The misery of the Romanian legacy media

As the whole world watched the Romanian presidential election's drama in 2024, blatant lies were spread by a press that can't get rid of infiltrated assets from the local Intelligence Services.

As I mentioned in my first article about the events from 25 November - 6 December 2024, the Romanian press is infested with intel agents.

There was a time when a Soros-funded local NGO, Active Watch, was one of the most inspiring voices denouncing this grave menace to the free press and to journalism. A menace to democracy as a whole, as a press under executive control cannot fulfill its essential role as a check and balance.

The issue was actually acknowledged by the European Parliament over ten years ago: in 2013, Member of European Parliament Renate Weber took over Active Watch’s fight and managed to include in the EU Media Charter an article dedicated to tackling this problem, stating that:

[The European Parliament] calls on the Member States to adopt legislation so as to prevent the infiltration of newsrooms by intelligence officers, since such practices highly endanger freedom of expression as they allow the surveillance of newsrooms and generate a climate of distrust, hamper the gathering of information, threaten the confidentiality of sources and ultimately attempt to misinform and manipulate the public, as well as damage the credibility of the media;

This was voted by the European Partiament. Unfortunately, 11 years later, Romania never complied. In 2015, the head of Romania’s Intelligence Service, George Maior, even declared that:

“The undercover officer is a special branch, a special weapon of any intelligence service. Their task is to use this role to gather national security information for the state.”

At that time it triggered formal protests from Active Watch, but also from the head of the Romania Television, Stelian Tanase, who asked for all the agents to be removed. Mr Maior has later been decorated by the CIA in 2017, being awarded the "Earl Warren Medallion". Of course, the CIA awarding a man praising intelligence services infiltrating newsrooms would only surprise those who haven’t been paying attention to the CIA’s ethics during the last… many decades.

All this to confirm that, whatever you take from the Romanian press, you have to consider the possibility to be reading the product of the local intelligence services work. You need to assess the background of any journalist: if he never had a strong stance about this matter, asking for the law to remove intelligence assets from newsroom, if he’s not critically reporting about the deep state scandals and its meddling in the judicial processes and in the media: you may be exposed to non-journalist work.

According to seasoned Romanian investigative journalist specialized in security matters, Cornel Ivanciuc, there may be around 100-200 infiltrated assets.

Moreover, an article from the satyrical newspaper Catavencii even mentions the role SIE agents within the international press had, tasked to bring good press to President Basescu’s regime (2004-2014). In conclusion, you can neither expect clean journalism from the Romanian authors in Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe, Nature, Politico, RFI, the BBC, Newsweek and so on as long as a law isn’t applied to remove the intel agents from the press and clear all the names that can be cleared.

According to another seasoned Romanian investigative journalist, specialized in corruption matters and politics, Patrick André de Hillerin, "planting" assets in foreign newsrooms is a legacy from the pre-89 era. For a while, in the 90s, these activities halted, but then restarted, including by "acquiring" assets, rather than "planting them" - probably a more cost-effective way, although more risky.

My take about this — and I really hope the coming years will finally see a law meant to comply with European values and the EU Media Charter — is that Romania needs not only to remove the intell assets from the newsrooms (both locally and internationally), but most importantly to flag all the content produced by them in the press and on social media, so people’s constitutional right to information is respected¹, and the whole matter can be properly studied by academics. This would also help restoring credibility to the Romanian press and be a service done to all the actual journalists who do their job, haven’t been hiddenly on the State’s payroll.

Now, what can such infiltrated mainstream media produce during an home-bred hybrid attack against the democratic processes? Of course, actual fake news…

But since it’s also the fate of a lot of media outlets nowadays, it will always be hard to tell if a smear campaign is the product of intell services meddling, sheer incompetence or sly mimetism within the great click-bait hunt that characterizes our era. It's also worth noting that virtually all the local media outlets receive funding from political parties, while the few that claim “independency” are often highly “dependent” from foreign governments’ money (including OCCRP/USAID/NED funding), and are now in distress. I'll probably come back to the specific issue of the financing in another article.

For now let’s just dive into a few examples of fake news.

Fake news from the legacy media

First of all, let’s be specific, there has been a lot of declarations regarding the hybrid attach suffured by Romania. From what I observed, the most obvious hybrid attack is the one performed by a conspiracy of forces from the moment Georgescu appeared as the victorious candidate of the first round of the Romanian presidential election. As I described in another post, the Romanian President, his party, but also the French president and a series of forces decided to do whatever it took to challenge the vote of the people, even if no proof of a significant Russian meddling could be provided. (Actually, one of the demonstrated instances of meddling was that the Romanian President Iohannis’ party, the party of the current interim President Bolojan too, has been part of the TikTok campaign initially attributed to Russia). During this attack, started on November 25, the first and most widespread fake news was to define Georgescu as pro-Russian, anti-EU, anti-NATO, although he had clarified his stance repeatedly (here, here, here).

The fake-news prize should probably go to the local Newsweek for the article “Who is Călin Georgescu? He wants RO-EXIT, Romania’s exit from NATO, and a return to Mother Russia.”

But the labels have been all over the place:

Adevarul: “Romania on the edge of the abyss: Pro-Russian extremism threatens the stability of the EU and NATO.”

