James Stewart. Journalism Practice. Volume 7, Issue 3. 2013.
Introduction
On 22 December 1989, the day the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fled from Bucharest, one of Romanian TV’s anchors told his audience that “for 25 years we have lied” and promised that “from now on we will tell the truth’ (Coman and Gross 2006, 11). More than 20 years later, there is extensive evidence that the Romanian media, controlled by powerful vested interests, still fail to provide reliable and accurate information to their audience. A report for the Center for International Media Assistance in 2011 concluded:
the reality of Romania’s news media is that it is dominated by five conglomerates run by competing media owners, at least two of which have criminal connections, and their journalists have to toe the owners’ line. The government controls and meddles in public broadcasting, and the quality of journalism is sinking instead of rising. (Hume 2011, 56)
The media-monitoring agency ActiveWatch summed up the situation in its report Press Freedom in Romania 2010:
Relevant and verifiable editorial content is on the brink of extinction, suffocated by hysterical, manipulative pack journalism, partisan opinion and infotainment. (Ganea, Popa, and Ursulean 2011, 9)
Coman et al. (2011) concluded simply that “neither public nor journalists trust the media”.
There is no doubt about the scale of the challenge involved in revolutionising journalistic practice in Romania following the changes of 1989. In all the communist regimes, the mass media were used as instruments of political control, but journalists in the Balkan states of Albania, Bulgaria and Romania were especially tightly controlled. As Gallagher observed,
The only guaranteed activity enjoyed by the Balkan media under communism was that of supporting the existing political system in prescribed ways. A high degree of political orthodoxy was demanded of journalists in the Balkans. They were seen as defenders of a social system which was promoted more zealously than in other parts of communist Eastern Europe. (2000, 114)
As early as 1998, Gross advanced a general theory that the west was mistaken to assume that the encouragement of free media would help establish an open, democratic society in a country like Romania. He described independent, impartial and professional media as an expression of a democratic system—not something which could be created in a society in transition, as an aid to that process. However, the findings of this research show that in one area of Romanian journalism at least, when conditions were favourable, the values of public service journalism were welcomed and adopted by young radio journalists and their bosses. When powerful financial and political interests intervened, those favourable conditions vanished. This paper describes the role of the BBC in the attempted transformation of Romanian broadcasting in the 1990s—a role for which it was seen to be uniquely qualified because of its perceived professionalism and its reputation as a source of reliable information for Romanians during the communist era.
The aims of accuracy, impartiality and independence are prominent in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, which express values which were part of its stated journalistic mission long before such guidelines were codified.
The BBC is independent of outside interests and arrangements that could undermine our editorial integrity. Our audiences should be confident that our decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests. (BBC 2012)
In the 1990s, following the fall of Ceauşescu, an attempt was made to export these BBC values to a country with very different journalistic traditions. This process involved training for young journalists—at the BBC School of Journalism in Bucharest—in combination with partnerships between the BBC’s Romanian news service and newly established independent broadcasters. This paper is the first detailed evaluation of this engagement, exploring the impact of the BBC’s intervention in both the short and long term.
Democracy and Media Freedom
Following the overthrow of the Ceauşescu regime in 1989, western governments and non-governmental organisations invested tens of millions of pounds with the aim of supporting the desired transition to an “open”, democratic society which might, in the future, be eligible for membership of NATO and the European Union (Faint 2004, 45-9). The development of free and open media was widely seen—especially from outside—as a necessary precondition of democratic development. As early as 1991, it was argued that creating independent media was one of five necessary conditions for democratisation in Romania (Carey 1996, 22-3). The argument has been summed up as follows:
Democracies need accurate, fact-based journalism because, without it, the decision-making process is “itself falsified”. Information is the fuel of public discourse, and a plurality of opinion, expressed in commentaries and editorials, gives rise to heated, healthy, and productive debates on the issues concerning a free society and free, self-governing individuals. (Gross 2002, 4)
Western aid, from governmental and non-governmental sources, was invested in projects to support the development of free media. Von Franque (2009) quotes a figure of US$1 billion as the total of international investment in media development aid to the countries of the “enlarged Europe”.
