Uncommonly Common or Truly Exceptional? An Alternative to the Political System-Based Explanation of the Romanian Mass Media

In Romania, the political system, itself an amalgam of systems and still shifting in line with a continually evolving democracy, is only the vessel in which corruption is percolating and not the cause of it; culture is the cause. This is true of the very nature of how instrumentalization, clientelism, and political parallelism have evolved. Romanian clientelism and the political parallelism are often an expression of the powers of the manager-journalist or star journalists and not only of media owners and politicians. This may set the Romania mass media system apart from other systems.