​PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE DEMANDS MEDIA WATCHDOG’S DISMISSAL

The parliamentary Standing Committee for Culture, Education, Sciences, Youth, Sports and the Mass Media will demand at the Parliament’s nearest plenary meeting to discharge all the Audiovisual Coordinating Council (ACC) members, it was decided at the Wednesday’s working meeting of the Committee, which considered the ACC’s 2018 Annual Report.

The lawmakers expressed their utter discontent about the activities of the Council, which they characterized as being “too politicized a body, but insufficiently active in situations requiring immediate interference”. Besides this, the Standing Committee highlighted “the establishment of a monopoly [Plahotniuc’s] on the Moldovan media market and lack of measures to combat it”.

MP Maria Ciobanu of the DA Platform stated that in recent years the Moldova-1 company – the only public television channel in the country – has come to be plagued with censorship, “notorious for its severity greater than even the one that existed in the communist governance period”.

“For many years, the Moldova-1 doors remained tightly shut for all opposition politicians. Not a single of them appeared on the public television funded from the State Budget. How come Moldova-1 has fallen victim to the [Plahotniuc’s] censorship?” Maria Ciobanu demanded from ACC Chairman Dragos Vicol.

Standing Committee member Octavian Ticu (DA) stated that the Audiovisual Coordinating Council has developed into an instrument for punishing the opposition and dissidence in the expert hands of the oligarchic regime and into a politicized body turning a blind eye to numerous fake news.

The Standing Committee rejected the ACC Annual Report and reiterated an intention to demand dismissal of the Council.