“Media development” means activity undertaken to help media outlets work according to the professional and ethical standards which are today expected in, and of, democratic societies. Media development can include a range of actions directed at media organizations themselves, or at their political, economic, legal and regulatory contexts. (Von Franque 2009, 92)
In Romania, the financier George Soros played a central role in supporting attempts to develop the pillars of what he called an “open” society. Between 1990 and 2010, through his Open Society Foundations, he invested almost US$1 billion in democratic development in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including Romania (OSF 2011).
Soros was a partner in the BBC School in Bucharest, along with the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA), which—through its Know How Fund (KHF)—invested £52 million in Romania between 1990 and 2004 (Faint 2004, 49). The logic was spelled out in a British Government report in 2004:
The KHF commenced operations in Romania in 1990 with similar objectives to those of the KHF in other countries in the region, namely to support the process of transition, including both economic transition from a command economy to a market-based economic system, and in the political sphere, from totalitarianism to democracy. (Gray 2004, 7)
KHF support for media development was classified under the heading “Governance” and included an estimated total of around £600,000 for the BBC School. The total investment in the School by Soros and the British Government is estimated to be around £1 million. Between 1992 and 2001, the School trained around 500 young Romanian radio and TV journalists.
This research explores the impact of the BBC on journalists and journalism in Romania, by examining the experience of one cohort of trainees at the BBC School of Journalism in Bucharest—the intake of January 1994, who were trained by the author. Interviews with them and key players in the establishment of the school provide an insight into the state of broadcast journalism in the years following the fall of Ceauşescu, and the background from which the BBC trainees came. Their accounts of their experience after graduating from the school provide an assessment of the impact of the training on their own careers, on the radio stations where they worked and—in the longer term—on the wider media scene.
The research is based on face-to-face or telephone interviews with nine of the 11 participants on the training course which ran at the BBC School from January to April 1994. It also draws on interviews with key players in the establishment of the school, in order to get a picture of its founding aims and their assessment of its impact. It is informed by the author’s first-hand knowledge as a trainer at the school (on the course under review) and later as manager at BBC World Service Training responsible for its running. (The author was employed as a journalist by the BBC, in various capacities, between 1992 and 1999.) Surviving records relating to the establishment and running of the school have been consulted.
Background 1989-1992
The fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was the final, most dramatic and most violent of the collapses of communist dictatorships across Europe in 1989 (Almond 1992, 229ff). It was through the broadcast media that most Romanians—and observers abroad—followed the takeover of power by the shadowy National Salvation Front (NSF). As in all the communist states, control of the media had been an essential propaganda weapon in the previous regime’s armoury (149). Although control of the state radio and TV service in Romania had passed to the leaders of the NSF in December 1989, it soon became clear that it was not in the interests of the former Communists within the Front (Ion Iliescu and his allies) to change the tried-and-tested methods of managing the media. Old methods of control were soon reinstated (Gallagher 2000, 113-4).
However, just three weeks after the fall of Ceauşescu, there was a significant first step towards the establishment of free and independent media. On 11 January 1990, the first independent radio station in Romania’s history went on the air in Bucharest. The first voice on the airwaves was that of a student, Daniel Klinger, who announced that the station was called UniFun and was broadcasting on 69.8 MHz. It was the beginning of a revolution in broadcasting in Romania and the start of a process which, for a time at least, brought a flowering of broadcast journalism in the public interest in what, it was hoped, would be an emerging democracy.
When UniFun went on the air, it had no licence to do so, though within a few days its operators obtained informal written permission from Prime Minister, Petre Roman, to continue broadcasting. The students had been recruited by a team from Fun Radio in Paris, who brought a transmitter to Bucharest and recruited volunteers to become Romania’s first free broadcasters. The students were pioneers, venturing into unknown territory, who soon found they had a large audience among the 1.5 million inhabitants of the capital city, who were starved of information.
Daniel Klinger, who had a long association with the BBC and its school in Bucharest, recalled those heady days. The student broadcasters set out to give people information as well as to play music and enjoy the taste of freedom, on and off the air.
