Politicians in Ukraine have been trying to silence the Kyiv Post almost from the day it started publishing on Oct. 18, 1995.
The reason is simple: Kyiv Post journalists, unlike most others in Ukraine, have enjoyed editorial independence under its two publishers, American founder Jed Sunden, who owned the newspaper from 1995 to 2009, and British businessman Mohammad Zahoor, who owned it for the last nine years, until March 21.
Editorial independence means that publishers don’t interfere with journalists’ decisions on how to cover the news. Sunden and Zahoor also gave us free reign in opinions.
Both Sunden and Zahoor insisted on fairness, accuracy and high ethical standards while defending our free speech every day, sometimes in the face of tremendous pressure.
Will our third owner, Odesa businessman Adnan Kivan, continue the tradition?
We don’t know. We have yet to sit down with Kivan and speak with him about his plans for the newspaper and its 40-member staff. But in a brief telephone conversation on March 22, he sounded encouraging and not in a hurry to make big changes.
The smartest thing he could do is to keep this fantastic team in place.
Our mission — holding those in power accountable — is what a free press does in democracies, as Ukraine aspires to be. We take the job seriously — maybe too seriously for those who want us to lighten up and find more inspirational stories to tell.
We take a hard stance against authoritarianism and corruption out of deep love for the country. We are still optimistic that this nation can and must be a fairer and more prosperous society.
Our integrity is why a community of readers, subscribers, donors and advertisers have supported us financially since 1995.
Kivan presumably knows all this, which is why he was willing to pay at least $3.5 million to own the Kyiv Post. The people are the asset — so replacing us or turning us into another politician’s propaganda tool will make the Kyiv Post worthless. The public’s trust will be gone. Advertisers and subscribers won’t support a PR rag.
Pressure on Kyiv Post
Let’s run down a short history that highlights the ways in which the Kyiv Post’s coverage has irritated the powers that be:
In tape recordings released by his former bodyguard, ex-President Leonid Kuchma and tax service head Mykola Azarov (later prime minister, now in exile on corruption charges) talked in 2000 about tax raids on the Kyiv Post to intimidate and harass the newspaper.
In 2011, ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s agricultural minister, Mykola Prysyazhnyuk, pressured Zahoor into trying to stop publication of an interview that implicated the minister in corruption involving the grain trade. Both Yanukovych and Prysyazhnyuk are abroad today, fleeing corruption charges.
Also in 2011, billionaire oligarch Dmytro Firtash lost his libel lawsuit in a British court against the Kyiv Post for a 2010 article about corruption in the natural gas trade. Firtash is also in exile, fighting U.S. corruption charges from Vienna, Austria.
And then, over the years, Zahoor has been approached by various politicians or their fronts to buy the Kyiv Post, ostensibly to silence this bastion of free speech. The offers came from Firtash, Yanukovych bag man Sergei Kurchenko (also in exile) and people who say they represent President Petro Poroshenko. To his credit, Zahoor has refused all these offers and insisted that the next owner keeps the newspaper alive and independent.
Many questions
But now we have more questions than answers.
I was the chief editor during the Kyiv Post’s first sale from Sunden to Zahoor in 2009, which was also the first year that the newspaper experienced financial losses. From 1995 to 2009, the Kyiv Post was wildly profitable, so flush with cash that Sunden started numerous other publications under his KP Media holding company before he sold the business in 2011 and cashed out as a multimillionaire.
Before the 2009 sale, Zahoor sent his representative, Jim Phillipoff, to meet with me and other top editors to tell us that Zahoor insisted on keeping the existing editorial team in place.
Zahoor also, in his first interview with us, pledged a policy of editorial independence and non-interference with our news judgment. He has kept his word. The only exception, a well-publicized one, was the 2011 flap that led to my five-day firing and a staff strike on April 15, 2011, for defying Zahoor’s order not to publish the Prysyazhnyuk interview. But we quickly resolved our dispute and our relationship has been almost conflict-free since then. Although I was fired a second time on May 1, 2013, amid cost-cutting moves, Zahoor rehired me four months later.
As for the Kyiv Post’s future under Kivan, the new owner is not making any commitments to the current staff. In our brief telephone conversation on March 22, he was feeling under the weather and we agreed to meet in Odesa, where he lives, when he feels better. He said he supports freedom of speech, democracy and strong stands against corruption. Syria is his passion — and he wants more coverage of the Syrian civil war and the brutality of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
Zahoor believes Kivan means what he says about protecting our editorial independence and wants a smooth transition.
We’ve been blessed for the last decade. Zahoor has given us a free hand to run a great newspaper. And we did it with his money! Zahoor’s generosity amounted to $5 million spent during his ownership. During this time, the nation suffered two recessions, a revolution and now Russia’s war.
The community owes Zahoor a big debt of gratitude for not abandoning the Kyiv Post and our mission. He’s a hero of the free press. From quite some time, I have known that Zahoor felt that he had given enough and was searching for the right buyer — someone who would meet his two conditions of keeping the Kyiv Post alive and independent. He says he found that person in Kivan and I want to believe this.
Reasons for pride
But if this turns out to be one of my last columns as chief editor, I’d like to recount all the reasons for my pride in the Kyiv Post.
Our journalism is tough, ethical, fair, accurate and top-notch. We tried to do our jobs without fear or favor.
We’ve been a journalism school for some of the top professionals still working in the business today.
Our crowning achievement, perhaps, came in 2014, when our coverage of the EuroMaidan Revolution that ended Yanukovych’s presidency and the start of Russia’s war earned us the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, a prestigious award from one of America’s top journalism schools. I still love reading the inscription on the plaque in our front lobby: “In recognition of courageous and determined professional reporting on behalf of democracy in the face of great personal risk.”
Commercially viable
We’ve gained plenty of enemies over the years with our critical coverage. But anybody who thinks that Ukraine will be better off or less corrupt without the Kyiv Post’s strong voice is mistaken. The public will simply know less about what is going wrong and how to make it right, especially the 75 percent of our audience that reads us from abroad.
Also, despite the financial challenges, I take pride in the fact that our revenues cover 75 percent of expenses — more than any other news outlet in Ukraine, to my knowledge, where the same five oligarchs heavily subsidize and politically control the major media.
I can promise one thing: If anybody seeks to muzzle our voice, you’ll hear about it.
It’s been a dream life with a dream job for an outstanding owner who became a champion of great journalism. I just hope it’s not over, for me or the independent Kyiv Post.
