The balanced covering of the election campaign when this is full of aggressive words or messages that incite hatred is a real challenge for the mass media. Executive director of the Association of Independent Press (API) Petru Macovei said it is rather hard to ensure a balance between the fast provision of information and keeping of quality, but the reputation is the most important thing that a media outlet has and, if they take information from a website without verifying it, this points to nonprofessionalism.
“We cannot have full confidence in information published by other media outlets no matter how famous these are. Swiftness is important, but the quality is more important. That’s why any information, regardless of the place where it is taken from, should be verified,” Petru Macovei stated in a news conference at IPN.
The API executive director noted that some of the portals and the content they provide in general are balanced and impartial. However, the videos of different electoral meetings or other events organized by election contenders they post, the materials in which the given election contenders criticize others, their opponents and disseminate defamatory messages or promote hate speech affect the monitoring results because everything that a portal places on its platform is its own content, even if the material was taken from elsewhere. There is yet a positive tendency as some of the portals stopped to take full videos of events organized by election contenders if these contain accusations and the right of reply is not given.
Petru Macovei noted that following the API’s first monitoring report that covered ten media portals, particular changes occurred. Those portals that follow the public interest and listen to the wishes of the public responded to the recommendations made by the Association. In some of the cases, the covering of the electoral theme at some of the portals improved. Other portals showed to be very biased and continued to favor particular election runners and to promote them. In the second monitoring period, several portals continued to act as a source of electoral agitation for particular election contenders and of discrediting of opponents. Only two portals - agora.md and newsmaker.md – fulfilled their mission of objectively and impartially informing in the current election campaign.
The report was compiled as part of a project financed by the National Endowment for Democracy of the U.S.
