BY HAYDEN HUBBARD
Hayden Hubbard is a second year IDEV student at SAIS and a Senior Editor at SAIS Perspectives. He was a volunteer for two years in Romania and Moldova and a consultant intern with the Utah-Moldova Business Partnership.
Amidst a pandemic the likes of which has not been seen in a century as well as economic downturns and political instability the world round, these are dark days in almost every corner of the globe. However, sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, the small post-Soviet republic of Moldova provides reason for hope.
As the poorest country on the continent, recently rocked by a banking scandal in which one-eighth of its GDP was stolen, and having faced a government collapse last year that shifted power to an ardently pro-Putin coalition, Moldova has not been excluded from hardship. COVID-19 and the economic downturn could have very well been the straws that broke the camel’s back. Yet, it is precisely these difficulties that make the contrasting success of Moldova’s free press an unlikely source of hope for the country.
While Western media has experienced increasing polarization and declining credibility, and Moldova is facing similar challenges, a small coalition of independent media entrepreneurs have been making unprecedented waves in the country. Their experience poses a valuable lesson for the media in the West.
Moldova’s “free” press is plagued with oligarch-owned media conglomerates, Russian propaganda, and a corrupt legal system that enforces the status quo. The coalition of media entrepreneurs have had to fight tooth and nail for the roughly one-fifth market share that they own. While there are no formal ties between them—one is an investigative newspaper, another is a youth-focused online media site, and yet another is a TV station focused on fighting corruption—they are each doggedly resilient about one thing: finding and sharing the unadulterated truth.
Moldova’s geopolitical circumstances make this endeavor more challenging than it might be elsewhere. On its western border is Romania, NATO’s easternmost member, and on its eastern border is Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region. The country has long been viewed as a battleground between East and West, with political parties that typically align as pro-EU or pro-Russia. The political situation, however, is more complex than it seems, as various oligarchs and political figures claim to support one side (usually the pro-EU side), while making secret alliances to support the other in an effort to enhance personal gain.
The result has been a rapid decline in the public’s trust of government and the media. Although the pro-EU paradigm is popular for supporting democracy and a free press, much of the population distrusts pro-EU politicians who may be disingenuous. As Moldova’s Director of Transparency International, Lilia Carasciuc, has argued, people don’t really care which side politicians are on at this point, they just want politicians who have the best interest of the country in mind, and not their own. [1]
It is precisely this yearning that Moldova’s growing group of media entrepreneurs aims to address. They are decidedly independent, taking a stance against corruption and for transparency, rather than picking sides. As this poses a threat to the powers that be, these media entrepreneurs have been victims of cyberattacks, relentless online bullying, and even physical intimidation by thugs. But through rugged persistence to their high-in-demand ideals of transparency and neutrality, the group of these media entrepreneurs has seen tremendous growth. While many small newspapers are failing, the investigative newspaper Ziarul de Garda experienced 33 percent readership growth[MOU5] last year. The youth-focused online media site started just six years ago and is now among the top eight most popular news sites in Moldova.
It is in dark times like these that the free press can hold more sway than ever, in spite of recent regressions in the press’s perceived reliability and transparency in Moldova and much of the West. Perhaps, like the media entrepreneurs in Moldova, the news outlets in the West will use these challenging times to redefine themselves in the public’s eye as beacons of truth, rather than conduits of private interest.
[1] Lilia Carasciuc was interviewed by the author in Spring 2020
PHOTO CREDIT: Free use image from Canva Pro.