2018 was the year of combating of foreign propaganda. This is gladdening, but only up to the moment when we realize that the effects of the struggle against foreign propaganda are actually not the expected ones. First of all, it became known that the legislation of the Republic of Moldova is not applied uniformly on the territory controlled by the constitutional authorities, which is except Transnistria. This way, the foreign propaganda in Găgăuz Yeri feels at home. Moreover, from the very beginning the regional authorities warned the central ones that they do not intend to implement the national legal norms that hamper foreign propaganda’s access to Moldova’s media sphere. This is a problem.
Secondly, without special efforts, we can ascertain that the strait of the foreign propaganda substantially extended the space for internal propaganda. The distortion of realities with the aim of developing favorable propagandistic beliefs in the citizens is mainly done through the media, especially through TV channels, radio and the Internet. Evidently, the owners of media resources are the main beneficiaries of the propaganda. In this regard, the media outlets that belong to politicians and persons affiliated to political parties have the biggest propagandistic impact based on frequency and volume. These findings that cannot be easily refuted lead us to the conclusion that the old problems of the Republic of Moldova – concentration of the mass media and monopolization of the advertising market – remained unsolved. On the contrary, they worsened.
As 2018 is a pre-electoral year, the media resources affiliated to parties preferred in the course of the year: to attack the opponents, forgetting to remind the people of what they promised four years ago in order to come into possession of mandates of government or representation; to substitute the reports on the implementation of electoral programs with momentary accomplishments, without doubting the beneficial effects of the latter; to invent subjects for propagandistic purposes and to distract attention from pressing, real problems. These findings equally refer to the media outlets affiliated to the parties of the power and to those of the opposition. Another problem appears here. The asymmetry in the propagandistic capacity is detrimental to those with small resources. It’s clear that the propagandists with the capacity of 10% somehow justify the activity of the propagandists with a share of 90% in the media sphere. In this regard, the strategy for combating distortions by contrary acts didn’t prove to be really efficient.
The combating and disclosure of the unilateral coverage of the reality, proliferation of fakes and other artifices of the propagandistic flows necessitate at least comparable resources, if not proportional to those that are affiliated. A special role in this regard is played by public media outlets that could contribute to establishing a balance in the promotion of the interests of the government and the opposition, easing the tense situation caused by the polarization of society by propaganda.
The planned election campaign prior to the parliamentary elections of February 24, 2919 could be a starting point in this regard. If the electoral legislation anyway obliges to draft a code of conduct for the electoral contenders and media outlets, why shouldn’t they attempt to draft a document that would serve as a model of decent behavior in the periods between election campaigns? Evidently, this is a naïve question. No one will want to concede a part of their potential. And we should thus only meticulously develop the citizens’ critical attitude to information flows, no matter what direction they come from. The critical attitude requires the cultivation of the citizens’ interest in public affairs and the effects of the government of the elected one. Such an approach could be a contribution to the development of participatory political culture immune to the effects of propaganda.
IPN Experts
----
IPN note:
This is the 70th and last commentary of the series “IPN Experts” produced in the framework of a project financed by the U.S. Embassy in Moldova during the past eight months. The goal of the project was to offer the general public models based on documents and facts by which one can distinguish the truth from foreign and, particularly, internal propaganda. In this project, we chose to be extremely correct as we took care to first publish news articles based on exact statements made by a series of politicians, of all political orientations, usually in evening TV programs, without distorting or interpreting them somehow, which we provided for the public. Only after this, as the second source, we produced opinion articles that cited hundreds of documents, with hundreds of real hyperlinks to them.
During eight months, none of those documents, proofs, links were challenged on the forum of the Agency’s website www.ipn.md or any other public space. But we yet faced an attack by which we were accused of... propaganda. The fact that we sign the commentaries with the generic name “IPN Experts”, not with names of concrete persons was used as a pretext. It was insinuated that the authors are “heavyweight(s) of a political party” and that IPN this way lied to the public and the backers. This is crass untruth! However, without wanting to, the authors of the attack confirmed the arguments we presented to the U.S. Embassy at the start of the project, when we decided to sign the articles as we signed them. “There will be unpermitted and concerted attacks on the person, not on the message, this being one of the mandatory elements of propaganda,” we said then. The backer agreed as it knows the real names of the IPN Experts and knows much more than someone would like about the centers, methods and real propaganda authors from the Republic of Moldova, and also about the conditions of the journalists and the press that want to be objective and professional in the Republic of Moldova.
As everyone has the right to opinion, we would have overlooked this attack if it hadn’t come from circles close to the most important person in the Republic of Moldova at present, who takes the most important decisions concerning the fate of society and every citizen apart. We would not like to believe that those decisions are taken based on the “information” and “analysis” of the model shown above.
IPN
