“The Tattlers' Tattle”: Fake News, Linguistic National Intimacy, and New Media in Romania

Abstract

This article analyzes the successful Romanian weekly satire show Cronica Cârcotaşilor (The Tattlers' Tattle) in the context of the televisual landscape of postsocialist Romania. I argue that given the widespread skepticism toward the unfulfilled promises of the post-socialist transition and the European Union (EU) accession, the show's ability to curb Romanians' disaffection from politics is remarkable. Positioning Romanians as active television viewers and gatekeepers against practices of manipulation and incorrect uses of the Romanian language, the show fosters discursive contestation and activates a desire for political engagement. My discussion introduces the notion of “national linguistic intimacy” to evoke how the show strives to naturalize the affective ties with the national community by reusing the flavor of Romanian comedic and satirical literature and encouraging language play.

Notes

¹One can read these blogs at http://Găinuşă.wordpress.com/, http://www.şerbanhuidu.ro/, http://www.mistretzu.ro/, http://cronica.primatv.ro/forum/, and http://www.gogaie.ro/.

²The reenactments can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvywQviVg.

³For example, when a French TV station announced a “burr” (blunder) of the NATO air forces during the 1999 war in Kosovo, the news was broadcast by an editor at a Romanian private TV station as a new “bravură” (bravery) of the NATO air forces. In another instance, a television broadcaster whose task was to present a concert on Saint-Saëns adapted the name according to her intelligence by saying “Sans-Sense” (Non-Sense) (Stamatoiu, 2006, p. 6).

⁴In an article about the satiric spirit of Romanians, American scholar Robert Cochran (1989) describes his 1985 trip to the communist country as follows: “Romanians express themselves most characteristically and most profoundly in their joking. In the ironies, obliquities, and covert aggressions natural to the genre they find a vehicle perfectly suited to their situation, their history, and perhaps their temperament. Living in secular purgatory that at times must seem infernal, they inhabit a joker's paradise […] Generically the joke is Janus-faced – at once assertion of defiance and admission of defeat, it disparages itself even in its telling, proclaims its own limits, and is always at least partly told on its teller” (pp. 260, 272).

⁵“Grobian” is a widely used word in Romanian. It refers to Saint Grobian, the fictional patron of coarse people conceived by the satirist Sebastian Brant (1457–1521).