It was like a mission. All of us thought it was very important, not a game. We began to do news, but without guidance or models. What made us famous was that we started to say what was happening in normal language, not the wooden language of the state broadcasters. We had no sense of journalistic values or public service broadcasting. It was pure instinct: we would see something happening and tell our friends. We wanted to tell the truth. Until December 1989 the only radio was the national station which was pure propaganda—there was no tradition of proper journalism. (Klinger, interview)
In the BBC model of public service broadcasting, as expressed in the corporation’s Editorial Guidelines, impartiality is an essential component. It would be a central element of the message conveyed to young broadcast journalists in the BBC School when it was established in Bucharest in 1992. However, it is significant that Klinger’s evidence is that Romania’s first independent radio station did not attempt—at least in the beginning—to be impartial. The “instinct” to “tell the truth” led it to set itself in opposition to the official media by giving a platform to the newly re-established democratic political parties, who—it was felt—could not get a fair hearing on the state-controlled media. “We were not balanced—we were opposing the public radio” (Klinger, interview).
It was not long before the novice broadcasters of UniFun were confronted by questions of journalistic ethics. In March 1990, violence broke out between ethnic Romanians and Hungarians in the Transylvanian city of Tîrgu-Mureş. It later became clear that the disturbances were the result of a provocation by reactionary elements in the NSF in the run-up to the first elections (Gallagher 2005, 82ff). UniFun sent a reporter to the city and he returned with powerful eye-witness accounts of the events. However, as an ethnic Romanian he had not felt safe in approaching members of the Hungarian community in the tense situation. The student news editor of the station refused to carry a one-sided report, afraid that it would only inflame feelings. Her decision caused a storm among the volunteers, with some outraged at what they saw as a return of censorship (Klinger, interview). Her principled example would not be followed by most journalists in Romania in the long run, despite the efforts of the BBC School and other western trainers.
The BBC had been involved in journalism in Romania since the launch of its Romanian language service in 1939 (BBC 2008). In the early 1990s, the service, which had broadcast from London during the Communist era, was able to operate openly in the country for the first time. Its head, Christian Mititelu—who had worked in exile for many years—would play an important part in the establishment of the BBC School in Bucharest, especially in identifying promising candidates and stations whose owners would be willing to put into practice what their staff would learn. Through his engagement with local radio stations as potential partners for the BBC, he was in a good position to assess the state of journalism in the country before the school’s foundation.
Despite the promise of Romanian TV’s anchorman in the heat of the “revolution”, Mititelu observed that, in the early 1990s, the state radio and TV were “practically unchanged” from communist times. Though the key players in the former propaganda operation had been marginalised, their influence had been replaced by “a form of self-censorship” and journalistic laziness.
They did not have any notion of public service, that what they were doing was something important, not just an employment. (Mititelu, interview)
The “wooden” style of state broadcasting was recalled by Viorel Apetrei, a trainee at the BBC School in 1994.
They were very formal, addressing their audience as “esteemed listeners”. They covered stories because these were the stories they had always covered. There were lots of boring press conferences—no really good stories or investigations. Maybe Romanians had nothing to compare this with—it was the same as they were used to receiving. (Apetrei, interview)
Meanwhile, the newly established local radio stations had little idea of public service:
These stations offered a variety of music, feeble discussions with guests and the public at large but very few news programmes. Not until after 92-93, that is, after the 1992 broadcast law was enacted, did these private radio stations define an identity for themselves with a specific schedule of programmes and a definite style. (Coman and Gross 2006, 88)
When a system for licensing local, independent radio stations was introduced after 1992, Mititelu developed relationships with several of these, around the country, negotiating agreements for them to carry the BBC’s Romanian news service on their local FM transmitters. This had the potential of increasing the BBC’s audience and improving the listening experience (broadcasts from London were carried on poor quality short wave). He encouraged the partner stations to aim, in their local news coverage, to match the BBC’s journalistic standards.
