About the Condition of the Romanian Journalist After 20 Years of Free Press. Elements of Context (Media STUDIES: TEXTS AND Contexts) (Report‪)‬

Since December 1989, Romanian society began a long journey of institutional transformation and hence transformation of mentalities. This process of repositioning, of building an identity also had to be assumed by the media. Unlike many other areas, which received a longer reaction time, the journalist was forced to adapt quickly to new realities. The switch from a controlled and one-way communication system to an absolute freedom of the message mediated by a press institution was sudden and violent. Launched in the process of recovery and synchronization with Western values and operating systems, the Romanian journalist was put in front of unprecedented qualitative and quantitative leaps. He had to preserve and to meet the requirements imposed by the position of main source of information for an ever changing society--a change often quantifiable in months, quarters and semesters. At the forefront of major social changes, of the import and diffusion of Western values, the journalist (and the mass-media institution) had to reinvent his professional identity without having the time for discernment, often relying on a rapid imitation, on indigested and unpracticed systems. If in the first years after the revolution, one of the main sources of pressure was the need for information of a society which itself was in the process of rediscovering, of reinvention, of reorientation, gradually the journalist and the media institution for which he was gathering news has multiplied the sources of pressure. As society was borrowing by imitation and began the long process of assimilation and learning of the democratic system, the journalist had to withstand competitive pressure, but also economic pressure. In our opinion, media development is symptomatic (and also, along with other professional sectors, it is responsible) for how the entire Romanian society has operated and managed its own metamorphosis.