Cav's Place

After a recent announcement that it was likely to happen, today it became official: The EBU has withdrawn the Romanian national public broadcaster, TVR, from all member services due to unpaid debt, the immediate obvious effect being that our entry, Ovidiu Anton’s “Moment of Silence“, can no longer take part in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, nor can TVR broadcast the competition. Of course, there are other effects as well, such as when it comes to the news TVR broadcasts, and if the situation won’t resolve itself by then they won’t be broadcasting our national team’s qualifying matches for the 2018 World Cup, nor the competition itself or a number of other competitions they had contracted through the EBU.
The situation from the EBU’s point of view is explained in the article I linked to above and TVR doesn’t make different claims, only pointing out that they did pay the participation fee for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, just because they had notified the EBU since the start of the year that they won’t be able to make any more payments otherwise and therefore expected such a decision but nevertheless hoped that by paying this fee on time the ESC participation won’t be affected. The Government, on the other hand, passed the responsibility to the Parliament and also stated that paying one of TVR’s debts would have discriminated against all others who are owed money, considering TVR’s desperate financial situation.

Now I understand that the EBU is doing this just to try to generate a wave a discontent, causing the public to pressure the Government and Parliament in the hope that this will finally make them pay TVR’s debt when all their other attempts quite obviously fell on deaf ears, but it’s definitely not fair to punish the artist for something that has absolutely nothing to do with him. I mean, he took part in the national selection five times before finally winning, now also took part in the promotional events organized before the competition, I imagine also invested a certain sum of money in this, and suddenly he finds himself kicked out through absolutely no fault of his own. If TVR no longer being able to broadcast the competition should still leave viewers the option of watching it on-line, what is he left with?
Some are suggesting to at least allow him to perform the song as part of the interval act, which I guess would be the very least they could do, but from where I’m standing that’d be too little and perhaps not worth the trouble and expenses for him and his team. This really shouldn’t affect the artist, who fairly won his right to be there and actually compete, so what I’m saying is that it’s fair that the EBU stops providing any services for TVR until the debt is paid or a new agreement is reached and as a result Romania probably shouldn’t get to vote in the competition, but Ovidiu should be allowed to compete as if nothing happened. And, looking into the future for a moment, not allowing TVR to broadcast other competitions that aren’t freely available on-line harms viewers more than TVR, so that hardly seems fair to me either, a more suitable penalty perhaps being to actually force TVR to broadcast them but without any sort of advertisements or sponsorship deals, so they won’t be able to earn money from things they didn’t pay for.

But this is longer than I meant it to be already, so allow me to also point you to a petition that was hastily created by somebody. If there will be others as well, I may edit this to add them, since that’s rather poorly written, but for now that’s the one I know of and linking to it is the least I can do. Not that the decision is likely to be reversed even in the extremely unlikely scenario that the debt will be paid, much less simply as a result of a petition, and the EBU made this clear, but it may still be worth something, at the very least to the artist, and perhaps when it comes to making other arrangements for those other competitions TVR contracted through the EBU as well.