We were trying to open people’s eyes to the role of journalism, to make them realise that they could be balanced and objective reporters if they had the will to do it. They had to be prepared to ask questions when they went to press conferences; they had to develop the curiosity which is natural to a journalist. (Mititelu, interview)
In 1992, Uniplus (as UniFun had been renamed) began to rebroadcast the BBC’s Romanian news service. Klinger recalled: “Hearing it in Romanian, for the first time we had a standard to aim for.” When the BBC School opened in 1992, there was an opportunity to deepen the partnership with rebroadcasters by training their journalists. Horea Murgu, another key player in the establishment of the BBC School, specifically saw its role as to “bridge the gap” between the professional and editorial standards of the BBC service which local stations were rebroadcasting and those of their own, local news services.
“The Childhood of the Media”
In their interviews, the cohort of trainees who are the focus of this study gave an account of the state of broadcasting in Romania in the early 1990s, when they began (often as students) working in newly established local radio stations. The picture they painted was consistent—of new stations which had obtained licences to broadcast in some of Romania’s major cities, with audiences eager for news and information but young would-be journalists lacking experience and skills. The period was described by one interviewee as “the childhood of the media”.
I had no idea what to do. There was one journalist who had been trained in the Communist period, all the rest were students and completely non-professional. We [in Cluj] had enthusiasm, but no skills. I shiver when I think back; we must have been raving mad. It was a serious shock to go to the BBC School. (Jalobeanu, interview)
We had no teachers and no examples; we [in Sibiu] weren’t rebroadcasting the BBC. Our owner knew it [journalism] was a good idea—but not how to do it. (Vişa, interview)
Partly because we were very young, and partly because of the culture, impartiality, fairness, etc., did not exist as part of the core values of journalism. We didn’t think much about these, didn’t necessarily go for both sides of the story. The Romanian media was very, very immature—we were just out of the revolution. It was split between two sides; most of the media was private and was against the president [former Communist Ion Iliescu]—only the public stations were pro-Iliescu. It was natural to take sides—to get both sides of the story in the same piece of coverage was very rare. (Popescu, interview)
World Service Training and the Establishment of the BBC School in Bucharest
The establishment of the BBC School in Bucharest, and the delivery of BBC journalism training across central and Eastern Europe, came about through the involvement of BBC World Service Training (WST). Before 1990, its function had been to train new recruits to the English- or foreign-language services based at Bush House in London, but its expertise, credentials and connections enabled it to become a significant player on the international scene. Soon after the fall of Communism in Poland, the BBC’s Polish service had been approached by the new government for help in training journalists. The request was referred to WST, whose head, Gwyneth Henderson, persuaded the ODA to fund a pilot project to bring Polish journalists to Britain. This was the start of what would become a large training programme, covering most of central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, financed by the KHF.
In the spring of 1991, the KHF facilitated a two-week visit to Britain by Horea Murgu, a senior member of staff at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Bucharest, with a close interest in the development of independent broadcast media. He met the BBC’s Christian Mititelu and Gwyneth Henderson and discussed the possibility of BBC trainers being based in Romania (rather than sending trainees to Britain). When the ODA agreed to fund the training, the idea of the BBC School was born, but further funding would be needed to cover running costs and to pay for equipment.
It was the Soros Open Society Foundation Romania (OSFR) which provided the rest of the finance. Founded in 1990, OSFR was part of a network of foundations in which (by 1994) George Soros had invested more than US$300 million. OSFR had already taken an interest in training broadcasters, by organising a short radio course with three trainers from the United States specialising in news, scheduling and commercial management. Daniel Klinger from Uniplus attended, along with representatives of half a dozen Bucharest-based stations and a handful from other parts of the country.
In the autumn of 1991, Horea Murgu met George Soros, who agreed to fund equipment for 10 radio stations and the proposed BBC School. Part of the arrangement was that the selected radio stations would rebroadcast the BBC Romanian service, free of charge, and would benefit from BBC training. Murgu and Christian Mititelu were members of the panel which selected stations to receive this funding. In the first year, only Uniplus benefited, with the supply of equipment, valued at US$7,500 (OSFR 1992). The annual accounts of OSFR from 1992 to 1999 show that in total US$313,000 was invested in the BBC School (covering equipment, administrative support, accommodation for trainers and transport costs). George Soros would go on to support similar initiatives with the establishment of BBC Schools in Sarajevo (Bosnia Hercegovina) in 1996 and Ekaterinburg (Russia) in 1997.
