I noticed that the little marketing monkeys at CSOP (for more on them, see below) put out their latest poll today. If you speak Romanian, click on the link for the entire breakdown.

Nonetheless, I thought it was mighty interesting to see Daddy Isarescu (albeit still quite low) continues to be the person most Romanians have trust in. Considering he hasn’t held political office in over a decade, I can’t quite figure out exactly by what measure people are rating him.

I mean it’s Isarescu who brought in the Wise Old Elves of the IMF, so I’m guessing this means a lot of Romanians think this was a good thing.

Clearly PDL (the ruling party at the moment) suffers from a much poorer public image than do the USL (red and blue). But if you look under “Apara mai mult interese firmelor” (defends corporate interests) you’ll see that PDL is “winning” that particular category.

Obviously this is the respondents’ opinions shown here (roughly 1,000 people were polled) but I am mighty curious of the actual Wise Old Elves of the big industries and companies in Romania feel the same way, that the PDL is “their” party.

And last but not least, I thought this graphic was particularly informative:

If you look down as “mass media”, you’ll see that while 35% of the respondents said they trust the mass media, 58% (easily over half, even with the margin of error) do not trust the mass media. Considering there are 7 full-time news channels and dozens and dozens of newspapers (owned by different and competing interests), that’s really saying something.

This is why I always expect blogs to rise up and fill in that gap, the same way they do in Russia and the United States and yet here in Romania it seems more like it’s about fun-time yuk yuks than becoming a reliable source of information for people.

Quite frankly, despite my initial poor experience with the Transilvania L!ve/Look folks, I really do have high hopes that they will be able to break Bucharest’s grip on the national mass media and deliver meaningful and insightful content now and in the near future.

As for the banks? Fuck ’em. They’re lucky to get 17%.

As for CSOP, the firm that conducted this survey, they are a division of the multinational giant Taylor Nelson Sofres, which is itself a sub unit of the mega corporation Kantar Group. Long story short, these are the masters of propaganda and marketing, and you all know how much I loooove those folks.