Civil society organizations issued a statement whereby they express their concern about the increase in the number of cases of inappropriate reactions and verbal attacks on journalists on the part of members and supports of political parties. According to the NGOs, these resort to insulting and aggressive behavior towards journalists, IPN reports.

The statement was signed by eight organizations. The signatories make reference to a case when the director of the paper “Ziarul de Garda” Alina Radu was verbally attacked by representatives of a ruling party because the newspaper tried to find out according to what criteria the National Public Broadcaster “Teleradio-Moldova” conferred the honorific title “Most efficient campaign to protect the health of children in rural areas staged ever in the Republic of Moldova” on the campaign “Revive Moldova” – Mobile pediatric cabinet” that was carried out by Vlad Plahotniuc’s Foundation “Edelweiss”.

Another invoked case is the verbal attack on the head of the Journalistic Investigations Center Cornelia Cozonac because she published an article on the portal Anticoruptie.md whereby she informed that the owner of the channel Noroc TV is an adviser on general matters to the director of the sate-run company “Moldova’s Railways”.

“The ruling parties must realize that it is the duty of the press to critically analyze governance, to conduct investigations, to make revelations and to report irregularities. Also, the ruling parties, as all the political organizations, should educate their members so that these have civilized discussions, including with the press, without attacks on the person, gender, physical state, maternal status or composition of the family of reporters who do their job,” reads the statement.

According to the NGOs, such messages, by which the journalists are intimidated for the fact that they do their job, run counter to the European norms and values. The signatories request the political parties to give up using scandalous language and to adopt a constructive, correct and equitable attitude to the journalists and the mass media.

Among the signatories are the Independent Journalism Center, the Association of Independent Press, the Electronic Press Association and the Journalistic Investigations Center.