KHF finance for trainers over the life of the Bucharest school (1992-99) is estimated at £600,000. The other essential partner in the Romanian project was the Academy of Theatre and Film, which provided space for the school in an unused part of its building. The BBC School opened its doors to the first trainees in October 1992.
Aims and Curriculum of the BBC School
It appears that no BBC records which might have contained a clear mission statement for the Bucharest School have survived. Neither the British Embassy in Bucharest nor the Department for International Development (successor to the ODA) in London were able to identify any relevant records. However, Christian Mititelu recalled that the vision was for an initiative which would have “a long-term impact on the media landscape”. A clear statement of aims from one of the partners was later published by OSFR:
The intention of the course is to train working journalists in the spirit of responsible and professional journalism. Those elements perceived to be lacking in the independent sector and to a large extent in the Romanian electronic (i.e. broadcast) journalism are emphasized: assertive interview, professional programming, marketing and management. (OSFR 1994, 68)
The annual report of OSFR for 1992 had described an early version of the project in the following, more general, terms:
A post-graduate school of journalism was established in October 1992 at the Academy of Theater and Film within the Independent Radio Project program which aimed to provide equipment and high level training to independent radio stations … The BBC course, based on training schemes run by BBC for its own staff in London, provided instruction in all aspects of radio skills such as news gathering, interview techniques, preparation of commercials and journalism ethics. (OSFR 1992, 111)
While no detailed curriculum has survived, the author’s own recollection is that prior to departure for Bucharest in January 1994, he was shown an existing teaching plan which formed the basis of his own schedule and remained the blueprint for later courses at the Bucharest School and similar three-month-long courses run in other locations (including the BBC Schools later established in Bosnia and Russia).
There was an emphasis on both technical standards (recording, editing, scripting, presenting) and the principles of public service journalism, as practised in both commercial and public broadcasting in Britain at the time. Practical exercises were the foundation of the course, involving the trainees in finding and covering real news stories from the first week. In the early stages, material was prepared for short radio bulletins. As time went on, the length and number of bulletins was increased and—by the end—a daily, hour-long current affairs/magazine programme was “broadcast” live each day. Towards the end of the course, trainees produced individual 30-minute radio documentary programmes (many of which were broadcast on their home radio stations).
Practice may have varied from course to course, but on the author’s, trainees worked in English in the early phases, switching to production in Romanian when key skills had been consolidated and assessed. Feedback and group critiques of output provided learning opportunities; daily editorial planning meetings highlighted issues of news values; focus on the target audience challenged journalists’ subjective judgements. More formal teaching sessions focused on ethical and regulatory issues, including the concepts of fairness, impartiality and objectivity—with particular reference to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. The trainees were challenged to question their assumptions and practices, always in the light of the aim of providing a service to the audience.
Trainers were sometimes seconded from other BBC journalistic duties for just one three-month course (as was the case of the author). Others stayed for a number of courses; some were freelances who had worked for the BBC. The underpinning ethos was that trainers should be working journalists with current experience of public service broadcasting.
While this paper is primarily concerned with the journalistic training at the BBC School, it is important to note that the OSFR reports (above) mention the preparation of commercials along with marketing and management as elements of the courses. It is not known exactly what this involved at the outset, but later courses (including the author’s) were designed with a week dedicated to the management and commercial aspects of radio, which was a recognition that the stations from which the journalism trainees were coming were, or were aiming to be, commercial businesses.
Expectations and First Impressions of the Trainees
Independent radio stations were notified of forthcoming courses at the BBC School and these were advertised in the press. Selection was by interview, usually conducted by Christian Mititelu (head of the BBC Romanian service), Cristina Guseth (representing OSFR) and the trainer. There was a clear interest in taking candidates from the partner stations which were rebroadcasting the BBC Romanian service and which were part of the OSFR independent radio programme, but promising candidates were selected who were not connected to these stations (in January 1994, three of the intake were described as freelance). In some cases, the journalists themselves pushed for the opportunity to join the courses, in others they were proposed by their bosses.
