Consequently, some of the most important media owners – public figures that have played essential roles in the socio-economic and cultural life of post-communist Romania – have in fact highly complex roots, as former collaborators of the communist secret police and business beneficiaries of the transition period. In this sense, two of the elements most commonly shared across the market are ownership connections to the old secret police (“Securitate”) and the usage of money, obscurely produced during the communist regime and poorly tracked in the transitional period. Having said that, what is particular to the Romanian case has to do with an enduring and powerful sentiment that its media structures are haunted by the communist past. To be sure, this pattern of development applies to several other Eastern and Central European countries as well. The professionalization of journalists at the same time with the proliferation of media outlets as means to serve different purposes, gave way for extraordinary investigative journalism to be developed, but also for propaganda and misinformation to take more sophisticated forms. After this so called naive period, media instrumentalisation (as defined by Hallin and Mancini, “control of the media by outside actors - parries, politicians, social groups or movements, or economic actors seeking political influence”8) took the landscape by storm.
#ANTENA 1 SOPCAST PROFESSIONAL#
That was a time when journalists wrote somewhat independent from pressures, although their style had little to do with professional journalism. After the first wave of post-1989 journalistic enthusiasm, print media mushroomed with over-night appearances (1,200 newspapers in the early 1990s)7.
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