Journalists take a stand against political censorship (10/13/02)

Journalists take a stand against political censorship

by Viktor Stepanenko
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

The absence of freedom of expression is a painful problem in post-Communist Ukraine. In recent years, Ukraine's executive authorities have been regularly mentioned among the top regimes "honored" with the title of "enemy of the press."

The ongoing political crisis, the activities of the anti-presidential opposition and the new turn in the "Kuchmagate" scandal associated with Ukraine's alleged sale of radar systems to Iraq have exacerbated the problem of freedom of expression in the country.

The series of events that triggered the "information crisis" and generated a new wave of public debates on freedom of expression in Ukraine can be reconstructed as follows.

At the beginning of September, the chairman of the parliamentary Committee for the Freedom of Expression and Information, Mykola Tomenko, publicized secret instructions by the presidential administration regarding the news coverage on the main national television channels controlled by pro-presidential business clans.

The secret media regulations appear to be a regular practice - known to many Ukrainian journalists as the "temnyk," jargon that refers to the authorities' secret direction of journalists as regarding the presentation of news topics. In his open letter to the country's leadership, Mr. Tomenko directly connected the activation of the "temnyk policy" with the appointment in June of Viktor Medvedchuk as the head of the presidential staff.

On September 23, on the eve of a major anti-presidential rally in Kyiv, opposition leaders occupied the UT-1 television headquarters in a futile attempt to present their position to Ukrainian viewers. Official media outlets subsequently portrayed this desperate effort by the opposition to gain an opportunity to speak freely as "political extremism" and a "criminal action by political outsiders."

On October 1 journalists of the independent news agency UNIAN accused its new executive director, Vasyl Yurychko, of censoring their work and refusing to run any reports that could be construed as unfavorably portraying President Leonid Kuchma. The conflict was settled when Mr. Yurychko and the disobedient journalists signed a declaration in which the supervisor promised not to interfere with their work.

On October 3 the journalists' growing resistance to the official media policy resulted in a "Manifesto of Ukrainian Journalists Against Political Censorship" [see text on page 3]. The manifesto, which is open for signing by any journalist in Ukraine, was prepared by some 60 representatives of various media outlets.

The signatories of the manifesto say they "welcome the tendency whereby, under circumstances of the growing political censorship in Ukraine, journalists are switching from individual protests to collective actions of solidarity." The manifesto declares the readiness of Ukrainian journalists to organize a countrywide strike and to stand for the rights of colleagues who were fired from their jobs for political reasons.

The significance of this document can hardly be overestimated. For the first time in Ukraine's modern history the vicious circle of narrow corporate interests of journalists belonging to different media groups has been broken.

The history of the post-Soviet media - in particular, the example of Russia's NTV television, which many observers claim was suppressed by the authorities last year for political reasons - shows that the lack of professional solidarity among post-Soviet journalists is a major factor that makes the fight for the freedom of expression in post-Soviet countries a very problematic task.

Another obstacle is the peculiar post-Soviet way of pursuing businesses that, in order to be successful, have to maintain political loyalty to the authorities (or at least pretend to do so). That is why, as a rule with rare exceptions, even private post-Soviet media outlets have not yet constituted themselves as really independent information businesses. They have largely become mouthpieces used to publicize the propagandist justification of the political and economic domination of governing clans. And, quite often, these clans own or control major media outlets. In such cases, journalists become hostages to the clans' "editorial policy." It is not surprising that in Ukraine this policy happens to be pro-presidential.

Andrii Tychyna, a journalist at the nationwide 1+1 television network (controlled by the Viktor Medvedchuk-Hryhorii Surkis clan) admits that "news coverage [in Ukraine] is ceasing to be a reflection of real socio-political events but is becoming a generator of some virtual reality," Zerkalo nedeli reported on September 28.

Can the Ukrainian media transform itself from a tool of oligarchic control over public opinion into a social institution that could be sensitive to public interests? The recent protest actions by Ukrainian journalists seem to be taking an important step toward such a transformation.

Dr. Viktor Stepanenko is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and director of the Center for Public Policy Development.

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