Those of us getting our news online don’t care much about what’s on TV. I know I didn’t.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, what’s on TV has a major impact on everyone else’s lives. We can smirk all we want at our compatriots who spend their every evening glued to some channel that we discard as stupid, but we better take interest into what they are seeing there.
Because with the presidential and parliamentary elections coming in 2019, what Ukrainians were told on TV for the past five years will decide how they vote. And with TV remaining the main news source for the majority of the population of 42 million people, how the TV audience votes is how Ukraine votes.
So I decided to familiarize myself with what Ukrainians watch on TV, particularly in news and current affairs segment. I didn’t have high expectations, but what I saw left me aghast.
I decided to begin with probably the most odious and talked-about Ukrainian TV channel nowadays, NewsOne.
A relative newcomer to the Ukrainian TV stage, NewsOne was founded in 2010 but came to prominence in 2015 and has since climbed up to the bottom lines of the top 10 ratings of most-watched stations. With an average rating of 2 percent of the audience, it is still far away from the five moguls (Rinat Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoisky, Petro Poroshenko, Dmytro Firtash) who have long dominated the Ukrainian TV market through ownership of Ukraina, Inter, 1+1, ICTV, Novy and STB. But it’s ahead of other news stations like Espresso or Channel 5.
It is officially owned by a lawmaker Yevhen Murayev, formerly a member of the ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and it’s post-EuroMaidan Revolution successor, Opposition Bloc. Today Murayev is an independent lawmaker and a member of Za Zhyttya (For Life), a populist new party headed by a populist politician and TV persona Vadim Rabinovich.
But rumors link NewsOne to Viktor Medvedchuk, the notoriously pro-Russian political heavyweight who is most famous for being a personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian dictator, who even served as the godfather for Medvedchuk’s daughter, has his interests in Ukraine taken care of by Medvedchuk.
In June, NewsOne got into a scandal when its owner Murayev said that Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker imprisoned in Russia on bogus terrorism charges, is viewed by half of the people as a terrorist, and by another, “nationalist” half, as a hero. He added that “time will tell who was right.”
A number of Ukrainian activists, experts and politicians proclaimed they were to boycott NewsOne from now on in protest of this false and clearly pro-Russian statement, and would decline the channel’s invitations to go on air.
And even before that, in 2017, the channel was picketed for about a week by activists who claimed it shared pro-Russian views.
So I sat down on a Monday night and watched all of its prime-time programming, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
The Monday that I tuned in happened to be the day of the Helsinki summit, July 16, when U.S. President Donald Trump met with Putin and famously barely mentioned Ukraine in their post-meeting briefing. (Ukraine would get more attention in the following days, when the rumor started that Putin suggested to hold a separatist referendum in the part of Ukraine’s east occupied by Russians and their proxy militants, and Trump allegedly agreed).
The summit dominated the coverage, with the host and guests of every show discussing it. However, it quickly became clear that the summit was just a pretext, a conversation starter, because most of the studio guests had nothing to do with foreign policy and knew next to nothing about the U.S.-Russian affairs.
Instead, they were Ukrainian politicians, former and current members of parliament, who were on air to push their own agenda.
This is how it works. Several news shows follow each other throughout the night, each taking from one to two hours. Each one includes a host and one guest. They sit next to each other and discuss the current affairs. Looks normal so far, right?
But something stands out. First, the hosts aren’t journalists talking to their guests in a journalistic manner. Instead, the hosts here are merely assistants helping the high guests put their message through.
The night started with Oleksandr Moroz, the former head of the Socialist Party, who hasn’t been active in politics in the recent years. When asked to comment on the Helsinki summit, he mumbled something irrelevant before finally proclaiming that “Ukraine is being secretly governed from abroad” – a statement popular among pro-Russian politicians who criticize Ukraine for falling into dependence from the West and taking loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Moroz was boring and irrelevant, but the next guest of the night made me miss him. I had to work my memory muscles to recognize Yevhen Chervonenko, a former lawmaker who briefly governed Zaporizhia Oblast and had a short run as the minister of transport in the government of Yulia Tymoshenko in 2005.
The host, Tigran Martyrosyan, served almost as an object of furniture to Chervonenko, who was speaking unstopped and emotionally for the whole time of the show.
