Omega, Moldova Suverana and Nezavisimaya Moldova continue to favor PCRM, report

During the fifth week of election campaign, as the previous weeks, some of the newspapers and news agencies showed a biased electoral behavior, mass media expert Petru Macovei told a news conference on Tuesday. The conference was held to present the third monitoring report on the covering of the election campaign by the mass media, compiled by the Independent Journalism Center within the Civic Coalition for Free and Fair Elections, Info-Prim Neo reports. Petru Macovei said that after monitoring 16 newspapers and online news agencies during a week it was established that not all of them observe the deontological norms. The news agency Omega and the newspapers Moldova Suverana and Nezavisimaya Moldova evidently favored the PCRM and presented Communists' political opponents in a bad light. At the same time, the papers Timpul de dimineata and Jurnal de Chisinau criticized the PCRM or presented it in a mainly unfavorable light, while the PLDM and PL were presented in a positive light. The news stories in these newspapers are unbiased. The news portal www.unimedia.md also favors the Liberal parties and criticizes the Communists. The paper Flux criticizes all the election contenders and supports the candidates of the PPCD. The report says the local newspapers Cuvantul and Gazeta de Sud published neutral news items, while their opinion materials presented the PCRM principally in a bad light. According to Petru Macovei, the papers Vesti Gagauzii and Golos Balti stopped covering the election campaign. The newspaper Komsomoliskaia pravda engages in this process less, but its opinion materials favor slightly the PCRM. Most of the newspapers and news agencies increased the number of opinion articles and news stories about the elections. The papers and news agencies had been monitored between October 25 and 31. The Monitoring of the Mass Media in the Election Campaign Project is implemented in partnership with the Independent Press Association and the Marketing and Polling Institute IMAS-INC.