The arrival of Viktor Yanukovych as president in February 2010 had almost no effect on the development of printed and electronic media in Ukraine. Just as in the past, they continue to sing along to their owners’ political tune and remain politically biased in favor of certain parties and financial and industrial groups. Owning a channel is not about making money from it directly, but achieving political goals. Media managers feel it is more important not to lose sponsor money than create genuinely marketable and high quality informational product.
Those newspapers, Internet sites and television channels that aligned themselves with the previous authorities are now suffering from a lack of competitive informational product and stable audiences. Something tells me that the top media managers have long been feeling ashamed at this situation, and the humiliation it brings, and are now subconsciously ready to start creating quality informational product, be it for the entertainment or educational purposes, that would sell well on the domestic market.
If you are a politician and you don’t affiliate yourself with any political party or financial or industrial group, access to the airwaves are pretty much restricted. Perhaps the only way to make your point to the public is to pay for publications, or as journalists call it – to get yourself some paid news. Quite often sums involved are really exorbitant — we are talking thousands of dollars for a single fairly small publication that doesn’t intend to blacken anyone’s name — but rather to assess and make recommendations on pressing social issues, for example.
There are opportunities in the Internet age to make your voice heard: blogs on certain portals and a personal web-page.
But on the whole the situation is unacceptable. Media should be a discussion forum that supports debate over issues of importance for citizens and the nation as a whole. Such debate is impossible unless there are several alternative views on a particular social or political problem. This is the way that consensus is born. There’s something in it for the media owners, too – interesting, professional discussion turns the product into something that people want to watch and is therefore marketable.
The West has consistently criticized the authorities for backtracking from principles of democracy, but it is slowly losing leverage over the political leadership of the country through the informational and expert environment.
Announcements of cuts in several BBC language services, including Ukrainian, served as a signal for a number of political regimes that gravitate towards authoritarianism. Ukraine is no exception. Declining international informational monitoring of the situation inside Ukraine leads to an ever-growing permissiveness of authorities. Such actions, obviously, don’t serve the interest of the West, which is very concerned with democratic recessions in Ukraine, nor of the people of Ukraine, who suffer from repressive actions by the authorities, nor of the opposition, which continues to rely on the West’s support for maintaining a level, democratic playing field.
The reason for the cuts is trivial: The U.K. government is trying to save on budget costs, including radio broadcasting. However, these trivial cuts of BBC language services will result in far more serious geopolitical consequences that the West would find much more challenging and expensive to fix. At the very least, this holds true for Ukraine.
One way to improve the current situation would be to encourage European and American publications and news agencies to establish or, in many cases, reestablish offices here.
These would not only help tell the world about what is happening in Ukraine, but also stimulate local media towards delivering high quality domestic product, and better integrate Ukraine into global processes.
Oleh Lyashko is a lawmaker in Ukraine’s parliament.
