On his two days visit in Constanta, His Excellency, U.S. Ambassador Mark Gitenstein, has kindly given us an exclusive interview # On this occasion, His Excellency spoke about the direction it has taken the mass media in Romania, its future and about the censorship that Mayor Radu Mazare applied through the distribution of media, trying to shut down our newspaper in late 2009
" It is so obvious that it illustrated bad judgment, insensitivity and straight obnoxiousness. It is hard to seriously comment on something that stupid. Anybody that doesn't understand that this would be offensive does not deserve to be taken seriously. As for the censorship of the press by the Mayor, it is one of the most blatant I've heard about here. And it's an action that Ceausescu would have been proud of" said U.S. ambassador to Romania, Mark Gitenstein.
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1. Several months ago you said that the Romanian media has an aggressive style. In your opinion, what is the line between aggressiveness of the press and freedom of expression of the Romanian press?
Your press is here very aggressive; it also, unfortunately, is taking a lot of wrong lessons from the United States. This is obviously true with the electronic media, which is doing the same thing in United States in respect with cable media in particular. For example, in the U.S. there are two cable networks; one is MSNBC and the other one is Fox News. And they have decided that the way to make money is to identify a particular segment of the population and just play with that segment. So if they have a particular bias that is very conservator or very liberal, the media tends to be very conservator or very liberal and not very objective.
And so, there's a lot of bias in your media, just like there is in US and is very aggressive. So it is aggressive and bias. I noticed in
