At least a part of the print run of the weekly news magazine Focus disappeared from newsstands across the country after publishing a number of critical articles related to President Viktor Yanukovych.
Readers
complained that the magazine, which went to press on Friday, could
not be found in Kyiv, Odesa and other cities because it was called
back. Readers and journalists also said that electronic versions of
stories about Yanukovych disappeared from the magazine’s web site
shortly after publication. Deliveries to subscribers seem to have
gone unaffected, though.
The
stories that may have caused the troubles were infographics
illustrating three years of Yanukovych’s presidency and included
pictures showing dynamics in international rankings, prices of food,
promises he kept, and so on – most of it was not flattering for the
president.
One
of the stories illustrated how much the Ukrainian president costs the
taxpayers. The magazine discovered that more than Hr 1.2 billion
($150 million) is spent on Yanukovych annually and analyzed how the money could have been spent differently.
There
are conflicting accounts of events at Focus coming out of the
newsroom and the publishing house. Some journalists said that when
stories went online on Friday, the site was blocked for an hour, and
then stories disappeared. Several journalists, who spoke to the Kyiv
Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the
atmosphere in the newsroom is “tense” and some journalists are
considering quitting their jobs in protest to what they interpreted
as censorship.
But
chief editor of Focus Yana Moyseyenkova says
the stories in question never went online on Friday. “The stories
on Yanukovych were queued to be uploaded today, on the third
anniversary of his presidency on Feb. 25,” Moyseyenkova said. These
stories did start reappearing on the site on the same day.
Moyseyenkova said she was not in charge of print distribution, but said
magazines were available in some parts of Kyiv, in Dnipropetrovsk and
Brovary, and that a PDF version of the magazine will eventually be
posted on focus.ua for all to see.
Borys
Lozhkin, president of UMH Group, the publisher of Focus, couldn’t
be reached for comments over the phone. But his holding released a
statement saying that about 20 percent of Focus print run of 32,000
was recalled due to technical problems.
But
the journalistic community received the news of technical problems
with a lot of skepticism. Mustafa Nayyem, a journalist of Ukrainska
Pravda news website who was among the first to discover that Focus
was missing from sale in Kyiv, said that if the chief editor’s
account of the events was to be believed, it is hard to explain how
the stories in question appeared in Google’s cached pages over the weekend.
Nayyem posted their screen shots on his blog on Sunday.
Nayyem
also said it was suspicious that the management failed to react to
fears of censorship for a total of nine hours since the news about
Focus came out.
This
is not the first time that Focus magazine finds itself in similar
circumstances. In 2009, the magazine ran a cartoon featuring the then
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko having a sexual intercourse with the
then Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. The latter threatened with a lawsuit,
and most of the print run was taken out of circulation.
Another
Ukrainian magazine – Ukrainsky Tyzhden faced similar troubles in
2012 when it run a cartoon showing media owners Dmytro Firtash, Rinat
Akhmetov, Petro Poroshenko and Lozhkin in a humiliating attempt to
please the president by putting their media to his feet. Ukrainsky
Tyzhden then alleged that all the copies were bought out from
circulation at the request of Lozhkin’s UMH Group, an allegation he
denied.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]