While the aims of the founders and funders were clear, for many of these ambitious young reporters, it was not necessarily—or only—the opportunity to learn which attracted them. In a new and competitive environment, they were interested in getting ahead. Liviu Popescu identified the benefits of attending the school when one of his colleagues at Radio Delta (Constanţa) returned from the first course in 1992.
There was an aura about him. I noticed that having this stamp of approval on your CV would open many doors. BBC was a magical word. It was not necessarily the training or the experience, but the stamp of approval; it was very powerful and I thought I wanted to do it. The BBC School was the first training school with a hands-on approach. I expected it to change my career, but I was surprised by the extent (to which it did). (Popescu, interview)
Others could see a combination of potential benefits.
I wanted journalism education to help my career—education from a prestigious name like the BBC would help my career. It would bring opportunities; the graduates were an elite group. (Apetrei, interview)
We thought, we have to get knowledge from somewhere. The BBC was an example. We [Radio 1 Braşov] were rebroadcasting the BBC—we knew it from that—we all sensed a huge difference. The BBC School was something amazing, so desirable. (Chiriac, interview)
My impression was that there was no-one to teach us in Romania. I wanted to know how to do it properly—partly because it [the BBC course] was in English and it [the trainer] was someone from England. (Jalobeanu, interview)
Fertile Ground: The Early Impact of the BBC School on the Trainees and Their Stations
At a time (in 1994) when some at least of the newly established independent media in Romania saw the value of serving their audience by providing reliable news, graduates of the BBC School reported a welcome for the message they took back to their newsrooms. It appeared that the training they received at the BBC School was bearing fruit. Marius Chiriac was immediately promoted to chief news editor on his return to Radio 1 Braşov.
Even during the course, people would ask me what I had learned and I shared my experience with the small community of radio and other journalists in Braşov. Now I was in a position to implement what I had learned and that is what I tried to do. The station changed quite a lot, especially the quality of the news shows. The BBC [connection] also gave access to people in important positions in Bucharest—I had made important contacts while at the school. (Chiriac, interview)
For Cristian Grâdinaru from Univers FM in Braila, the course also had an immediate impact. He was made programme manager with control of a budget.
At that time, I was able to change everything that I wanted or needed to change. Everything for our audience changed. I understood that it should be in their interests and about their life. We had more audience participation and more phone-ins, etc. (Grâdinaru, interview)
Viorel Apetrei found his radio station was receptive to the ideas he brought back from the BBC School, but particularly identified the skills he learned in radio recording and production as something which carried him through his developing career as a reporter and broadcaster. Within a year he was making TV films reporting on the war in Bosnia. Freelance Dana Jalobeanu was hired by Uniplus after graduating from the BBC School and was then recruited by Radio Contact to launch a new station for their network in her home city of Cluj.
I had time to recruit people and train them—passing on the BBC knowledge. We had three or four months’ training before going on air. It was a very good team and it lasted for three or four years. Two of them later joined the BBC Romanian section. The BBC School transformed me into an advocate of the [BBC] style. (Jalobeanu, interview)
Liviu Popescu describes how he worked at Pro FM in Bucharest with a number of other graduates of the BBC School, “so we had common ground”. In his view, they represented the best professionals at the time.
Adrian Sârbu [the owner] insisted on accurate and unbiased reporting. Pro FM had a lot of confidence in people who had BBC training. (Popescu, interview)
Many of the graduates of the January 1994 cohort experienced an early benefit to their media careers in the mid- to late 1990s. Jalobeanu had a long association with the Romanian service of the BBC both on radio and television, as well as (later) working for TV Romania and the commercial ProTV. Apetrei worked as a TV war reporter as well as a radio producer for several years before joining the Antena 1 commercial TV station as a news producer in 1998. Grâdinaru moved from radio into newspapers in his home town of Braila, becoming editor in chief of Libertatea from 1997 to 2000. Adrian Neagu worked for Reuters and ProTV. Popescu returned to ProFM before moving to PrimaTV after military service; from 1999 to 2002 he worked for the BBC Romanian service in London, then returned to work for TV stations in Bucharest, eventually becoming chief news editor at TV Romania.
