Romania's Media History

Andreea Mogos, a journalism teacher at Babes – Bolyai University, in Transylvania, Romania, had come today at class in order to give us a brilliant conference about the media situation in her country from 1900’s until now.

During 45 years, Romania was ruled by The Communist Party and Ceausescu was it dictator during 25 years. After the communist dictatorship, in 1989, Romania became a free nation and democracy brought a drastically media change.

The communist party controlled, censored and selected all the things that will appear on the newspapers. For example, they talk about how “incredible” was Ceausescu and the problems of the capitalists countries like drugs, crime and social inequalities. As we’ve seen on the video, they also edit the photos for their own interest. So, in the communist Romania, people weren’t informed: they only consume propaganda. In fact, the Party’s ideology made the Media’s traditional functions, because there was only one journalism school, and their teachers taught how to create propaganda instead of how to inform about the truth.

In 1989, The Revolution of December 22nd overthrew the regime. The whole nation knows what’s happened in the capital, Bucharest, thanks to TV and its broadcasting of all the revolution events. The people who appeared on TV during these convulsed days became an influential social actors as successful businessmen and political leaders. With the arriving of democracy, newspapers began to change their names and most of them added the word “Liber” (free) because freedom was the most important thing that Romanians had then.

During the Romanian Transition, in 1990, the print media consumption exploded. Press went from 495 titles to 1444. Obviously, that occurred because people want to know, more than never, what is going on in the country. In the 90’s appeared hundreds of new newspapers, but he first one entirely based on private capital appears on 1991 and was called asCotidianul.

From 2000 until now, the print media outlook appeared to be more stable and nowadays, tabloid newspapers as Cancan begin to gain an incredible number of readers. Talking about television, channels as ProTV and Antena 1 are very important in that landscape and thanks to Internet, Romanians can explore an infinite of possibilities that they couldn't dream it before.