Experts of the Monitoring of Broadcasting Code’s Implementation project accuse SB of faulty functioning

The Supervisory Board (SB) of the Teleradio-Moldova Company (TRM) hasn’t yet identified its place and goal as instructed by the legislation, in this way functioning more in its own corporate interest, rather than for the public’s interests. This is the conclusion of the expert team of the Monitoring of Broadcasting Code’s Implementation project. The reason for such a conclusion constituted the case study made by the project team concerning the SB reaction to the decision of the Broadcasting Coordination Council (BCC) on May 23, 2007. Through that decision, TRM was publicly warned over bias and lack of politic and social pluralism during the election campaign. Fadei Nagacevshi, expert of the project and representative of the “Lawyers for Human Rights” organisation, mentioned that the SB met on May 28 in order to adopt a decision which would oblige the TRM President, Valentin Todercan, to present within two days a report on the company’s measures for improving the situation. Taking the report into account, the SB decided to elaborate and apply an immediate internal mechanism for monitoring the news programmes. The experts found that the SB reaction to the company’s sanctioning by the BCC was too late, even though maybe a correct one. The decision however, wasn’t sufficient for the auto-monitoring, since it didn’t contain the right mechanism to ensure its final steps. According to the authors of the research, this case denotes a faulty functioning of the SB, which doesn’t have enough knowledge of legislation, lacks a common will to comply with it and reacts inadequately to the decision of national regulatory authorities in the field. The project “Monitoring of Broadcasting Code’s Implementation”, financed by the Soros Foundation Moldova, aims to institute a public control mechanism over the way the new broadcasting legislation is implemented in Moldova.