20 Years Later: Ukraine
By Inna Akhtyrska Posted Apr 13 2010
A Ukrainian woman holds a poster during a February 2004 protest in Kiev. Demonstrators rallied against the closing of the independent media by Ukrainian officials before the presidential election.
EPA Photo: Sergey Dolzhenko
“Now and Later” State of Ukranian Media in the Past Five Years
Natalya Ligachova, a reporter for Telekritika and a critic of media environment makes the following analysis:
- Ukraine is repeating Russia’s situation when Vladimir Putin became president and concentrated the news business in the hands of the political elite. Ukrainian media will be monopolized and controlled, and politicians will be forced to make deals with media owners.
- Private media will serve interests of the ruling party. This will lead to dependency of editorial content on government policies.
- Media will cover the administration of Yanukovych with loyalty, which in essence might translate into propaganda and PR.
- In television programs Ukrainian is expected to be replaced by the Russian language, and by entertainment over analytical journalism.
Ukrainian media have changed since the 2004 Orange Revolution brought Viktor Yushchenko to power in a democratically contested election. Today, there is more freedom of speech. If journalists are not too lazy to analyze, they can write and say quite a lot. Compared to the years of Leonid Kuchma's presidency, the news business became more critical during the Yushchenko years. “There are no more 'temniki', letters from politicians to journalists spelling out guidelines on how to cover certain topics,” says Svitlana Rogovska, INTV reporter.
Rogovska says that today the main problem of Ukrainian media is dependency on big corporations ran by politicians and oligarchs who try to spread their influence. Control of media has become more structured since the February 2010 presidential election in which Victor Yanukovch defeated Yuliya Tymoshenko in an election praised by foreign obsers as mostly corruption free. The defeated candidate had once been an ally of Yushchenko.
Now oligarchs who represent political and financial elite groups are among the key media owners in the country. Media resources are concentrated in the hands of “Partia Regionov” (Party of Regions) that is currently in power. Tymoshenko, now the oppostion leader, does not own any mainstream news organizations.
The world economic crisis of 2009 has changed the media environment dramatically. Many TV shows were canceled, and numerous newspapers shut down, including Novynar, the Ukrainian version of Newsweek.
Many TV stations cut their funding for some shows. If in Fall 2008, the STB program, “Fabryka Zirok,” the prototype of “American Idol,” was filmed by 40 cameras, a year later the show relied on four cameras only.
Independent foreign new business owners left Ukraine during financial crisis. Now all media tycoons – (TV channels Inter, 1+1, Ukraine, ICTV, STB and other media) that respectively belong to Valery Khoroshkovsky, Igor Kolomojski, Rinat Achmetov, Dmitry Firtash and Viktor Pinchuk – are loyal to the new president.
Ukraine has not experienced direct censorship from the government over the past five years; however, editors and journalists begin to feel uncomfortable in the current situation, says Vachtang Kipiani, an independent journalist. “Stories that simply don’t embrace the so-called ‘spirit of Yanukovych’ are now being eliminated from newscasts,” he says.
Only the online media have relative freedom to cover politics objectively Journalists and social elite now tend to trust more the web sites like telekritika.ru, korrespondent.net and pravda.com.ua. “No one, not even the police, reacts to articles where journalists write about corruption,” says Alesya Batsman, the editor of TV program Shuster Live. “It means that journalists’ investigations are useless.”
Some Ukrainian journalists believe that Anna German, a former reporter now working for the President’s Administration, might be able to help improve today’s media environment.
The news and information business in Ukraine is more stable now than ten year ago. Hopefully, it will stay like this in the future. Maybe, foreign investors reappear, that should help add balance between those organizations loyal to the current government and those that are more objective. In a democratic society there should be news businesses that can express a variety of ideas and cover events with little fear of reprisal. The key goal for Ukrainian journalists should be to become watchdogs that will not allow politicians to suppress journalistic freedom and the right to keep the public informed.
Inna Akhtyrska
Inna Akhtyrska received an MA in Journalism at Kharkiv National University, Ukraine in 2007 and an MA in Political Science at Pultusk Academy of Humanities, Poland in 2009. She also studied at the Missouri School of Journalism between 2004 and 2005. She was a reporter for the Ukrainian television, Inter TV in 2007-2008, and now she works as a journalist for Perspektywy Press in Warsaw, Poland.