Murdoch’s ‘Romanian’Faces. Media Ownership in Romania: Risks of the High Concentration

This article aims at exposing about the risks which might occur when the high concentration of ownership and control combines with elements such as oligarchic tendencies, informal networks, the most often invisible, between oligarchs, politicians and/or former nomenklatura, lack of effective implementation of regulations in the competition field, and, last, but not least, the size of the market and its recent political and economic developments. In the vision of scholars, views adopted by the European Commission in its recent ‘Media Pluralism Monitor’ (2009), the ‘structural pluralism’ (pluralism of ownership and control) plays a role in shaping the whole concept of pluralism, along with other identified forms of pluralism: media types and genres, political viewpoints, cultural expression and local and regional interests. Written form a risk perspective, the article aims at analyzing some of the factors which might be relevant, in relation to structural pluralism, based on case studies which are generously offered by the recent developments in the country: the political affiliation of media owners, the judicial investigations some of them have been subject of, the increasing dominance of certain players, the openness of the market versus the state monopoly in certain fields (e.g. the nationwide terrestrial TV licences). The emergence of different factors and the different ways how they interact might transform an apparently ‘beneficent’ consolidation of the media (from the liberal perspective) into a danger for democracy.