Moldova (public), the BCC chairman has said: “All the political parties claim they don't have access to some radio and TV stations. If a party does not get to the Parliament, it should seek for a reason: that it had no access, was not presented.” Ludmila Vasilache offered her colleagues to model examples of the BCC's behavior in case it will have to decide on cases about propaganda films. She referred to the genre of films recently broadcast by some televisions in which opposition leaders are presented in a negative light, and are not offered the opportunity to say their own opinions. BCC member Corneliu Mihalache has said “such films do have a right to exist,” and the BCC chairman suggests the possible electoral contestants who feel touched to go to courts. In their report on the April 5 elections, international observers hired by ODIHR say about the BCC that it did not duly react to the violations committed by broadcasters during the electoral campaign for the April 5 elections. EU institutions keep criticizing the fact that the opposition parties in Moldova do not have sufficient access to the broadcasters paid from the tax-payers' money, the latest appreciation being given in the Conclusions of June 15 of the EU foreign ministers. “The Council is also concerned by the deterioration of freedom of expression and media freedom and urges the Republic of Moldova to ensure equal access of political parties to the public media,” reads the document of the EU Council. Moldovan experts under the aegis of the Electronic Press Association (APEL) find, among others, about the previous elections that “during the electoral campaign, the BCC did not duly honor its mission of a guarantor of the defense of the public interest in the area of audiovisual communication on democratic principles, one of its basic tasks – supervising the observance of the law.”