A Long-term Influence? The State of Broadcasting in Romania Today
It had been intended that the BBC School should become a free-standing Romanian institution once British funding was withdrawn, but attempts to achieve this were not successful—perhaps in part because of changes in the media landscape and a decline in support for such an institution from the broadcasters. The school closed in 2001.
Coman and Gross conclude—in a brief reference—that the BBC School failed to take root:
Ultimately, despite its relatively well constructed curriculum and the attraction of the BBC label, the school did not manage to impose itself sufficiently on the Romanian media scene as a reliable training institution. Consequently, as soon as the international financing stopped it became clear that neither the Romanian newsrooms, nor individuals interested in journalism, considered the programme a good investment and withheld technical, financial and moral support they might otherwise have been willing to extend to the school. (2006, 125)
It is a striking fact that only one of the BBC School cohort of January 1994 was still working as a journalist in 2010—and, in this case, not in Romania. Raul Dudnic emigrated to Canada in 1995 and launched his own radio programme in Romanian. Since then he has built up a business producing and broadcasting radio and TV programmes for the Romanian diaspora in Canada, buying slots on networks and selling the commercial airtime around the programmes. Based in Toronto, he co-operates with another (later) graduate of the BBC School who runs a similar operation in Vancouver. He may have been the one best-placed to put into practice what he learned from the BBC.
Radio [in Canada] allowed me to do exactly what the BBC taught me to do. The course helped me enormously. I produced the same style of news—everything that I learned at the BBC School. (Dudnic, interview)
For the rest of the cohort, developments in the media and journalistic practice from the late 1990s onwards led to disillusionment and decisions to work in other fields.
Writing about journalism in the Balkans, Gallagher concluded that “in some countries” outside assistance (from Soros and others) had “enabled a new generation of journalists to emerge capable of sustaining a vigorous free press” (2000, 127). A 2004 report on Romania for the Department for International Development described the BBC School in Bucharest as an “important success” of the KHF, within “the political agenda of promoting pluralist media … in support of democracy”. Its impact was judged to be sustainable due to the “creation of a critical mass of trained news journalists” and it was favourably compared to other projects which had “only a limited or short-term” impact (Gray 2004, 24).
However, in contradiction to the positive assessment above (and the initial experience of the cohort studied here), the same report concluded that “trainees had difficulty persuading their employers to adopt BBC taught practices on return (to their stations)” (Gray 2004, 119).
Gray identified one significant factor which may have explained longer-term resistance to the public service message, highlighting the fact that the independent, commercial media (in which BBC trainees were employed) were dominated by the same forces as the rest of Romanian society:
The main model characterising the Romanian political transition is what we call “democratisation without decommunisation”. The transition was largely dominated by the communist-times political elite, which remained entrenched in all key areas of society, from the strategic industries to the now private media. (2004, 88)
This view is echoed by Berry (2004), who like Gallagher (2000) identifies the difference between the experience (before 1989) of Romania and central European countries like Czechoslovakia or Poland:
The failure to pass through an Enlightenment project up to 1989 is a significant reason for the abject failure to democratise contemporary Romanian society. The failure has impacted upon the current structure of media ownership that negates the development of a democratic public sphere and media objectives based on a Public Broadcasting System that prioritises the public interest as a starting point for nation building. (Berry 2004, 194)
Coman and Gross also stress the difference between Romanian experience under Communism and that of countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary where an underground press had existed. They see a much closer comparison with other Balkan countries, notably Bulgaria and Albania (2006, 24).
There was a wide agreement between all those interviewed for this research that any progress towards a public service model in Romanian broadcasting had come to an end by the late 1990s. This is confirmed by reports produced in the closely monitored period running up to Romania’s admission to the European Union in 2005. By 2001 there were 231 licensed radio stations, but the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) report published in that year highlighted evidence of widespread political corruption in the process for awarding or renewing licences. It also referred to poor professional standards among Romanian journalists and poor training resources following the closure of the BBC School. It drew particular attention to the dominance of two media trusts, one controlled by a close friend of the Ceauşescu family (IREX 2001).
