LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (05/21/06)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Our newspapers, our calling cards

Dear Editor:

Earlier this month a conference was held in Vilnius. It was called "A Joint View of Neighboring Relations." Its participants were leaders of eight former Soviet republics that now are democracies. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney addressed the gathering. And the great New York Times - the newspaper of record - covered it from ... Moscow! Just like in the good old Sov days: everything from Vilnius to Vladivostok was covered from Moscow. But this was in 2006 - 15 years after the collapse of the USSR.

The Times' Moscow correspondent "covered" the event by summarizing Vice-President Cheney's speech, particularly the parts where he criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin. In other words, he obtained a text of the vice-president's speech (perhaps from the press section of the American Embassy in Moscow) and filed a story that made the front page of the Times. A similar piece could have been written from the Times offices in Manhattan. Of course, it wouldn't have a Moscow dateline. But then, who needs a Moscow dateline on an event in Vilnius? Sixteen years after Vilnius "left" Moscow!

I bring this up, because the next meeting of the democratic leaders from the former Sovland may be held in Kyiv. And The New York Times, "the newspaper of record" will "cover" it from Warsaw, maybe, or simply from New York? But not The Ukrainian Weekly. There is no way Zenon Zawada would cover such an event by writing a story from a speech text. I watched him in Donetsk during the world Ukrainists meeting, and he was all over the place, grabbing sources and rushing to sessions (literally) rain or shine, and filing his pieces to Parsippany from all kinds of Internet cafes or holes in the wall with Internet connection in Donetsk.

A couple of years ago, I finally went to Khersones, the thousands-year-old city in the Crimea, near Sevastopol. I had heard about it for many years, but what finally moved me to arrange a trip there was Roman Woronowycz's article about it in The Weekly. And let's not forget that the readers of The Ukrainian Weekly had ringside seats as Ukraine was shucking its colonial bonds and learning to fly solo, because of the coverage of Marta Kolomayets, the first bureau chief in Kyiv.

And currently Mr. Zawada not only brings the readers informed reports on political events in Ukraine, but also visits and writes about places in Ukraine that virtually never appear in the ads of Ukrainian American travel agencies. Yet they are very interesting from historic, cultural and political points of view. Like Alchevsk, for example, the base of Alchevskys - Ukrainian capitalists who spent their money on Ukrainian schools when the Russian tsarist government suppressed Ukrainian education. I haven't been there yet, but plan to visit because The Weekly has carried a story about it.

I write all this, because in a few days the leadership of the Ukrainian National Association will gather for its quadrennial convention and the rising costs of publishing The Ukrainian Weekly and Svoboda will probably come up. Again.

My wish is that the convention delegates and the leadership seriously consider the benefits of its publications - to the community, and to the United States of America and Canada as reliable sources of information on Ukraine, and on Ukrainian American and Ukrainian Canadian communities, or, let's be realistic, voting blocs.

The two papers are our assets worth preserving. Let's not turn them into tin-cup beggars. They are calling cards of all of us.

R.L. Chomiak
Washington

Quotation from Keats not Yeats

Dear Editor:

I hope it was only editorial oversight, and not that of Ukraine's first lady, that misattributed the famous quotation from the penultimate line of English poet John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to "Irish poet John Yeats" (May 7, page 1). Irish poet William Butler Yeats' name does not even rhyme with "Keats."

Well, we all make mistakes. I once nearly bought what I thought was a volume of Yeats, only to discover that it was a botanical treatise on yeasts.

Andrew Sorokowski
Rockville, Md.

Editor's note: In fact, the error was our correspondent's. We stand corrected. Thank you to our letter-writer.

A newspaper and its mission

Dear Editor:

In a letter in the April 9 issue of The Ukrainian Weekly, Dr. Myroslav Burbelo suggested some forward-looking changes for The Ukrainian Weekly in order for it to become "more like other American or European major newspapers." Mercifully, he allowed that "it would probably require the addition of some young journalistic knowledge in specific fields, for example science ... and lead to mental enrichment."

Skeptics will prevail this time. A newspaper's mission is not easily adjustable and would require a compelling reason for change. Also, to say that The Weekly has a dual responsibility to the diaspora as well as to Ukraine is an exaggeration. The newspaper's fiscal status is not rosy; the glow is red. If anything, the diaspora could show more reciprocity.

Today The Ukrainian Weekly's journalism is at a professional level. The reporting of events in Ukraine and related commentaries and sources of political analysis usually get top rating. If the diaspora scene presented in The Ukrainian Weekly is parochial, as observed by Dr. Burbelo, it is so because the diaspora almost by definition is mostly parochial.

This means that, with rare exceptions, the Ukrainian American diaspora collectively pays scant attention to the pre-eminent public issues of its own country, the U.S.A., even though such civic issues are paramount to its own socio-economic and cerebral itinerary, and especially to that of its children. War or peace, the health insurance morass, the recent unprecedented assault on Social Security, the defense of civil liberties - which we ardently wish for Ukraine but mistakenly take for granted in America - are arbitrarily outside the purview of The Ukrainian Weekly, despite a virtual certainty that the younger generation will not stay long in the ethnic orbit. The diaspora's obsession is with museums.

Widening a narrow window on events in the American landscape that affect many lives, beyond the strictly conservative view presented by columnist Myron Kuropas, would be welcomed by those who have distanced themselves from The Ukrainian Weekly - and there are some among the young - because of its perceived narrowly chosen content.

Overall, The Ukrainian Weekly's column writers seldom venture outside of the ethnic fabula, and may soon run out of topics. While trying to be relevant, they are easily eclipsed by the Kuropas effect, with its robust style and mobile horizons, and with a consistent Republican Party political advocacy, mainly by hectoring at perceived pillars of liberalism.

Balance would be welcome - by presenting another point of view in a regular column, preferably a younger voice, as the only way to mitigate a more than fleeting impression that the newspaper has a favored ideological tinge.

The suggested idea may not sit well with a large part of the Ukrainian community, if it votes the same way as the half of America that elected President George W. Bush. There is no denying that right-wing rhetoric and gasoline-based, SUV driven patriotism have been the winning numbers since the watershed Republican congressional victory of 1994. But profound ethical and Constitutional questions now confronting the administration and the rising dissatisfaction with failed war for oil in Iraq are taking the wind out of earlier spin. The same voters may now notice when the government in Washington stands accused of breaking the law - as we had noticed when former President Leonid Kuchma's regime abused power in Ukraine.

And, contrary to Dr. Burbelo's conjecture, The Ukrainian Weekly is not quite the only English-language newspaper in the U.S. that "provides information in an unbiased way for Americans" about Ukraine. Some of the most accurate reporting and analyses of events in Ukraine in the last several years have appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and, yes, in The New York Times, The Washington Post and regularly in the Kyiv Post (an important source for foreign visitors). And it would be naive to think that foreign government sources know less about Ukraine than we do.

Boris Danik
North Caldwell, N.J.

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