When I boarded the Air Moldova turboprop in Vienna for my connecting flight to Chisinau last Friday (talk about a small world - seven people on the plane, I knew one of them and he knew two of the others), the reading material available for passengers left no doubt as to how the Moldovan government was spinning the events of April 7.
Below are the two pages of coverage from state-run Moldova Suverana (a newspaper we had occasion to discuss last summer when it ran a hatchet-job piece on American NGOs in Moldova) - the paper had only four pages in total and the other two were business announcements, classifieds, etc. The front-page headline is "The Opposition's Latest Vandalism Will Cost Us 300 Mln Lei," and the stories along the right-hand side discuss Voronin's conversations with the Presidents of Russia and Lithuania and the Russian Duma's support for the Moldovan authorities.
MS's second page of coverage highlights, among other things, photos of opposition leaders Chirtoaca and Filat supposedly organizing the riots and - rather unbelievably - photos of destruction in Chisinau in 1941 when it was retaken by Romanian forces, inviting readers to draw a comparison between the devastation wreaked by a fascist army and the riots in downtown Chisinau on April 7th.
Further down and continuing below the cut is coverage from Vremea, a Russian-language newspaper which doesn't seem to have a functioning website at the moment (the URL on the front page leads to a blank page). The bulk of the paper is devoted to what it calls a "Chronicle of a Failed Putsch."
Below are the two pages of coverage from state-run Moldova Suverana (a newspaper we had occasion to discuss last summer when it ran a hatchet-job piece on American NGOs in Moldova) - the paper had only four pages in total and the other two were business announcements, classifieds, etc. The front-page headline is "The Opposition's Latest Vandalism Will Cost Us 300 Mln Lei," and the stories along the right-hand side discuss Voronin's conversations with the Presidents of Russia and Lithuania and the Russian Duma's support for the Moldovan authorities.
MS's second page of coverage highlights, among other things, photos of opposition leaders Chirtoaca and Filat supposedly organizing the riots and - rather unbelievably - photos of destruction in Chisinau in 1941 when it was retaken by Romanian forces, inviting readers to draw a comparison between the devastation wreaked by a fascist army and the riots in downtown Chisinau on April 7th.
Further down and continuing below the cut is coverage from Vremea, a Russian-language newspaper which doesn't seem to have a functioning website at the moment (the URL on the front page leads to a blank page). The bulk of the paper is devoted to what it calls a "Chronicle of a Failed Putsch."
IMG_1371, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
The last page, of course, is not about Moldova, but its slams on Georgian and Ukrainian leaders assist one in pinpointing the paper's editorial stance.
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