This dominance had not been evident in the early years of the development of independent radio (and TV) stations. But the increasing commercial viability of these businesses, intrinsically combined with their ability to reach substantial local audiences, attracted the attention of politicians, bigger business interests and combinations of the two. Cristina Guseth, formerly of OSF Romania (now of Freedom House), described her findings when, in 2005, she sought details of the ownership of broadcasters from the regulator, the National Audio-Visual Council (CNA).
I realised that over 90 per cent of radio stations were owned by political or politically related people. All had been put into the service of political and economic interests. (Guseth, interview)
In a report published in 2004, Reporters Without Borders described in detail the “berlusconization” of the Romanian media, specifically the dominance of local media by the ex-Communist Social Democratic Party (PSD), who “have been determined to take control of the press since the party’s electoral defeat in 1996” (Blatmann and Julliard 2004, 3). Writing as early as 1998, Gross characterised the situation in this way:
There is sufficient evidence showing the autonomy of the media is co-opted by politics, politicians, business and business people with strong political ties or interests ranging from the politico-ideological to the personal, and even by state and government institutions. To put it another way, most media are owned, operated, and intended primarily as political instruments satisfying the perceived political needs, egos and/or political ambitions of owners, subsidizers, editors, publisher, directors, and even journalists. (1998, 6)
Christian Mititelu, former Head of the BBC Romanian Service, living in Bucharest, and a member of the National Audio-Visual Council in 2010, agreed that there had been a decline in standards since 2000. He described a “downward spiral” in the broadcast media alongside a dramatic decline in the printed press. In the current severe recession, he observed that it was difficult for the broadcast regulator to maintain journalistic standards, even if it wanted to.
As the perceived decline in ethical and editorial standards gathered momentum in the late 1990s, most of the BBC School’s cohort of spring 1994 left the media to pursue other interests. Dana Jalobeanu observed the process in Cluj, where local news coverage was dropped as the network was consolidated. She has strong feelings about the state of Romanian broadcast journalism today, which chime with those of others among her contemporaries.
I cannot relate to its language and standards. It’s outrageous. They are not engaging with serious issues. (Jalobeanu, interview)
Writing in the late 1990s, the time when consolidation of political control of the media occurred, Gross suggested that initiatives like the BBC School were doomed to fail:
We in the west were wrong in assuming that the media will help establish democracy. Independent, impartial, professional media are expressions of well-entrenched democratic societies and function in their support. They cannot be spontaneously created in a society in transition to help that transition. (1998, 10)
Revisiting the subject more than a decade later, Coman and Gross concluded:
The now more than 15-year-old struggle to transform the mass media into an institution worthy of a mature democracy has been unsuccessful to date, perhaps because Romanian democracy has not yet matured sufficiently to demand and support such media. (2006, 11)
Conclusion
The state of the Romanian broadcast media in 2012 raises important questions about the lasting impact of interventions such as that of the BBC in the 1990s. What this research has shown is that—in a climate where new, independent, media saw public service broadcasting as a desirable and commercially viable offering to their audience—the BBC School played a part in equipping a new generation of journalists to provide that output. However, when political and commercial pressures undermined the basis of the model, the notion of public service broadcasting was jettisoned. The key question is whether such an initiative could ever have succeeded in grafting the values of western public service journalism on the new media in a society which had experienced Gray’s “democratisation without decommunisation”.
If Gross’s analysis is correct and the values of public service journalism cannot be transplanted, the Romanian experience has implications for contemporary interventions by western media organisations in states in transition. BBC Media Action (successor to WST) no longer delivers the type of journalism training which was offered in Romania in the 1990s, concentrating instead on supporting local media initiatives for development. But organisations like the US-based Internews continue to promote the training of journalists as an essential step in the development of “good governance and transparency” in a country like Afghanistan.
Accurate and timely information is essential to rebuilding Afghanistan during a period of political transition. Internews has been working in Afghanistan since 2002, training journalists and establishing radio stations to support good governance and transparency. (Internews 2012)
That statement could have been written about the BBC’s intervention in Romania in the 1990s. The important long-term question must remain whether such initiatives can lead to the establishment of sustainable media institutions and practices which will survive social, economic and political change and the likely withdrawal of foreign support. The BBC’s experience in Romania suggests the answer is in the negative.