Marius Dragomir Talks About Eastern-European Journalism at the International Journalism Festival

Our Director Marius Dragomir called for large-scale interventions, engagement with businesses and protection for the space that still exists for independent journalism in an engaging discussion at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

The panel focused on what western European journalists can learn from their eastern European colleagues. The other panelists included freelance Bulgarian journalist Boryana Dzhambazova, Azerbaijani columnist Arzu Geybulla and Cristian Lupşa, founder and editor of DoR, a Romanian quarterly. They discussed trends and tendencies that characterize the media in eastern Europe.

Marius Dragomir pointed out three main trends. First, media capture, which has been spreading fast across the region, with Hungary being the textbook case. Second, an extreme level of polarization in the journalistic field.

“You have on the one hand a very powerful media system funded and supported by the governments, dominated by propaganda narratives, staffed by thousands of people who call themselves journalists. And then you have the independent sector that has been shrinking in the region. They rarely find a business model in this system where governments play such a big role in funding the media,

he said.

He also talked about journalists often becoming reactive or corrective. The former refers to journalists documenting issues such as corruption, stories after stories. This is very important, he said, but reactive. The corrective trend means that many journalists want to counter disinformation by moving into the field of fact-checking. This is also great, according to Marius Dragomir; the problem is that there is nothing in between.

We have lost in the region the model of journalism that informs people, we are missing the model that we had in the past or that we have in some western and nordic countries where public service media do an independent job,

he said, adding that the problems are not limted to the region.

He mentioned a few examples of independent journalism that still survive, such as investigative platforms, cross-border initiatives, small local media outlets, or groups of journalists launching their own media companies after the one they work for has been taken over by oligarchs.

Pointing to the problems he said many journalists were quitting their profession, and sometimes even their countries.

In terms of possible solutions, Marius Dragomir called for large-scale interventions, such as Pluralis by the Media Development Investment Fund. He also urged more engagement from private businesses that operate in these captured environments. Very often they dislike their environments but do not dare to support independent journalism, not even by advertising, for fear of reprisal from the authorities. Finally, he called for the protection of the spaces that are still independent, mostly on the internet. He said governments were slowly trying to move to this area to regulate the internet and close these spaces down, but “that would be the final nail in the coffin.”