9 TV Channels Fined 240 000 Lei by the BC for Breaching the Provisions Related to Local Programs

The Broadcasting Council decided to fine Moldova-2, RTR Moldova, PEH TV, N4, Cinema 1, ITV, Zona M, TVC 21, and TV-Gagauzia TV channels 240 000 lei for not broadcasting enough local programs and/or programs in Romanian and/or during prime time. The decision was taken during the meeting on December 29, 2022.

According to the BC press release, the monitoring reports on 12 TV channels were analyzed on different days on December 2-14. Nine of them were fined from 10 000 to 42 000 lei each for breaching one or more provisions of the Code of Audiovisual Media Services (CAMS) of the Republic of Moldova. The main breaches are related to the average daily duration of local programs: at least 80% of them have to be in Romanian, and 75% are to be broadcast in prime time.

RTR Moldova, PEH TV, and Cinema-1 are classified as national private media providers.

In March 2022, the Broadcasting Council classified RTR Moldova, PEH TV, and Cinema-1, along with three other TV channels as national private media providers, which implies that they are supposed to broadcast local content with an average daily duration of at least eight hours. That is a double amount compared to the previous regional status, according to the CAMS data. Chisinau Court of Appeal confirmed this decision on December 5, 2022.

Two of the three TV channels, RTR Moldova and Cinema-1, do not even comply with the quotas corresponding to the regional status, according to Liliana Vitu, President of the Broadcasting Council. “They’ve had enough time to adapt to the new national status, to get ready for it in terms of finance and human resources (…) this is the reason why I think we should go to the national classification today,” the source remarks.

Only in the last month of the previous year, the Broadcasting Council applied fines of more than half a million lei for the failure to comply with the proportion of local content in the media service providers’ grid, and the time and language of broadcasting, according to the data published on the institution’s official website.