As I write, the national electronic media continue to be media for the ethnic majority and closed to the Roma. The provisions of the 1998 law on media which encourage ethnic diversity in the national media continue to be resisted by a stubborn administration. This administration refuses to accept that Roma are part of the nation and are entitled to be part of its media as well. Time and again, each time I was about to convince officials that a Roma program should be an integral part of the National TV program, it turned out that ongoing personnel changes in the institution meant that the person with whom I had been communicating would no longer be working on the issue. Three boards of directors of the National TV have come and gone in the course of my work, and each time I have had to start from the absolute beginning, because the new personnel had never thought about Roma in the National TV, and because the institution had never had a concept of which Roma were a part.
Officials come and go, but the exclusion of the Roma from the Bulgarian media continues.
As I write these words, it appears that my hope that Roma will appear on the National Television has finally borne fruit. At the end of October 1999, the Program Committee at the National Television approved one project for a Romani television broadcast on Channel 1. Over the past several years, our work with the media has brought about if not a critical change with regard to Roma, at least an alternative to the culture which perceives Roma as so distant that it would be unthinkable for one of their kind to be in the TV studio, or in the radio studio or behind the computer typing their article for the next day s edition. We expect that in the near future, we will see this alternative weighing ever more against the status quo.