Category: Article

Media Manipulation in Ukraine

Article by Iain Elliot

Journalism is a particularly dangerous profession in Ukraine. Over the past five years several dozen journalists have been killed or injured under suspicious circumstances. More often than not, the authorities fail to find the culprits. The most notorious case was that of Georgy Gongadze, whose internet newspaper Ukrainska Pravda frequently published material critical of the government and presidency. On 16 September 2000 he disappeared, and in November his decapitated body was found in a forest near Kiev. Major Melnychenko of the State Guard then revealed tapes which he claimed had been recorded in the office of President Leonid Kuchma, apparently connecting the President to actions against the journalist.
On 3 July 2001 the director of the Sloyansk TV company TOR, Igor Aleksandrov, was beaten up and died two days later. He had criticised several local Donetsk region politicians. On 28 January 2002 the chief editor of the newspaper Business Berdyansk, Tetyana Goryacheva, was attacked by an unknown assailant who splashed acid in her face. Last April the head of the independent Public Radio, Oleksandr Kryvenko, died in a car crash when the Volkswagen Golf in which he was travelling veered off the road and hit a tree. Also killed was the driver, Gizo Grdzelidze, coordinator of Ukrainian projects for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Roads in Ukraine are bad, and people increase the risks by refusing to wear seat belts. (My regular driver, Kostya, told me to resist my automatic move to fasten the belt as soon as I got in, because it made the traffic police suspicious: they reckon that by appearing over-anxious to observe the law, you must be hiding something serious that you don’t want the police to see. Once they had stopped you, they would certainly think up something for which to extort a fine or a bribe.)
But tragically, so many opposition politicians and journalists have died in recent years on Ukrainian roads under unexplained circumstances that the general public tends to suspect the worst whenever another such death occurs.
Public Radio under Kryvenko broadcast a wide range of views and frequently aired material critical of the authorities. The official Ukrainian media regulatory body, the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting, rejected the station’s application to be allocated one of Kiev’s FM frequencies, but Public Radio was able to use the frequencies of other independent stations, Radio Rox and Radio Kontynent, and won support from the Soros Foundation and the European Commission. Reporting the deaths on 9 April, Interfax-Ukraine said that the “cause of the accident is unclear”. Investigations into several other car crashes which resulted in the deaths of prominent opposition figures have likewise left the causes “unclear”. Vyacheslav Chornovil, the dissident journalist imprisoned by the Soviet regime, became leader of the nationalist movement Rukh and a presidential candidate in independent Ukraine. He came to London in 1998 as guest of the British East-West Centre to participate in our elections project. Oleksandr Yemets, a Minister of Nationalities and frontbench spokesman for Democratic Revival was in Britain for a media project we organised in 1995 for the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech.
I met Gizo Grdzelidze because of our shared interest in media reform in Ukraine. He drove me around Kiev to meet some independent journalists involved in a series of seminars held throughout Ukraine on the difficulties experienced by journalists critical of official positions. In my first years as director of the Britain-Russia Centre and the British East-West Centre we arranged several seminars and conferences in the countries of the former Soviet Union to encourage journalists to observe higher professional standards and promote the freedom of the media. More recently the emphasis of western-sponsored projects has rightly moved to helping create an environment in which government officials, judges, media owners and politicians try to promote independent media because they understand clearly the advantages which will accrue to the state, to society and indeed to themselves as individuals and parents. But it is an uphill struggle.
Political censorship and media manipulation by government agencies is a fact of life in Ukraine today. Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech for all citizens are not effective. Articles 15 and 34 of the Constitution, Article 2 of the press law, and Article 6 of the law on TV and radio broadcasting forbid censorship and guarantee free media. President Leonid Kuchma himself appoints the head of the State Committee on Informational Policy, TV and Radio Broadcasting, and the members of the National Council on TV and Radio Broadcasting are appointed by President and parliament. In July 2002 the Chief Department of Information Policy was set up within the presidential administration to tighten control over the media.
While this does not match the total media management attempted by the Soviet regime, the principles are similar, and the practice usually depends on bureaucrats shaped by their Soviet past. Business and political groups loyal to Kuchma own the national TV channels, most regional TV and radio stations, and many of the main newspapers. One of the scandals of journalism Ukrainian style is the issuing of secret directives (temniki – abbreviated from “topic of the week”) to ensure “correct” coverage, or non-coverage of events. Journalists who are not prepared to conform to the imposed “guidelines” are forced to resign. This results in the national television “newscasts” preferring opinion to factual reporting, and showing a remarkable similarity in their coverage and presentation.
