The Ministry of Culture Will Be in Charge of Coordinating Media Policies

The Ministry of Culture will assume the task of providing coordination of policies in the sphere of media. The decision to grant this power to the authority was taken at the Government meeting last week.

According to the approved Government Decision, the Media Policy Department shall be established within the Ministry of Culture. In the informative note, the authors specify that the initiative is included in the action plan for complying with the provisions formulated by the European Commission in the context of the process of joining the European Union. In addition, the intervention in the sphere of competence of the Ministry of Culture is necessary for implementing the draft law on the Subvention Fund in the sphere of the media, which is supposed to be approved in the second reading.

Four persons shall be included in the management team, and implementing the draft decision regarding this segment requires additional financial expenses of 1339.6 thousand lei per year for paying their salary.

Media Azi wrote about the fact that, according to the media subvention project, the authorities intended to create a fund which is autonomous from an institutional point of view and partially funded from the state budget, which is intended for financially supporting projects and products developed by the media. The fund will be managed by a board appointed by the representative media organizations and will be subordinate to the Ministry of Culture.

The previous initiative stipulated that the Ministry of Justice had to assume the attributions related to implementing the government policy in the sphere of audiovisual media services and that of the press, at that time invoking the fact that there was no central specialized authority dealing with this sector at the governmental level of the central public administration.