I am a journalist who, as it happens, has worked almost exclusively for foreign media and the local English-language press.
And the more I do, the less I am willing to consider working for the Ukrainian press, either now or later.
It is not only an issue of money, although it is true that few newspaper journalists in Kyiv make more than $400 a month.
What has happened recently to many Russian newspapers explains what I am talking about.
Just two months ago, a young journalist with little or no relevant experience, recruited by one of the well-known and popular papers in Moscow, could count on a salary as high as $2,000 per month. Now that Russia is going through a serious financial crisis, many newspapers in Moscow have suddenly become poorer. This is not so much because the papers themselves are having economic problems.
Many of the papers’ owners, who paid such high salaries in order to make their papers obedient, can simply no longer afford such expensive toys.
I have seen the situation in Ukraine’s print media enough to make certain judgements. And in my opinion, there are no Ukrainian- or Russian-language newspapers published in Kyiv whose primary strategy is to write objectively.
The Kyiv Post, I believe, has such a strategy. But that would be much harder were the paper not published in English, or had it decided to put out a Ukrainian-language or Russian-language edition.
The reason is simple: too few Ukrainians can read in English, and so any attempts to win voters’ sympathy through such a paper would be inefficient.
That is why, as far as I know, no one with ambitions to rule this country has so far approached the Post with an offer to cooperate.
Setting up a new newspaper or buying an existing one is regarded as a relatively cheap way to win votes. With only a year left before the next presidential election, we can expect that very soon a number of newspapers will either disappear or adopt completely different editorial practices, while some new major dailies will appear.
It’s very easy to determine how the existing papers find ways to make ends meet or, to put it another way, on whose money they are surviving.
Some find a pretext to print a picture of the incumbent president in every issue, even if the picture adds nothing to the story it goes with, and even if the story itself could only interest those who find comfort in boredom.
Others regularly publish stories about the success of a certain large Ukrainian gas company, and others still have front-page articles about a particular candidate in the 1999 presidential race too often for anyone to fail to notice the tendency.
Those who refuse to comply with outside pressure are ordered by courts either to suspend publication or to pay a few million dollars in ‘moral damages’ to someone.
One very popular daily had to close down last spring after allegedly damaging the reputation of a well-known businessman and politician.
Another weekly, widely believed to have been linked to a former prime minister now in opposition to the president, had its bank accounts arrested.
Still another daily, which allegedly slandered the interior minister, is barely surviving and is having to urgently replace its fleeing staff with young writers who graduated from university just a few months ago.
Some newspapers will sink so low for money they will blindly commend someone who they just got done blasting.
One Kyiv daily recently wrote a sharply critical article about the French construction materials giant Lafarge, accusing the company of ignoring Ukraine’s legislation and trying to gain control over the country’s cement industry. Just a month later, the same newspaper published a page-long story about how good Lafarge is and how greatly Ukraine would benefit if the company chose to invest in the country. The latter story, however, became possible only after the French company took a team of Ukrainian journalists to its plants in Eastern Europe, of course, free of charge.
Even the so-called opposition media manifests itself in a peculiar form in Ukraine.
If a newspaper regularly criticizes the government, one can not immediately conclude that it is in opposition to those who rule this country.
Similar to Russia, the degree of criticism that newspapers are allowed is to a certain extent determined by those who are criticized.
It is rather sad, but true. What’s worse, journalists here seem to get used to the fact that one is not supposed to report what one sees and hears, but to interpret it in a way that would satisfy one’s sponsors.
In such a situation, one can freely proclaim, as it is proclaimed in the constitution, that there is no political censorship in Ukraine. There is simply no need for such censorship for those with enough money to pay for whatever they want to have written about themselves.
I am far from imagining that there is a country in the world where one can enjoy absolute freedom of expression.
But if someone were to come up with practical criteria to rank countries according to the extent they maintain freedom of speech, Ukraine would be very far from the top. And the closer the country gets to the next election, the further down it moves on that list.
Volodymyr Zolotnycky is a journalist based in Kyiv who regularly contributes to the Kyiv Post.
