A Place That Needs Journalism
If you’re a Chicago journalist, Gabriel Nicolescou has a proposition for you. Fly to Romania, where truth is a strange new concept, and show the nation what to do with it.
“Something very interesting,” Nicolescou told us. “Some words have lost their power and are slogans. Let’s say–‘For the understanding among the peoples around the world.’ Or ‘Noninterference with internal affairs.’ We have heard for so long Ceausescu selling this to the United States and the world, and selling it for a good profit . . .”
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An architect educated in Bucharest, Nicolescou, who’s 45, left Romania legally in 1978 and has lived in Chicago since ’79. He is absolutely serious about sending journalists over. Journalists, he said, and also typewriters and copiers and fax machines. The people of Romania, where under Ceausescu typewriters had to be registered with the state, have virtually none of the modern tools for sharing information.
“Right now, they know what they don’t trust,” he said. “They don’t know very well what they trust. But they know they don’t trust Communists, even the Communists who did not have such a good relationship with Mr. Ceausescu.” Nicolescou was speaking here of the Council of the National Salvation Front, which seized the reins of Romania and is riddled with old apparatchiks. His paper will support equally the three non-Communist parties that have sprung up in opposition, and urge them to run a coalition slate against the Front in May’s national elections.
In that same issue, Nicolescou printed the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He told us the February issue, due out this week, would carry Lincoln’s observation, which Nicolescou finds so pertinent now–“You may fool all the people . . .”
Some listeners also see the commercial issue as momentous. Last July the citizens group Friends of WFMT filed suit in Circuit Court to try to keep the station as is, and a petition submitted last October to the Federal Communications Commission accused WFMT’s owners of “fraudulent, deceptive, or unethical” conduct. The grounds: WFMT contrived a “deficit” last year, raised $400,000 from listeners to meet it, then broke its word by “taking steps to change the character of the station” anyway.
William McCarter, president of the Chicago Educational Television Association, which runs WFMT and TV station WTTW, had made it clear inside the station that he was fed up with management by hallowed custom. Communicating his disdain for what Antlitz calls “just plain resistance to change,” McCarter has slung around such dripping sarcasms as “Vienna choirboys” and “the rape of the vestal virgins.”
