Don't drink water, it's poisoned

1989, December the 22nd is considered to be the most important date in Romanian near History. And as a crucial social change, media had an extremely important role.

"Don't drink water, it's poisoned", they said. What would be the aim of such an unjustified action? A non expected message for an expected reaction. The Romanian nation was lost, disconcerted. It was a permanent search of what to do. What were they supposed to do, when years before they had been forced to act in a prestablished way? The comparison may seem childish but in essence it is not: as a bird jumps out of its nest for the first time, Romanian people were forced to jump. Without knowing if they would be able to move correctly their wings.

My Phylosophy teacher at school used to say there were three types of people in the world: the ones who had ideas and the initiative to develop them, the ones who had also ideas but lacked this second skill, and the ones who didn't have ideas nor initiative. This last type of people was qualified by a Spanish erudite called José Ortega y Gasset as "el hombre masa" (the mass-man), the one who acts moved by the rest, lacking his own ideas, his own worries, his own thought.

As a general idea, it would be possible to qualify the Romanian people during the days just after the revolution as mass-people. Forced to act, they would not be able to canalyse all that freedom. But obviously, among that mass there were specific people of the first type that my Phylosophy teacher used to present. Those were the most dangerous ones. The ones that took advantage of the caotic situation after December the 22nd and tried to rebuild the regime left behind simbolically when Ceausescu ran away in his helicopter. Those were the ones that apreciated the huge power and influence of the state television, and were determined to contribute in the increase of the chaos in Romania so as to gain the power themselves. So they focused on the TVR.

"The country is full of terrorists", they said. There was no aim. There was no justification. There was no truth in that statement. They just wanted one thing: maintain the chaos until they had the influence.

So there they were, the few that had realised the media was the most powerful arm, struggling to build themselves a name. A powerful name. Those are the ones that nowadays own the biggest media companies in Romania.

This post has been written inspired by the talk we have today attended in class. Andreea Mogos, teacher at the Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Rumania, explained the reality of the media in her country during Comunism and after the fall of the regime until today.

Nuria Ribas Costa