Media watchdogs launched an initiative on March 24 to monitor Ukraine’s prime time television news programs of paid-for news, otherwise known as “jeansa.”
As much as 100 percent of the political reports on certain television news networks during the second round of the 2006
parliamentary elections were “jeansa,” said Otar Dovzhenko, the vice editorinchief of Telekrytyka, an Internet publication covering Ukraine’s media.
“Jeansa is slang for corruption in the media,” he said, or reporters getting paid to report prejudiced or unbalanced stories that are a careful mix of fact and opinion.
The term is derived from the jeans that Ukrainians journalists like to wear.
Media watchdogs launched a new initiative on March 24 to monitor incidents and provide statistics on paidfor content in Ukraine’s prime time television news programs on national networks.
The Equality of Opportunities committee, a media watchdog established in 1994, launched the initiative and will present their results to the public later in the year.
“It differs from all the previous anti[corruption] journalism projects because we just want to show people real numbers on how much information of that kind we have, so they can better orient themselves to what they watch and what decisions they make under its influence,” said Oleksandr Chekmyshev, chief of the Equality of Opportunities committee and head of the new initiative.
Despite efforts by journalists and media organizations to raise awareness of the practice since it was first witnessed after the 2004 Orange Revolution, paidfor journalism can still be seen in all news reporting media in Ukraine today, watchdogs said.
Jeansa “has become the main problem that threatens the profession of journalism as it is, turning the process of informing society into a process of social opinion manipulation,” Chekmyshev said.
Prices for jeansa vary from $500 per minute in business news programs at thirdrate channels to $10,000 per minute for prime time news at firstrate channels, according to Telekrytyka.
Meanwhile, to be a guest star on a program has its own price tag.
Networks are charging star politicians $50,000 to $80,000 to be invited on top television programs, according to Telekrytyka.
In some scenarios, a politician participates in a talk show, and a journalist asks him sharp questions, which the lawmaker answers with great success, Chekmyshev said.
At the end, the audience concludes that the journalist is brave for broaching such controversial issues, while the politician is praised for his intelligent answers.
“But this is something like an opera, as both the journalist and the politician just read responses from a teleprompter,” Chekmyshev said.
Schemes used to buy jeansa have changed as its presence has increased on Ukraine’s media market, experts said.
Now it is possible to “buy” a channel, an editor, or even a journalist, although the last option now has more consequences than it did several years ago.
Everything has to pass through the media’s management level, said freelance journalist Ihor Chaika, the author of a series of documentary films about jeansa in the Ukrainian media.
“Jeansa went beyond the level of journalists a long time ago,” said Viktoria Siumar, director of the Institute of Mass Information, a nongovernmental organization that monitors media freedom.
“Nowadays, there are special people, special price lists for this, and it’s not a secret anymore.”
Jeansa is practiced beyond Ukraine, but to a lesser extent, Dovzhenko said.
However, reporters abroad would face consequences if caught.
“The worst is when topmanagers say, ‘We don’t care about the media content,’ so no one cares about media product quality,” Chekmyshev said.
