President Petro Poroshenko rules Ukraine’s television airwaves, a new study suggests.
But opinion is divided on whether the survey indicates top-down control of the media by the government, or self-censorship by a media fearful of damaging the image of the country’s leader in a time of war in Ukraine.
According to the study by Eugenia Kuznetsova, a researcher with the University of Deusto in Spain, 98 percent of references about the president on Sunday news airtime in Ukraine are either positive or neutral.
Media too soft?
Kuznetsova analyzed references to the president on prime time news programs on the four most-viewed Ukrainian TV channels: 1+1, Ukraina, ICTV and Inter. The sample included all weekly news bulletins in the period from Poroshenko’s inauguration in June 2014 until July 2016.
In her analysis, Kuznetsova accuses the media of being too soft on the head of state.
“Why is the president given a ceremonial role in the Ukrainian news?” Kuznetsova wrote in a report for news website VoxUkraine published on Sept. 7. “’The president has entrusted, met, signed, visited, arrived, stated’ – all this is reported as if the president were not an independent political figure who deserves to be judged on his policies.”
Bad study?
But Oksana Romaniuk, the director of the Institute of Mass Information, a Kyiv-based media watchdog, is skeptical about Kuznetsova’s analysis of her research, and its methodology.
“We think the study was very subjective, since the perception of the president’s activities depends on the region and the political views of every individual,” Romaniuk said. “Some of his decisions would be perceived differently in eastern or western Ukraine. Also I believe most TV channels generally cover the president’s official meetings and visits just because this is the nature of his position. In order to speak about self-censorship on TV, one has to analyze content and journalistic work, not just the coverage of ceremonial events.”
Television channels remain an influential element in Ukrainian politics because 83 percent of the population relies on TV as their primary source of information, according to a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2014.
Favoring official sources
In June, the Academy of the Ukrainian Press conducted a content analysis of prime-time news bulletins on seven channels, including the four covered by Kuznetsova’s research. The results indicated an imbalance of coverage in favor of official sources and the ruling authorities. Again, the academy found that over the last two years most attention in TV news was devoted to Poroshenko, with 10 percent of news airtime devoted to the president’s activities – more than any other government official.
With Ukraine having had a history of television news being biased in favor of certain politicians or oligarchs, and the interests of business and government still being tightly intertwined, some fear that journalists are again being pressured to produce coverage that is favorable to both channel owners and their political masters.
Challenging place
And over the past two years, Ukraine has been a challenging place to work for journalists. Although a 2016 report by U.S. democracy think tank Freedom House noted that, compared to 2014, the situation with media freedom in Ukraine has improved, journalists continue to face obstacles to reporting freely, particularly in the context of the current tensions with Russia. A recent incident – an arson attack on the Inter TV channel’s news studio – highlights the pressures facing many journalists over coverage of Russia, with Inter being viewed by some in the public as overtly pro-Russian. And according to the Institute of Mass Information, in the first six months of 2016 the General Prosecutor’s Office registered 113 criminal offences committed against journalists.
No criticism
Natalia Ligacheva, the head of the Kyiv-based media watchdog Detector Media, confirmed that the tendency to “either speak well, or say nothing” when it comes to reporting on the president’s activities has long been a characteristic of central Ukrainian TV channels.
“The president has always been the only official figure who receives the least criticism on TV,” Ligacheva told the Kyiv Post. “But I don’t think this is the result of direct pressure from the president and his administration on the news editors.”
Rather, Ligacheva said, the reason for self-censorship might be a decision by news editors not to worsen the situation through negative reporting at a time of war. “It’s important to mention that as Ukraine is going through difficult times, there must be at least one government institution that retains the public’s trust,” said Ligacheva. “Perhaps, TV news editors feel responsibility for this.”
Still unpopular
The positive coverage hasn’t boosted the president’s poll numbers. According to a survey conducted in late August by the Social Monitoring Center and a sociology institute of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences, only 12.5 percent of voters would vote for Poroshenko at the next presidential elections. Poroshenko won in the first round of the presidential election in Ukraine on May 25, 2014 with 54.7 percent of the vote.
However, Poroshenko is still the most popular possible candidate for the next head of state. Batkivshyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko is second, with 9.9 percent.
