Nobody expects the government to provide financial support to the independent media; rather, the government should help by regulating the media market in a fair way, says Mariana Rață, co-founder of TV8.
“All we really want is fair competition”, stated Rață during an IPN debate discussing the multiple challenges facing the Moldovan independent media today.
“Every time the state intervened in this market, it was to skew the rules in someone’s favor (...) The notion that there is a press funded by politicians is wrong. Politicians never pay the press with their own money. They pay it with taxpayers’ money”, pointed out the well-known TV host. According to her, one of the dishonest practices used by politicians is when governmental agencies and state companies are compelled to advertise in politically affiliated media.
When TV8 was launched in 2017, the entire advertising market was controlled by two ad sales companies. Through them - says Mariana Rață - Vlad Plahotniuc and Igor Dodon divided the market, so that nothing was left for the independent press. Although TV8 and other independent organizations complained to the Competition Council, it took two years for the watchdog agency to acknowledge the existence of a “cartel situation”. But even then, the Council closed one eye, identifying in that cartel the company of the now fugitive oligarch, but failing to see the other one. A cartel of one, “what a joke”, said Mariana Rață.
Now, according to her, the situation with the access to the advertising market has not improved, if not gotten worse. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many companies have withdrawn their advertising budgets, but somehow TV channels that re-broadcast Russian content have been spared, says the TV8 co-founder.
Moreover, the law says that all TV channels have equal access to the advertising market, but not all of them have the same operational costs, says Mariana Rață. “And it doesn’t seem to matter if they obey the law, which says they have to create a certain amount of original content”. On the one hand, there are channels that re-broadcast Russian content, produced with big money and attractive from an advertising point of view, channels that employ few people and create little original content. On the other hand, there are channels like TV8, which have few resources, but a big payroll that comes with creating original content. “To create 4 hours of quality content each day, you need to employ a minimum of 100 people”, explains Mariana Rață.
Another problem facing the independent press, according to the co-founder of TV8, is the lack of qualified staff, due to the brain drain among other reasons. “If you ask me what’s worse in today’s media, the lack of money or the lack of people, I’d say people”. Mariana Rață agreed with other panelists that the shortage of professional media managers is also a big problem.
The debate was the 239th installment of the “Political Culture” Series, run by IPN with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
