The Cultural Mission of the Media in the Beginning of the Romanian Press

摘要

The cultural and educational aspect of the media has always been a concern for theorists, journalists, people involved in the mass communication system and even for the common individual daily exposed to the media messages. The relationship between media and society can be looked upon in terms of global consequences (the functions), precise influences (the effects) and general missions of the media (the roles) [1]. In this article the authors will refer to the general roles assumed by the media according to the political system they function within. In terms of the global mission of the press, three American professors, Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm, in 1956 published a book called Four theories of the press , where they have elaborated the most famous models regarding the role of the media [2]. The four theories discussed are: authoritarian , where the state exercises control over content to assure that content is in the public or state interest; libertarian , where nearly everything is permitted and the public is trusted to sort what they need and consider useful from the multitude of messages coming from mass media; social responsibility , which is essentially libertarian but with an obligation of the media to meet certain minimum standards of responsibility to its audience; and soviet communist , which is a special type of authoritarian in which content is totally controlled for the specific aim of supporting communist ideology [3]. In correspondence with the European history of the press but much later, the Romanian press was born under the circumstances of the authoritarian model. 1829 is the year of the first real periodical publications in the Principalities and 1838 in Transylvania. By a text analysis of the articles introducing the gazettes, the authors of this article will demonstrate that the cultural and historical personalities involved in the development of the first gazettes had assumed their mission in terms of the libertarian theory based on the rights of the individual, the enlightenment of the people provided by knowledge, the development of the Romanian language and the creation of the citizen individual with a defined role in the political decision.