The CNA says: illegal!

In a response sent by Ralu Filip , the chairman of the National Audiovisual Council of Romania to the program coordinator of the Center for Independent Journalism, Cristian Ghinea, in which he comments on the task file prepared by the Targu Mures City Hall, he notifies that part of the stipulations of the task file regarding the purchase of space in the local TV stations are illegal. Thus, according to the CNA chairman, there can be no more than 12 minutes of advertisement during one hour, separated by means of sound and texts. “Thus, there is no publicity of 45 minutes” Ralu Filip shows, regarding the inclusion in the task file of the stipulation of providing spaces for informative shows of 30, 45 and 60 minutes. He specifies that the CNA signaled the illegal nature of these contracts signed with several city halls. Another illegal aspect emphasized by the CNA chairman is the fact that the mayor is under the rule of the three parts and under the extent of correct information (rule settled by Resolution nr. 40 of the CNA in 2005), thus the task file and the auction are illegal.

We remind you that last Thursday, the Targu Mures City Hall organized the first open public auction for contracting media publicity services, by preparing a task file in which the publications and TV stations to be offered by the tenderers were nearly indicated. Zi de Zi notified several NGOs in the field, but also public institutions about the main problems of the task file. Besides the ones above, the editor of our daily raised the issue of the inclusion in the task file of a single evaluation criterion for the tender, namely the lower price tendered per sq cm, for the written press, and for spot/show/announcement, for television, which is an extremely criticized criterion since it doesnțt observe the technical tender. Likewise, we found it suspect that radios were excluded from the task file, which might seem to be discriminative.

Nevertheless, last Thursday, as we specified, the auction was held after two hours of delay. Companies such as Info Statistics led by Bogdan Ilies and Image Communication administered by Calin Zeres were running in the competition. Three working days later, the auction commission could not make a decision with regard to the tenders, nor could settle an adjudgment for the auction. The reasons for extending the evaluation stage are still unknown.

We are going to keep you up to date with the position of the NGOs and the public institutions with regard to the problems notified by us in the case of this auction. To be continued. (L.V.)

Art. 27 of Law 504/2002 regarding the audiovisual shows that “Publicity and teleshopping are broadcasted in groups, they must be easy to identify through the corresponding marks and must be separated by other parts of the program service by optical and acoustic signals.”. The same normative act shows that “masked publicity means the presentation in programs, in words, sounds or images (…) of the services or activities of a (…) service provider”.