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ioan T. morar and daVid morar The Second Hat: Romanian Mass Media from Party Loudspeaker to the Voice of the Oligarchs The state of affairs of Romanian journalism can be best expressed by way of a real-life anecdote, which, incidentally, was transformed into a motion picture.1 Of course reality mixes with fiction. In fact, one could easily find enough similarities between this story and Milan Kundera’s tale from the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where one individual (Vladimir Clementis, a prominent member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who was included in the Slansky show trial and executed in 1952) is taken out of photos and history books, on account of being a traitor. The only remaining proof of his existence is the hat he gave to his war buddy (Klement Gottwald, the first secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia), when they were addressing the crowds from a balcony. The story we are about to tell is also about a hat, although in a different setting. The official photo for the visit of France’s president, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, to Romania, in 1979, was taken upon his arrival and was sent to Agerpress, the National Press Agency. There, after a thorough examination, they realized that the French president wore his hat on his head while Nicolae Ceaușescu held his hat in one hand. Thinking this could potentially reveal some type of subservience of the Romanian communist leader to his French counterpart, the people responsible for 1 The anecdote was transformed into a movie plot by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who, along with four other directors, put together a project focusing on the communist period, entitled “Tales from the Golden Age.” The segment we are referring to bears the name “The Legend of the Official Visit.” 424 THE END AND THE BEGINNING printing the photo decided to alter this inconvenient reality. They cut out another hat from a different photo, and in a prehistoric-kind of Photoshop pasted it onto the Romanian dictator’s head. The end result was unexpected , as the photo printed in the newspaper showed Nicolae Ceaușescu with one hat on his head and another in his hand. The second hat had been there the whole time, but the overzealous comrades were only paying attention to the head. To paraphrase Paul Levine, Ceauşescu’s, or, for that matter, Clementis’ hats do hold lessons for us today.2 They are, in our case, poignant metaphors for the state of Romanian mass media, one that has a very visible second hat, forcefully pasted on by way of political or economic interest or by the legacies of a murky communist past. One cannot speak about the past twenty years in Romanian journalism without touching upon pre-December 1989 mass media and the mechanisms that made it into an ideological loudspeaker, a means for propaganda, under the total control of the Party. During the first part of his rule, Ceaușescu played a double game with the West, and completely disbanded the main institution of censorship. The Committee for Newspapers and Publications (Comisia pentru Presă şi Tipărituri) was formally closed in 1977, its employees fired, and the decision was publicized to the whole world as a sign of democratization. It was to be the ultimate proof that the regime was promoting freedom of expression, advertising the image of Ceauşescu as a maverick, somebody the West could count on. Ironically though, censorship on media and culture only got worse. After the institution was abolished, the act of censorship itself was carried out not only by the media section of the party, but also by the editors of each publication. Censorship filters multiplied and were stacked on top of each other, making the abolishment of censorship the best thing to ever happen to censorship. Revolutionary vigilance was activated and heightened, making censorship much more efficient.3 As a demonstration of the above-described process, Romania’s collective memory contains the case of a poet hired by the Censorship 2 See Paul Levine, “The Dean’s December: Between the Observatory and the Crematorium,” in Gerhard Bach, ed., Saul Bellow at Seventy-Five. A Collection of Critical Essays (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1991), 126. 3 For more details about the dynamics of censorship in the post-1977 years see Vladimir Tismaneanu et al., Comisia Prezindenţială pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România—Raport Final (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007), 404–6. [52.14.22.250] Project MUSE...

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