The Russian Federation is in an information war with everyone and the Republic of Moldova should not be part of this war. On its information agenda, Moldova should also have the interests that it should promote. We should now allow the TV channels of another state to influence the formation of this agenda, or the formation of the national information landscape, Democratic MP Corneliu Mihalache, stated in the public debate “Anti-propaganda law”: necessity, advantages and risks”, staged by IPN News Agency and Radio Moldova.
Corneliu Mihalache said the changes made to the Broadcasting Code were necessary to show that the approaches to the Moldovan information sphere, or the involvement of foreign TV channels in this sphere or the domination of foreign TV channels, should be changed. “In fact, the TV channels exist to disseminate propaganda or to manipulate. This is the duty of our, Russian, American, European TV channels. But foreign propaganda wasn’t so aggressive several years ago,” stated the MP.
According to Corneliu Mihalache, so many Russian TV channels shouldn’t have been retransmitted in Moldova as the situation concerning retransmissions in Moldova since the 1990s until now has worsened. The consumers of information in Moldova became hostage of retransmissions. “Such a situation exists in no other state. There are not so many retransmitted channels even in the CIS,” he noted, adding the national media landscape was parasitized by Russian TV channels.
Corneliu Mihalache noted that the advantage of the amendments to the Code resides in the fact that Moldova said possibly for the first time “stop” to a situation that can affect the information security of the state and didn’t think where the gas comes from, where goods are exported to and that we should be strategic partners. “The information security is now possibly more important than economic security. We live in the 21st century and the information is a weapon and this weapon is sometimes used rather harshly and aggressively,” he said.
He also said that the Broadcasting Code adopted ten years ago allowed replacing the retransmitted content with national content. “We cannot say now that we are not morally prepared for producing own programs. They have spoken about these changes and the replacement of the retransmitted programs for a year. I don’t think there will be major problems,” stated the MP.
The public debate “Anti-propaganda law”: necessity, advantages and risks” was the 86th installment of the series of debates “Developing political culture by public debates” that are held with support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany.
