The Romanian Mass Media And Cultural Development

This compelling book assesses the development of the mass media since the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 and the media's impact on cultural development, the public sphere, civil society and democracy. It controversially claims that Romania's failure to experience a thoroughgoing enlightenment project in its entire history remains a major obstacle for producing democratic ownership of the media and democratic development of society. Analyzing both the print and broadcast media and their respective effects on development, the book also discusses the effects of Romanian law on media and societal development, ethics, and media responsibilities. It concludes, however, that far from having an absolutely negative impact on Romanian post-communism, the media has helped produce a contradictory empirical form that equally contains positive moments in terms of subjective cultural development.

This book provides a theoretical framework and case study to explore how media systems take on the form and coloration given to them by culture and in tandem with the affecting socio-political and economic systems, which are also defined by society’s values, beliefs, and attitudes and even more so by those of its elites.

Examines the nature and influence of the news media in Romania before, during, and after the December 1989 revolution, concentrating on print and broadcast news media and their struggle to remake themselves and remake society. Covers the precommunist legacy, foreign mass media as a spark for the revolution, media laws in the noncommunist era, neutrality and objectivity in journalism, and news media in the presidential and parliamentary elections of the 1990s. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collective work aims to compare media (and in particular cultural press) in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania, placing the two opposing paradigms in a common approach with the intention of identifying shared patterns and intricate connections between them, but, at the same time, without ignoring their radical differences. This comparison is performed both explicitly, through several chapters focusing on the general methodological implications of such a comparison between Francoist Spain and Communist Romania in the development of totalitarian / dictatorial propagandistic systems; and implicitly, by offering the academic frame to a series of case studies from both regimes. The contributors to this volume – Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Romanian scholars – approach several aspects of media in relation to politics, propaganda, historical or social aspects in the two regimes, based on their academic backgrounds: history, cultural studies, media and literature. The volume intends to suggest – through its collection of general, comparative or analytic chapters, as well as through a new approach on two political and cultural phenomena otherwise studied as opposing paradigms – the need for a larger debate on the potential of the approach to these phenomena in a common framework.

This work examines early mass media critics, and their controversial writings, and links them with their contemporaries to demonstrate the relevance of their legacy for debates on media power and media ethics.

A land of mountains, hills, and fertile plains, Romania is a tourist destination waiting to be discovered. It is a rich and complex country: a place whose cities are home to beautiful parks and vibrant cultural scenes; whose people welcome guests warmly into their homes, sharing the best of whatever they have, and party into the night, suffused by Latin joie de vivre. Buffeted over time between three great powers—the West, Russia, and Turkey—Romania betrays the cultural influences of each, and it can be a difficult place to get a handle on. Culture Smart! Romania provides an indispensable tool for the foreign visitor, digging deep behind the clichés, explaining many of the behavioral quirks of the people, smoothing your path toward better understanding, and outlining the many attractions—cultural, social, and geographical—that await you in this underexplored part of Europe.

This source book contains basic information about the mass media system in Romania. This information allows the reader to understand the successive and quick transformation after the fall of communism, then tendencies of development and the characteristics of the most important institutions related to the media system. The book begins by giving general information about Romania. The introduction provides a broad base for the understanding of Romanian mass media. The author describes the frames that sustain the functioning of the press: the legal, the economic and the professional training frame. The most important chapter is devoted to the media structure: there is a rich database on press agencies, most important newspaper titles and magazines, radio and public television. Two chapters are devoted to the data on audiences of different media and to the socio-demographic structures of the profession. Readers that want to in-depth the knowledge can use the chapters on bibliographic sources and on research institutes related to Romanian mass media.

Not the mass media, but other powerful domestic and international factors provoked the ethnic conflicts in South Eastern Europe and determined the paths and mechanisms of their settlement. Nevertheless, it is a proven fact that on various occasions the use of guns was well prepared by hate speech used by the mass media in their coverage of interethnic relations. And vice versa, the efforts to find solutions for interethnic tensions and conflicts have been often facilitated by the moderate or neutral coverage of events by the mass media. Nikolai Genov is professor of sociology at the Free University in Berlin (Germany).