Behind the News with Moldova Matters

What makes the cut and why?

Welcome back to Moldova Matters! In today’s subscriber only article we are going to take a quick look behind the news and talk about just how Moldova Matters comes together, what makes the cut, what doesn’t and why. Thanks for supporting Moldova Matters and all the work that goes into creating an English language news roundup for Moldova!

Behind the Curtain - How is Moldova Matters Curated?

When I first began working on the idea that has become Moldova Matters in January of 2021 the starting premise was pretty simple. Every day over a cup of coffee I read the news and comb through for information that is important to my business and my work with the Moldova Small Enterprise Alliance. Beyond this professional interest, I’m a political junkie and follow the news, Moldovan, American, and European pretty avidly on a daily basis. The idea behind Moldova Matters was simple - to put all this miscellaneous knowledge and work to good use. I could use my experience from nearly 10 years living in Moldova to provide an English language newsletter focused on only the most important political and economic topics and grounded in the idea that context is king. From day one I wanted the newsletter to be approachable and narrative so that you didn’t need to follow all the twists and turns of Moldova’s fairly tumultuous political landscape to understand what was going on. 

As you can imagine, a big part of the work behind this newsletter is curating the content throughout the week. Each day as I read the news I copy links to important stories into a small textedit document on my desktop with a few notes about the story. With dozens of stories to read each day only a fairly small number make this first cut. Then, by the time I am writing the Weekly Roundup I have dozens of stand-alone stories and some big chunks of text that are like news-threads of an evolving story that have gathered through the week. At this point I further cull stories down until we have a manageable product for the Weekly Roundup. Since the roundup is almost always longer than my target length you can imagine these cuts can at times be challenging. Let’s take a look at the criteria for what does and doesn’t make it into these final cuts. 

What’s Relevant News - Where’s the Line?

The main set of decisions for picking out newsletter worthy updates is around relevance. Deciding what is and isn’t relative news is all based on questions of “audience” - who is reading Moldova Matters and what do they need to keep up with about Moldova? Generally speaking, here’s how I define my audience. 

• Expats living in Moldova or Expats who previously lived in Moldova but want to keep touch. Includes people here both for family reasons and for business. 

• Development workers and volunteers who work in Moldova temporarily

• English speaking diplomats, academics or foriegn policy readers who want to keep up with Moldova either from posts in Moldova or from their places of work around the world

• Moldovans who speak English and are interested in an outside perspective on local news

Now this probably doesn’t cover the whole readership (feel free to add audience tips in the comments) but it does generally represent a lot of the readers’ personal or professional interest in Moldova. When I first started Moldova Matters I outlined this target audience and then set a goal: 

Moldova Matters should be the Kyiv Post or Moscow times for Moldova (scaled appropriately to size :)

Since Moldova is a small country with no dedicated English language paper, the goal was to try and fill the key functions of such a publication while recognizing that this is mostly a one man show and that independent reporting is not in the cards for such a hobby production. All of these factors helped determine the “relevance question” and are used as a guiding editorial principle each week. 

So news about Parliament passing laws? Corruption scandals? Economic forecasts? COVID updates? All these and more are the meat and potatoes of Moldova Matters. Meanwhile, here are some stories that don’t make the cut on a typical week:

• Moldova’s new Road Racing problem - teenagers in BMW's driving at 200+ kilometers an hour in late night drag racing around Chisinau. The problem has been growing in recent months and police are struggling to crack down. 

• Weekly weather updates - it’s gonna snow this week in parts of the country! And heavy fog has led to flight delays in Chisinau. 

• Cultural news and updates - like a local photographer using the foggy weather of the last week as a backdrop for his amazing photoshoots.

In addition to local news and human interest stories that mostly don’t make the Moldova Matters cut, a number of political stories don’t make it in either even though they appear relevant on face value. Here are a few examples from this week:

• Former Prime Minister Vlad Filat lost a case at the European Court of Human Rights which ruled that his presumption of innocence was not violated when he was arrested and removed from power by Plahotnuic. 

• There was a bomb scare at the Presidential Administration leading to the building being cordoned off temporarily. The police found the perpetrator who has a history of mental illness - there were no bombs. 

In cases like these, there is a clear political news angle… but there isn’t really news here. Mr. Filat has been trying just about anything to stay relevant and he has many cases in front of the EcHR regarding his fall from power. Overall, this story is somewhat interesting but these little updates amount to simple process stories with no new substance. And the bomb scare? Unfortunately this is becoming a pretty common occurrence in Chisinau with a few calls a month to government buildings. The only new thing here is that they caught the person… and he turned out to be mentally ill. So, interesting in a “News at 11” kinda way, but not really important to follow for Moldova Matters readers. 

