Quality of newscasts on national radio station has improved, not yet on television

The national radio station, unlike the national television channel, has made considerable progress and manifests a steady tendency to reach the professional standards required by the deontological norms and the present legislation, say experts of the project “Monitoring Implementation of the Broadcasting Code”, quoted by Info-Prim Neo. A number of 128 radio news items and subjects and 219 television news stories and topics have been analysed during the last monitoring of the programmes of Teleradio-Moldova Company carried out between November 19 and 25, one of the experts Vasile State told a news conference on December 19. The radio news items and subjects based on two and more sources have doubled compared with the previous monitoring. The political parties are mentioned not so often, while the number of appearances of the first three persons in the state rose from 27 in August to 43 in November, the monitors ascertained. According to Vasile State, most of the monitored programmes are planned according to the real importance of the issues addressed. Earlier, it was mainly the protagonist that determined the place of the subject in the programme, and not the importance of the material for the public. According to the authors of the monitoring, the local correspondents manifest partiality in the radio programmes most often. Of the 219 television news stories analysed, 69 are biased, while 73 have a laudatory character, as against 82 biased news stories and 67 laudatory ones in August. The monitors say that the editions of the main news bulletin of the day “Mesager” differ in quality and this show an unstable planning and production. According to experts, the quality of newscasts would improve, without additional expense, if the producers did not accept inconsistent news items based on a single source, the subjects in which the author gives assessments instead of the interlocutor, the topics in which the protagonists are only officials with important positions to which the material refers etc. Ten media NGOs take part in the implementation of the project “Monitoring Implementation of the Broadcasting Code”.