Editors at Ukraine's UNIAN news agency say they are being censored and pressured by their superiors to soften news coverage of Ukraine's political leadership, marking the latest controversy in the nation’s deteriorating free-speech climate since President Viktor Yanukovych took office in 2010.
Six editors
at UNIAN wrote an open protest letter to the agency’s top manager Vadym
Osadchy, accusing him of allegedly applying pressure to censor and tone down
their coverage of Ukraine’s leadership and to accept paid-for stories about
other Ukrainian politicians ahead of the Oct. 28 parliamentary elections.
The
agency’s management denies the accusations while Ihor Kolomoysky, the Ukrainian
billionaire who owns the agency, did not immediately respond to emailed
questions.
Osadchy
said that under his supervision the agency aims for the highest journalistic
standards of fair coverage and accused the protesting staff of being biased
themselves.
“Some
employees, maintaining confidence in their right to influence the objectivity
of the coverage of news, perceived the attempts to make UNIAN’s information
products neutral (…) as censorship or practice of speech freedom infringement,”
Osadchy told Telekritika, the media watchdog news website, in response to the
allegations.
UNIAN
editors wrote a joint op-ed describing in detail how the agency’s managers
directed political coverage. If the allegations are true, they reveal bias and
selective news coverage at one of Ukrainian top news agencies.
UNIAN’s new
management arrived in May. Shortly after longtime chief editor Oleksandr
Kharchenko was fired for the agency’s poor revenue performance.
“After
Osadchy’s appointment (as UNIAN’s general manager), there was a lot of
discussion about what not to write about, that there is too much critical
coverage,”
Kharchenko said, following his firing.
In the last
two years Washington-based Freedom House human rights watchdog downgraded
Ukraine’s media freedom climate in its ranking from “free” to “partly free.”
During that time, a number of other Ukrainian media have undergone management
changes and, as a result, shifted from hard-hitting and balanced news coverage
to more entertainment and tabloid-like stories. TVi, known for investigative
journalism, has been eliminated from some cable television plans or switched to
more expensive premium-subscription plans, cutting their audience.
Moreover,
most of the nation’s news media outlets are owned by five wealthy men in or
close to the government, including Kolomoysky, member of parliament Rinat
Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Deputy Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky and
Economy Minister Petro Poroshenko.
Valentyna
Romanenko, one of the UNIAN website editors who co-authored the op-ed alleging
censorship, told the Kyiv Post that the misunderstandings with the agency’s new
management started when they were appointed, but intensified closer to election
day.
Viktoria
Siumar, head of Kyiv’s Institute of Mass Information,
said that UNIAN’s new management was oriented toward making more profit by the
agency by running paid-for-stories. Osadchy denied the allegation and said that with the arrival of the new management at UNIAN, the agency dropped running such stories.
Last week, six
UNIAN editors posted several screen shots of emails and instant messenger
conversations with Mykola Kondratenko, head of Internet projects at the agency,
who allegedly directly told the editors what to cover and how.
They said
that a number of news stories in which Yanukovych, his ruling Party of Regions
and Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko come out in a bad light were removed
from the website, allegedly under management’s directives.
In one of
the screenshots, the dialogue on an instant messenger with an editor
Kondratenko wrote to “forget about Yanukovych in a negative light at all” and
added that “there is hysteria here again – Osadchy got a phone call.” In that
discussion he also allegedly threatened to fine people who would not obey by
this rule.
Kondratenko
did not respond to emailed questions.
The
protesting staff at UNIAN says there was a ban on stories about the opposition,
particularly news regarding some opposition candidates who ran for parliament
in single-mandate constituencies in Kyiv.
“They said
they wanted to have all opinions in our news stories, but then everyone could
have noticed that there is no second opinion and the news (on the UNIAN
website) is not balanced,” said UNIAN’s Romanenko.
Osadchy says there are no bans on storied about opposition politicians and denied any pressure from the authorities to done down their coverage.
The
agency’s management fined two editors Hr 200 ($25) each for, as they explain,
running a news story about an anti-Yanukovych protest that took place near the
Presidential Administration on Oct. 26. According to the agency’s management, the editors were fined because they violated the procedure of approving the story and its headline with a chief editor before running it and has nothing to do with Yanukovych.
Siumar does
not think that UNIAN was pressured by the authorities to soften their coverage
of the government and the president. “It was self-censorship by managers or
owners who were apparently afraid of (provoking) the anger of the country’s
political leadership,” she explained.
Romanenko
says the staff simply “demands to be able to work normally, that is being
unbiased” in its news coverage. She also says their superiors are not
discussing anything with them right now. “Probably they just want to wait out
until the censorship scandal fades away after some time,” she added, saying she
and her colleagues are not sure what to do if the pressure to be pro-government
remains.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be
reached at [email protected]
