Romanian journalists find tolerance a hard lesson to learn

By Milica Pesic




BUCHAREST, Romania - The television newscast was about miners demonstrating against the government - a report that elicited no sympathy among journalists and other viewers gathered at Bucharest's Hotel Dorobanti.

"They are all corrupt!" shouted one person. "They are CIA spies," said another. "They are wrecking our chances of getting help from the IMF," said someone else.

When it was noted that 20,000 miners risked losing their jobs, one of Romania's leading journalists snapped, "So what?! When they entered Bucharest in 1991 on the communist side, they beat up anyone who wore glasses, [anyone who] had long hair or a beard. For them, that meant they must be intellectuals."

Like many formerly communist states in Eastern Europe, Romania has a long way to go in accepting the clash of views and opinions and in tolerating differences. "Tolerance is a hard lesson to learn," says Ion Zubascu, a journalist who participated in a seminar, "Minorities in the Mass Media," which was convened late last month at the Hotel Dorobanti.

"I try to remind intolerant people here that the first Christians were considered to be a minority sect," said Zubascu, who writes for the daily Romania Libera. "They were viewed as dissidents and a danger to the main political parties of the Pharisees."

Zubascu contributed an article about this topic to Reporting Diversity, a 144-page manual for journalists on covering diversity-related issues in Romania. The manual, which was promoted at the seminar, includes articles from 10 contributors in Romania and 20 from abroad. It offers "do's and don'ts" about reporting on gender, race, nationalism, and sexual preference.

The seminar, funded by the Soros Foundation, produced more than 20 proposals on how to promote tolerance of diversity and differences in Romania. The proposals included developing university courses, holding roundtable discussions with religious denominations, and convening similar seminars in ethnically mixed areas. Improved training for journalists also was discussed.

Another suggestion was to offer a cash prize in hard currency for achievement in diversity reporting.

Mircea Toma of the Catavencu Academy, a satirical political weekly, analyzes Romanian press coverage of ethnic minorities. He described the "negative attitude" that prevails in some newspapers about Hungarian and Roma (Gypsy) minorities.

Television stations, he said, tend to be more even-handed than newspapers in their reporting of diversity.

Toma said instruction on how audiences can avoid being "manipulated" by the media should begin in primary school.

Florin Pasnicu of Center for Independent Journalism in Bucharest said that in many cases journalists expressed prejudices without being aware they were doing so. They often are oblivious to the stereotypes they are promoting, he said.

Views and attitudes about homosexuality also remain controversial in Romania. Before 1989, homosexuality was taboo — as was discussion about unemployment and people with disabilities, said Adrian Coman, executive director of Accept, a human rights organization in Bucharest.

"Things have improved, but the law is tough on open homosexual behavior," Coman said, adding that the "Romanian press is guilty of homophobia, just as [is] the wider society." Among the examples of what Coman called homophobic headlines was this one:

"Should the whole of Romania become homosexual, if it wants to gain admittance to Europe?"

The headline appeared in the Event, which is close in viewpoint to the Orthodox Church.

Sexism in the news media also was raised at the seminar — a topic that is addressed frankly in the Reporting Diversity manual. "The Romanian mass media [are] not conservative. [They are] just brutally sexist," states Mihaela Miroiu in an article in the manual.

Reporting Diversity is a joint project of the Center for Independent Journalism and the Media Diversity Institute (formerly European Center for War, Peace and the News Media). Its publication was financed by The Freedom Forum.

The Freedom Forum, 26. February, 1999.