Online Newspapers, Live TV Channels, Radios

The media scenario regarding Moldova is a bit shaky at the moment, as the country is going under transition, so is the media. Before 2009, the government had a strong hand and influence in all the media, television, magazines and newspapers. It was a very hard time for this sector of the country as the government used the media sector as an instrument to spread its propaganda and influenced it heavily so much it came under hard international scrutiny.

Freedom House and Press Freedom index harshly announced the media of Moldova as “not free”. In the index, it came at 114th place out of 175. But relief for the public and citizens though, post-2009, the media has been able to breathe free air and be out of the grasp of spreading government’s propaganda and be transparent and true. As of now, the constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Currently, the country has around 64 television channels, which is really vast. Among them, a few, about 5 of them, are state-owned. Then it has radio stations, around 57 of them.

Even after all these, it’s an incredible feat that the public has very high trust in the media. The population highly consumes electronic media, especially television. Even though after 2009, the media sector of the country escaped the grasp of the government, it still isn’t without its flaws. The ownership of a lot of the television channels are not officially transparent and most of them are still influenced and used by their owners, either government or private entities, to push their interest and spread their influence among the public further. Among all these, the least consumed service is the internet and the print media.

People go months at a time without reading a single newspaper here. Even here too, the publishers prioritize pushing the interest of the owners rather than the public’s ones. Although recently the internet users of the country are on a steady rise. The plight of the media and the corruption in this sector of this country hasn’t yet ended completely. Some of the reasons are ever present, like poor logistics, poor training of the journalists, and the low pay of the journalists, and so on and so forth. All these issues affect the media’s ability to watch over the government and all current issues and keep the public appraised and updated.