Csop - “Ten for Romania” a valuable project

Csop

Most of Romanian important people were anonymous in Romania until they succeeded and obtained international recognition. From last few years we can chose some movie directors, quasi-anonymous in Romania, until they were internationally recognized: Cristi Puiu, (Cannes 2005 “Un certain regard” winner), Cristian Porumboiu (winner of the “Camera d’Or” prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2006), Cristian Mungiu (winner of the “Palme d’Or” in 2007) and the list can be extended to other categories.

Why regular people don’t hear about these values until they were internationally recognized? Are these people egoistic and seek only the international recognition ignoring Romanians? It is a normal career to be an international value before being a national value? The participation in these contests comes before national participation in any contest? National contests results are not important for Romanians or are not promoted enough? It is difficult to say in a country where most important information source is represented by TV media. In this respect, the initiative of such a project realized by a private TV station must be recognized to be really valuable.

The very interesting and generous project, “Ten for Romania” was developed by Realitatea TV, Romanian news TV station, having Mr. Mihai Tatulici as Project Manager. This project intends to regain for Romanians the reasons to be proud to be Romanians and to offer real leaders to be followed. The goal was to identify and rank 100 most valuable Romanians considered by their co-nationals, each year (10 categories x 10 people per category) and to promote them.

If the value is about perception of the people who evaluates it and about the way to measure the value, this generates a lot of questions: Are there Romanians that are perceived as real values at this moment? What that means for regular people? How can we differentiate between awareness and value? The people who are everyday presented in mass media are valuable? And questions flow continued, seeking for answers in all areas, starting from arts and culture and finishing with sports and politics.

“Romanian people elite reconstruction was our main target. The way that the nation perceives representative personalities forced us to address to sociology and not to realize a journalistic digging. Elites are the guides of the nations. Need for guides is today more important than ever, now when our road is so new and so difficult.” said Mr. Tatulici in 2005 after first year.

This is an “alive” project, by this assumption I want to say that the project shows a continuous adaptation and learning from the past experiences. From the start, the structure of the research was based on categories. This means that important people (elites) are compared inside their field of influence.

Four of most important Romanian institutions in the social research were chosen to participate in the project in order to avoid bias in results (Institution name – main contact for the project):

• CURS – Sebastian Lazaroiu

• INSOMAR – Cecilia Zavaleche

The approach was different each year in the effort to obtain most relevant results as Romanian elites. Let’s see the evolution.

1st year - 2005

Categories (which remains almost the same during all years) :

1. Politicians

10. Sports man/ woman

• First stage - a quantitative research:

o Criteria: gathering of people’s criteria in order to evaluate the “values” in each field. First three criteria were selected to go in second stage.

o People: Each respondent can nominate three persons considered as to be most important in their activity field. First 10 people nominated in each field were selected for second stage.

• Second stage was a quantitative survey where the results from first stage were used to clarify the most important personalities in each field. Each of ten people from first stage was evaluated against on first three criteria declared by respondents.

This methodology shows that people know these personalities promoted on TV, mainly politicians, and the criteria for evaluation were very generalist ones.

2nd year - 2006

The first year conclusions lead to a new approach where more “cultural” areas were considered, assuming that there will be the fields to find values. The claims from people who considered that is important to have a “professional” jury, which can use professional standards to evaluate “values”, were considered by producers and a new approach was tested. In this respect the categories were treated in different ways:

• Advocates, architects, surgeons, historicists – an evaluation realized by a quantitative survey in the guild.

• Politicians, writers, Romanian brands, journalists, young politicians, ministries – a quantitative survey on population.

A conclusion of this approach was astonishing for the “academic” fields. “The results scandalized academic world and mass media. Us, who are involved in this project, we were terrified by professional envies, self-esteem and amateurism covered under academism mask. The research in guilds was proven to be premature, those professional categories being at the start of a corporatist construction.” said Mr. Tatulici after the results of year 2006 were processed.

Another important conclusion was that we cannot discuss about a writers’ category, while only 5 names were mentioned by more than 2% of respondents and 71% of all respondents cannot mention any Romanian writer based on previous year activity.

3rd year - 2007

Based on the previous year experience, 2007 was a “back to the roots” development, where initial assumptions were reconsidered and same strategy as in 2005 was applied. It was nothing wrong here, the public space being almost the same, where people tend to have similar values. The results were not so different from 2005 ones.

The novelty after this year results was the conclusion of Mr. Tatulici who said: “The people can go wrong if they are captive of a single information source” referring to the TV as unique information source. Also he declared that “TV must be used under the sign of being a hazard for education” which is a very harsh conclusion coming from a TV professional as he is for more than 30 years.

4th year - 2008

The project starts on a new basis, with a real effort from Realitatea TV to promote values selected by a neutral jury, composed for each category of people with proven performance in each field. Each month, in a dedicated TV promo, the jury nominates for each category a “monthly value” to be considered by spectators for final ranking. We will see how this works, because is based on the TV station audience, and, in same time, some of competition TV stations starts to promote own values defined on different bases, without any relation to this project. In my opinion, this competition can bring benefits for Romanians, showing that there are more valuable people than we already are aware of, who deserve recognition and who can represent models for our co-nationals. As a conclusion, the project is very important and can bring real benefits for Romanians, due to the fact that the lack of values after Communist era (except of course “The Golden Calf”, which is the major motivator in these days) brings us to the lowest level ever since 2nd World War.

Csop