The Danish MP Hanne Severinsen, who is the rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe monitoring committee for Ukraine, criticised the role of the presidential administration when she addressed journalists at a Kiev conference on 10 June. Newspapers which criticised the government were subjected to arbitrary tax inspections or fire and sanitary checks which could result in them being forced to close down. An international comparative study on media freedom by Reporters Without Borders was made public in October 2002. On a scale which ranked Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada in the top five places, Ukraine came 112th.
The opposition bloc Our Ukraine which won 56 per cent of the vote in the 2002 parliamentary elections has far less TV coverage than pro-government parties with little public support. When the opposition organised a mass demonstration in September, most TV transmitters were closed down for “preventive maintenance”. A detailed study of this deplorable media scene was prepared by Oleksandr Paliy, Stanislav Lyachinsky and others for the parliamentary hearings held in Kiev on 4 December 2002 (see Political Censorship in Ukraine: Facts, Trends, Comments). They conclude that “political censorship is a reality which poses a threat to prospects for democratic development in the Ukrainian state and society”.
It was an extraordinary experience to observe the discussions at these hearings held in the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada) last December. I discussed them afterwards with Stepan Kurpil (chief editor of Vysokii zamok and chairman of the Lviv branch of the National Journalist Union of Ukraine). He maintained that Mikola Tomenko (head of the Parliamentary Committee on Freedom of Speech) had prepared the programme for the hearings, but the presidential authorities had interfered and delivered something quite different. The session was chaired by the deputy Speaker, Oleksandr Zinchenko, who allowed representatives of the official press to speak, even although they were not on the list, leaving no time for some of the scheduled independent journalists to speak. (The session ran from 10.00 to 14.00). Kurpil pointed out that the turnout of MPs was disappointing, most of those present being not surprisingly from Nasha Ukraina (the opposition bloc of which Tomenko was also a member). Tomenko even sacrificed his right to make a final statement so that Roman Skrypin (Gromadske Radio, formerly with STB TV) could denounce the censorship under which he claimed the hearings were conducted.
Kurpil took issue with the statement made by the new Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Tabachnik, that “de jure censorship in Ukraine does not exist”. Kurpil pointed out that even under the old regime from Stalin to Brezhnev the same could have been said: “But de facto censorship flourished and still flourishes to this day.” He cited the MP Ivan Bokii, who said: “When there was a censor, it was clear what would not be permitted to be printed. But now censorship means that those in charge of the media are instructed just how things ought to be.” This followed a point made by Andriy Shevchenko (head of the newly formed Independent Union of Journalists), the first journalist to speak: “Of course it wasn’t just yesterday that our work became difficult. Journalism has found it difficult to breath for several years now. But since the summer (with the arrival of the new presidential administration) it has been really hard. What has changed? Before we were told what could not be said. Now we are told what must be said. The authorities call this the information war. We see it as a war against our profession.” When Shevchenko tried to illustrate his speech by showing examples of the notorious temniki (secret instructions to the media) on the Rada screen, there was a technical hitch which called forth an uproar in the House.
Kurpil thought that the representatives of the authorities (such as the General Director of the First National TV Channel Igor Storozhuk) spoke in such a “grey and colourless” way that it was simply impossible to listen to them. When the Procurator General Svyatoslav Piskun claimed that his office was doing everything possible to solve the murder of Gongadze and other journalists there were shouts of “Lies! Shame” from the journalists present.
The media scene in Ukraine is less gloomy than this account might suggest, largely because of the determination of many Ukrainian journalists themselves not to accept the situation. They repeatedly speak out against censorship, and try to find employment where they can practice their profession honourably. Over the past decade I have worked on many media reform projects funded by the taxpayers of the Western democracies, and believe that it is money well spent. Repressive regimes are bad for their own people, and bad for their neighbours. Ukraine has to change, and I have met many fine people there who are active in the country’s developing democratic institutions to ensure that it changes in the right direction.

Iain Elliot

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