I bought a copy of Libertatea last Saturday and noticed something. About half the paper seemed to be dedicated to Sudoku games and things that were even less newsworthy than Sudoku.
Now, looking back a couple issues, I found out why. Apparently a few days earlier, Ringier, the parent company of Libertatea and Gazeta Sporturilor (GSP) fired the editor in chief of GSP. And, there was a protest among the journalists of both papers.
Liberatea was the newspaper that you might have seen in the documentary “Colectiv” which you might have seen if you have HBO. They have been at the forefront of not shying from controversy.
According to Libertatea, the GSP editor in chief was fired for criticising the gambling industry. At least he wasn’t thrown in a gulag, but it seems like capitalism can be just as strict as communism sometimes.
It is now owned, along with GSP, but a Swiss company called Ringier. Ringier is also the parent company of ejobs.ro, which our group previously recommended for job searches in Cluj.
Well, I personally dislike eJobs because their terms of service are so long. Even if you are a native Romanian speaker, it is like reading a small book, only more boring. Now that their parent company has fired a newspaper chief for doing his job, I would like to rescind that recommendation on behalf of Hey Cluj.
Don’t worry, I won’t get fired for that. We at Hey Cluj don’t get any advertising money from Ringier or the Sudoku industry. And even if we did, we actually believe in free speech.
So which newspapers in Roumania can you trust?
Jurnalul is owned by CNN. 🙁
Adevarul and Click have the same owner as each other. 🙁
The local newspapers can be independent, but they seem to be biased sometimes. I read Faclea, Monitorul de Cluj, Ziarul de Cluj and Gazeta de Cluj and I do get something out of each one.
I think most newspapers are generally trustworthy when it comes to Romanian news that they do report. 🙂 They leave a lot out, but you cannot include every event in eight pages.
For foreign news however, I am often disappointed. Even when they report events in nearby Ukraine, they quote American sources. And for American news, they quote British sources. Not only that, but often they translate articles written by amateurs or (obviously biased) activists and politicians. Why not actually ask someone in the country where things are happening?
I mean, there are so many Ukrainians in Roumania these days, many of whom are fluent in Romanian by now, it is not hard to find someone outside of the US state department to ask about events there. Yet the majority of events that are happening in a country which borders Roumania are told to us from people on the other side of the world.
Reuters also reports Serbian news to us. Serbia is not far by car, there are Serbs in Cluj, yet they have to go to the English speaking world to find out what is happening there. It makes no sense.
Don’t even get me started about the reporting of events in France and South Western Europe. And for Dutch news, I only trust what the farmers tell me. Antenna Satelor seems to have better Dutch news than CNN.
Still, I would rather read a badly translated article from the other half of the world than play Sudoku. If I wanted Sudoku, I would buy a Sudoku magazine.