Sometimes it truly is amazing how serendipitous the Unsleeping Eye is. Just a few days after writing Pot Calling Kettle about how Romania is planning on spending untold millions of Euros to broadcast Russian-language propaganda into Moldova, I came across this:

The EBU’s Director General, Ingrid Deltenre, has written to Romanian Prime Minister Dacian Cioloş to request an “urgent intervention” to save Televiziunea Romana (TVR).
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In the letter Ms Deltenre says that “TVR is facing complete financial collapse, caused by significant debts. In addition, the temporary management cannot embark on strategic reforms.”

Ouch!

Poor old TVR, abused and misused since the very beginning when Ion “Spontaneously Showed Up” Iliescu manipulated it to become the first post-Revolution president and then twisted to support every crooked prime minister and president ever since. The Cultural channel got slashed in 2012 (and who here remembers good old TVR Info?) and now we learn that TVR is so deeply in debt that the timid EBU is actually begging for someone, somewhere in Romania to do something.

Sigh… and all this comes after international bodies criticized TVR for consistently broadcasting heavily prejudicial content.

You know, I really wouldn’t be the person who I am today without TVR, from way back in the old days when I watched it in the village to when I learned about the 1989 Revolution and what happened in Cluj to when I appeared on the channel numerous times myself after I learned to speak Romanian.

But we have to be honest. It’s always been a naked propaganda vehicle. What’s “relatively” new is that the Romanian government is so incompetent that it can’t even pay its European Broadcasting Union dues.

And it’s never gotten its shit together to dub the stream from Euronews into Romanian despite the fact that TVR is a fucking co-owner of the channel AND several non-EU countries pay for the dubbing (including Turkey, Russia and Ukraine) in their languages.

It turns out the pot is cracked, rusty and about to fall to pieces. But at least I’ll be able to enjoy some sweet “EU values” broadcasts in Russian in the near future LOL

Christ, what a clusterfuck.