Media nongovernmental organizations consider the procedure for selecting the president of the National Public Broadcaster “TeleRadio-Moldova” (TRM) was vitiated and ask annulling the results of the contest held on June 4 and 5 and rerunning it. This should happen after the ad-hoc regulations concerning the designation of the president are supplemented with ‘measurable, exact and credible’ criteria. According to an independent assessment that was presented in a news conference at IPN on June 23, the candidate declared winner scored the lowers number of points based on a number of criteria.

Petru Macovei, executive director of the Association of Independent Press, said the procedure for selecting the president was vitiated because the Supervisory Board didn’t use criteria for assessing the candidates and their files. The members of the Supervisory Board superficially examined the files as they didn’t event verify the authenticity of the CVs or the weight of the projects of intent. They pretended to be staging a democratic exercise to choose a candidate for an important post on which the quality of the media products offered by the TRM and paid by taxpayers depends greatly.

Nadine Gogu, director of the Independent Journalism Center, said the regulations of the contest are general and do not contain well-defined conditions. A clear assessment mechanism should be worked out, which would include a set of criteria for which points would be given. The managerial, analytical and communication skills should be attentively analyzed. “Given the current situation, we can now suspect political interference in the work of the Supervisory Board,” stated Nadine Gogu.

Ion Bunduchi, executive director of the Electronic Press Association, said the members of civil society identified a series of criteria that are taken into account in most of the Western states when staging such contests. As a result of an analysis that centered on each criterion, the winner decided by the Supervisory Board at the beginning of June scored the lowest number of points. Therefore, the results of the contest should be annulled and a new contest should be organized.

The members of civil society also said that they are ready to present the assessment criteria they identified to the Supervisory Board and to cooperate in reviewing them.