Political News - Sorting Out the Fluff

A much more challenging editorial question for the Weekly Roundup is eliminating “fluff” and hearsay. Moldova has many excellent journalistic outlets like Newsmaker, Agora and ZdG who do solid reporting and have high journalistic standards. However, the Moldovan news is also completely infused with vague commentary from current and former political actors. Former Prime Minister Kicu has a comment on nearly everything that happens in Moldova and they invariably go like this “the new government messed up such and such because they are not professionals (implication - “like me!”) and we need professional leaders to actually solve our problems.” He does this almost every day and *never* actually suggests solutions for the problem in question other than giving him power again. Statements like this are just “fluff” and unfortunately they get primacy of place in a lot of Moldovan coverage with lazy journalists happy to take a soundbite without challenging it or asking follow up questions. Renato Usatii the former mayor of Balti is the premier master of this process. Sometimes called the “most informed man in Moldova” he regularly drips out supposed “facts” from his connections in the Moldovan (and likely Russian) security services. Rarely do they amount to much except to embarrass his political opponents… and they are almost never verifiable. 

With all that said, Mr. Kicu and Mr. Usatii ARE important public figures (or at least were… we’ll see what their next act has in store). So they do need to be covered sometimes. The question is what is “fluff” and what isn’t. 

In contrast, there are some figures who are 100% fluff. In cases like this I have to remind myself that no matter how interesting and entertaining their stories are, they just aren’t important enough to care about. I’m going to indulge myself a little and take a look at one such figure now. This man is *constantly* in the news and sometimes the stories are so insane and interesting I have to remind myself 2 or 3 times that he is not actually “relevant” in any important way. 

The Example of Cristian Rizea

Cristian Rizea is a former Romanian politician who served in the Romanian Parliament from 2008 - 2016 as a deputy with the Party of Social Democrats (PSD). During that time he had various positions in middle tier ministries and racked up an impressive list of corruption indictments for influence peddling, illegal enrichment, money laundering and more. Facing arrest, he fled Romania to Moldova in 2017 and claimed refuge here because of Moldovan citizenship that he had just recently acquired on the basis of distant relatives. On the basis of this newfound (and highly convenient) citizenship he has continued to fight extradition to this day. During the late days of Igor Dodon’s presidency Mr. Dodon stripped Mr. Rizea of his citizenship on the basis of false statements that Rizea made on his application regarding his criminal history in Romania. This is still being litigated in the courts. 

Since arriving in Moldova, Mr. Rizea essentially entertains 2 hobbies. Firstly, spending his (allegedly) ill gotten gains. Rizea lives in a palatial house in a neighborhood where he previously was able to call Mr. Shor and Mr. Plahotniuc his neighbors. The house was last listed for sale for 451,000 euros and boasts 450 square meters of living space, a pool and a large garage housing his Landrover (145,000 euros), Ferrari (200,000 euros) and Mercades (100,000 euros). He is also apparently working to open a new TV station in Moldova. When challenged about the source of all this money he says simply that he invested in Bitcoin some years ago and has prospered. 

Mr. Rizea’s second hobby is getting in the news any way he can all the time. Almost no story in the past 2 years has happened with Mr. Rizea trying to interject himself in it somehow. When Plahotniuc fled Moldova, Rizea claimed he knew where he was! (in some interviews this was Thailand, in others a secret prison in Moldova itself). When the General Prosecutor was removed from office in past months - Rizea was there trying to rally the crowd in a kinda sad one man protest. When journalist Natalia Morari was executing her spectacular fall from grace Rizea claimed secret information about another TV8 journalist’s supposed connections to shady figures (unverified claims he is currently being sued over). In the last Parliamentary elections he tried to run for office only to be disqualified on the basis of not actually being a citizen (anymore). Undaunted, Mr. Rizea then registered as a candidate for the ongoing (and unendingly interesting) Balti Mayor’s election where he was also disqualified for…. Yup… still not a citizen. 

During the Balti campaign he was fined for campaigning while not being a candidate. Managed to get into a fight in the street with some Socialist campaigners, and summed his exclusion up by saying "As you can see, the mob is very afraid of Rizea." 

Now, anyone who speaks of themselves in the 3rd person like this can’t help but be entertaining. But it’s his utterly hapless attempts to never be far from the conversation that truly make this man a gem. In a recent example Mr. Rizea called a press conference where he said he was going to speak about the problems of businesses building illegal terraces and privatizing parts of the sidewalk without permission. At this “event” which you can watch on youtube (and I highly recommend you do) Mr. Rizea shows up with a sledge hammer to “destroy” the allegedly illegal construction at the local restaurant La Sarkis. Immediately it is 100% clear that this man has never held any kind of hammer before and had zero idea how one worked. Here’s a still from the video of him trying to use it like a claw of some kind to tear down a cloth barrier. 

Source youtube

Now he tired very rapidly of his attempts to paw at this piece of tarp. At around 1 minute 30 seconds into the video he stops and an assistant runs forward with a damp towelette for him to whip off his rather dainty little hands. 

So what are we talking about Mr. Rizea? Well I have to be honest and say I’ve been wanting to write about him for a long time. He is a hapless crook (allegedly) and his attempts at relevance always fall on the “comically sad” spectrum. That said, is he relevant to Moldova Matters? I would say no. His little one man shows are entertaining for sure. But covering them risks making him seem important and he is not. 

So such are the challenges and decisions that go into what we cover here at Moldova Matters. What do you think? Are these criteria and decisions sensible in your view? Is there something we could be covering more of that we don’t? 

Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick look behind the curtain. We’ll have more subscriber exclusive material coming up soon focusing on policy challenges before the government and the state of conversation about the real reforms Moldova expects in the coming years. Stay tuned!