You're reading: News mixes with paid PR in media

Corruption replaces censorship.

A week before the fateful 2004 presidential vote, a group of journalists from one of Ukraine’s most prominent television channels, 1+1, lost their patience – and their jobs. In a joint statement on Oct. 28, 2004, they quit because “all their attempts to denounce censorship have failed.”

Natalka Fitsych was among the seven news journalists who resigned in protest. She said she had enough because she could not stop the so-called “temnyky” – instructions from the administration of ex-President Leonid Kuchma dictating how news should be covered.

“My daughter was only four years old, and I had a family to look after,” Fitsych recalled. “But I made this choice because I felt responsible for the news reaching out to millions of people.”

Five years later, freedom of speech is flagged as one of the major – if not the biggest – accomplishment of the President Victor Yushchenko’s term in office.

But does this mean that people are tuning into balanced TV news broadcasts every day and reading tough, critical investigative articles in their newspapers? Hardly, say media experts.

Instead, censorship has been replaced with outright corruption to influence the public.

“We had imperatives from authorities before, now we have bribes,” said Roman Golovenko, a media lawyer from the Institute of Mass Information. “In 2004, we had ‘temnyky’ and only one candidate covered. Now we have pluralism but it has its price tag.”

Trying to decipher the amount of paid advertising, self-censorship and implicit PR conveyed by journalists is difficult. Money rules.

“It is called ‘equality of corruption opportunities’: the one who pays more will get more,” said Natalia Ligacheva, chief editor of Telekritika, the media watchdog magazine. “Journalists are not for sale. Usually there is a special contract for the coverage of the whole election campaign with the top management, which specifies the frequency of reports and articles. On average, it can be a million-dollar contract, which is paid for legally and transparently.”

There are two types of political advertising: one that is clearly marked as PR and paid for, and the other that is also paid for, but masked as “news.” This type of paid-for news is called “dzhinsa” in the industry.

The Institute of Mass Information has been monitoring the four most popular print publications: the dailies Fakty, Segodnya and Economicheskie Izvestia and magazine Korrespondent for “dzhinsa” content.

Tabloid Fakty, in billionaire Victor Pinchuk’s media portfolio, made it on the black list, according to executive director Victoria Sumar. They had more than 60 articles over October and November, violating professional and ethical standards of fair journalism.

“Generally, Yulia Tymoshenko is a leader of these pre-ordered stories, then Victor Yanukovych,” Sumar said. “They have become more active in the last weeks of campaign.”

The stakes are especially high for Yanukovych and Tymoshenko, as they are tipped to be the two presidential candidates – out of a field of 18 contenders – to be dueling in the runoff round of the election if neither gets 50 percent of the vote on Jan. 17.

Favorable “news” comes with a price tag.

“On average, an article in print costs between $1,000 and $2,000, depending on the circulation,” Sumar said. “A posting on the Internet will cost $200 – $300.”

Telekritika’s Ligacheva blames Ukraine’s pairing up of politics and business for sullying the media.

“We have laws, national TV and radio Council law-enforcement bodies. They can all check if the money paid for advertising campaign matches up to the number of messages marked as ads,” Ligacheva said. “It’s easy to check but no one’s doing it because it’s not in their interests.”

Telekritika teamed up with Internews non-governmental organization to monitor the output of nine major television stations for both clearly labeled paid advertisements and PR in disguise.

ICTV and Inter channels broadcast the largest number of both paid advertisements and PR-in-disguise material, according to their findings.

Tymoshenko and Yanukovych are big advertisers – congesting the airwaves with seven minutes per hour each. By comparison, Sergiy Tigipko and Arseniy Yatseniuk got half the air time.

The nine TV channels surveyed made Hr 138 million for the Dec. 21 through Jan. 3 period.

Lawyer Golovenko thinks that journalists also share the blame with politicians and businesspeople for distorted news coverage.

“It seems that journalists are not really keen to see where the line is between PR and news,” Golovenko said. “They prefer to follow information tips, accusations and gossip from politicians without adding value to my life and development of the society.”

Former 1+1 political reporter Fitsych agrees that the quality of news journalism has declined.

“Censorship used to be rough and gross [in 2004.] We achieved what we fought for. There’re no more orders from above, rewriting of scripts, and convolution of all news,” Fitsych said. “However, the censorship we have right now is the other side of the coin, when journalists are made to report on certain events in preference to others.”

Fitsych, as well as most other journalists from the rebellious seven, stayed in journalism. Some even returned to 1+1.

Expert Sumar said she did not expect a repeat of 2004’s wave of protests in journalism ranks.

“Demoralization is the worst,” Sumar said. “As one of my friends put it, I want for the censorship to get back because then we knew what we were fighting against.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].