G4 Media: “Who is Călin Georgescu, the surprise pro-Russian candidate, anti-Semitic with a far-right Legionnaire-style and anti-Western rhetoric?”

DW: “Călin Georgescu, a nationalist candidat, anti-european and pro-Russia”

Radio Free Europe: “Romanians Protest Following Surprise Victory By Pro-Russian Presidential Candidate”

RFI Romania: “The independent candidate Călin Georgescu, with pro-Russian, ultra-nationalist, and anti-European positions…”

BBC: “A far-right, pro-Russia candidate has taken a surprise lead in the first round of Romania's presidential election.”

The Times: “Anti-Nato nationalist wins first round of Romanian presidential election”

The Guardian: “Shock as pro-Russia independent wins first round of Romanian election”

A special prize also goes to a usually very good and incredibly brave newspaper, Haaretz, who nevertheless managed to put off this loosy title: “Romania Accuses Israel of Election Interference After Netanyahu Minister's Call With pro-Nazi Candidate”.

And here comes the brazilian Dugin

A few days in this crisis, this crowd doubled down with a magnificent example of its dishonesty when they jumped on a ridiculous statement made by a fake Dugin account saying that Romania was part of Russia:

Where wokeists and elite of Democrats can flee from US? Canada? Trudeau was recently at Mar-o-Lago. Israel? There is a war. London, Paris, Dubai? Exactly where Russian liberals have fled. Or Moldova? That will be part of Romania soon. But Romania will be part of Russia.

It took me 10 minutes at that time to figure out that Dugin wasn’t behind this account and hadn’t declared this at all. Nevertheless, the propagandists in the newsrooms and on the social network circulated the news all over the place.

These outlets, G4Media, Antena 3, Digi24, Newsweek Romania, Romania Libera here over are just of few of those who spread the fake news. Almost all other media outlets faceplanted the same way: Gândul, Euronews Romania, ProTV, Adevarul, Hotnews, Bursa, and of course RFI…

Ziarul Financiar indirectly reported the reaction of the Prime Minister, Marcel Ciolacu, but used cautious terminology regarding the infamous Twitter account (looks like they did have a journalist at work). If any reader can pin point other media outlet who did their job at that time, let me know.

After massively spreading this fake news, it seems only Antena 3 published a sort of errata, stating that the Twitter account is held by a “pro-Russian troll” based in South America. Interestingly, I had found during my quick search the place where Dugin actually seems to communicate (disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure it’s him handling it, but the account, on VK, makes much more sense according to his known rhetoric). What the fake Twitter account had spread was a total distortion of the longer post. The full text, which Dugin was actually stating, was far less convenient for the mainstream media to publish in an errata:

I assumed that Biden's son would be pardoned by Trump. But it became clear that Trump intends to seriously take up the jailing of the corrupt elite of the Democratic Party. The seriousness of his intentions is evidenced at least by the appointment of Kash Patel as head of the FBI. Kash Patel is one of the most radical enemies of the Deep State. For the Democrats, this was a shock. Now Biden, his criminal junkie son, and all the participants in the perverted bloody pedophile orgies, apparently, have come to an end. They will rush to Canada, but the frightened Trudeau has already visited Trump in Mar-o-Lago and, apparently, agreed to the extradition of the woke elite if it decides to relocate to Canada. Yes, the US will now have its own relocators. Elon Musk has already stated that cancel culture is cancelled. Therefore, many will run to London to Starmer and to Paris to Macron. Or even to Dubai.

Of course, publishing this statement would have carried unpleasant information to share for the local infiltrated media — especially regarding the ticking clock to a potential end of the deep state people subverting Western democracies while covering corruption at the highest levels.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs joins the fake news dance

More importantly, the Romanian Ministry of Foreign affair decided to react to the fake Dugin account by reminding the long standing conflict between Russia’s and Romania’s interests in history, and stating that “Russia will fail”. Their argument (published on Antena 3) to react to a fake account is mindblowing:

[Andrei Țărnea further explained that] “The account is known for being used for Russian propaganda and disinformation and has been active for a long time. Whether or not it actually belongs to Dugin is irrelevant, as Aleksandr Dugin has no official status anyway, and therefore everything he says falls under trolling. Normally, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we ignore such posts and do not respond to them, but yesterday’s message went viral, widely shared in the media and on social networks in Romania. My reaction was therefore aimed primarily at that aspect, not at Dugin, whose statements hold no authority or significance”, Andrei Țărnea clarified.

This 'Brazilian-Russian troll' on X has proven remarkably useful for those spinning narratives. In this post-truth landscape, it seems the identity of who's actually making statements no longer matters - everything becomes just another PR stunt divorced from reality.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs' response reveals another disturbing mechanism of the home-bred hybrid attack against Romanian democracy: attack the concept of truth itself; debate with fake accounts; engage with made-up personas as if they genuinely represent your opponents, and then let the infiltrated media broadcast this as if it was actual news.

(This article is based on notes taken during the aftermath of the elections’ annulment in 2024. I am now publishing it between the first and second rounds of the 2025 election: George Simion has taken over the role of Georgescu, the “fake Dugin” has changed his Twitter/X handle and the Romanian press is quoting, once again, the brazilian troll.)

1. There is an actual Constitutional “right to information in Romania”, defined in article 31