Here's a very good interview (in Romanian unfortunately) with Sergiu Toader - one of the most important guys in the TV news producing area from Romania. He started in the heydays of ProTv in 1995, immigrated to New Zealand in 2001, returned and worked for Antena 1 and now is working for Realitatea TV.
Some quotes:
"The Romanian society is primitive, things are settled according the free will of the most powerful side. Unfortunately, the most powerful is the one with the materialistic means of being powerful. Everybody is playing the independent role, but it's just a comedy, and in Romania this type of comedy is of poor quality."
"With two or three exceptions, Romania has a political class formed by impostors and incompetents. That means people pretending they're able to perform (i.e. solve problems - or what they're paid for - MY COMMENT) and actually they don't know how to do it. [...] Besides being incompetent they're also aggresive"
"All TV stations are in PSD's portfolio -- ProTV, Antena 1, TVR, all generalists stations. [...]They have some evident relationships with the government and there's nothing we can do about it."
That says about all and it makes you wonder how it'd be possible to have, for example, a facelift for an extremist party by removing its leader when everything inside is rotten and the external context is like this. No pun intended. But that is the situation and Toader has been around for a while, as such he knows most of the above-mentioned local undergrounds and they come very much close to my own observations.
Very important also, I hope you're familiar with these days' TVR (the national TV station) scandal whereas a journalist - Alex Costache - is publicly accusing the news producers of government obedience and opposition censorship. The TVR CEO didn't take it that well after reading everything in the newspaper and in a face-to-face discussion he tried to threaten with the police when Alex tried to record it just to be on the safe side. The journalist is to be fired of course even though there are several colleagues of his making similar statements - I actually know few stories as well since I happen to have some friends working for TVR either. But it doesn't matter that much - what is more important though is that those are revolution signs or sparkles, hopefully things will start to change.