He said that Ukraine needs to be neutral (meaning, not ally with the West), praised the Russia-hosted UEFA football championship, and referred to Trump and Putin as “two presidents of the great countries.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise to those who remember Chervonenko’s reaction when he failed a competition for the governor of Odesa Oblast in 2016.
“Let this country burn! I’ll find where to make money,” he was filmed saying.
It’s hard to imagine an American politician – even with all the strangeness of the current U.S. politics – to be caught wishing America to burn and less than two years later appearing on TV like nothing happened. But it’s Ukraine, where everything is possible.
Chervonenko is one of NewsOne’s biggest stars. He is invited on air to talk about everything – from international affairs to the heavy rain in Kyiv. He rages about the current government and sometimes throws in something subtly pro-Russian.
Rumor has it, Chervonenko or someone sponsoring him pays for his TV time – and the price named is $10,000 for each hour-long appearance. There was never any proof of this rumor, but Chervonenko, who hasn’t held an official position or a parliament seat for many years, continues appearing on NewsOne nearly every night.
The practice of paying to get on TV is notoriously widespread in Ukraine. In March, the Institute of Mass Information published a price list sent out by the sales staff at Channel 112, another news station similar to NewsOne in content and ratings. To be a guest in the studio and be interviewed for up to 15 minutes cost Hr 70,000 if it aired in the afternoon. To pose as an expert and give a five-minute comment is Hr 54,000.
On the night I was watching NewsOne, the emotional Chervonenko was followed by a much more boring Oleksandra Kuzhel, a lawmaker with Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party, which has 20 seats in parliament. It was boring but worth it – because after making it through Kuzhel I was rewarded with the two-hour show of Vyacheslav Pikhovshek, appropriately called “The Subjective Takeaways from the Day.”
Pikhovshek was once an acclaimed Ukrainian journalist but with time his name became synonymous with sellout. Known for his support of the regime of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, now Pikhovshek appears to be working for Medvedchuk, judging from his show on NewsOne.
Pikhovshek hosts an evening program that masks as a news show but in facts includes just himself reading the news and commenting on them – that is, interpreting them the way that matches his agenda. Judging from his show, his agenda is anti-EuroMaidan (it was an unlawful coup that overthrew Yanukovych, the legally-elected president, he says), anti-government (they just want the war to go on), and in favor of improving relations with Russia.
Throughout the show Pikhovshek kept referring to the current government as “the party of war” – the expression used by Medvedchuk. To counter them, he said there is “the party of peace” – but whether he meant the Opposition Bloc or Medvechuk’s own Ukrainian Choice, was hard to say.
In the middle of his show, he suddenly read today’s statement by Medvedchuk, without commenting on it.
When one caller (all the shows take phone calls from the audience), asked something like “How we can end this misery?”, Pikhovshek shamelessly switched to direct propaganda, saying “first of all, we shouldn’t give them (i.e. the parties of Poroshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front) a single vote in the upcoming elections.”
Not your regular news show host.
It was almost a relief to see a regular news program at 11 p.m. However, it lasted only 15 minutes and included a promo piece about Za Zhyttya, the party of Rabinovich and NewsOne’s owner Murayev, launching a free bus for retirees in a city in central Ukraine. Needless to say, it wasn’t marked as advertising or sponsored content.
Then the night was back to Pikhovshek and his interpretations of news.
In a recent interview with Ukrainska Pravda, lawmaker and head of the parliament’s committee for free speech Viktoria Siumar raised concerns that Medvedchuk, a close friend of Putin, feels and acts so freely in Ukraine, adding that “he needs to be watched more closely.”
While Siumar, as a lawmaker with one of the ruling parties, the People’s Front, has her own reasons to stand against Medvedchuk, who calls her party “the party of war,” she is right to be concerned.
It is astonishing that today, when Russians have been killing Ukrainians on Ukrainian land for the last four years, a Ukrainian TV station would be so promiscuous in picking their guests and hosts (or in picking their paying clients, if rumors are true).
Still, NewsOne needs to be careful when allowing their pro-Russian guests speak – for openly pro-Russian statements the station can be sanctioned and lose its license. However, the fact that they didn’t lost it yet may prove that some under-the-table deal allows them to continue, or that the people standing behind it are too powerful for the authorities to go against.
On the night I was watching it, NewsOne’s approach to the pro-Russian statements made on-air was well demonstrated in the little episode that took place during the prime-time one-man show of Chervonenko, with the host Martyrosyan as his sidekick.
A woman called the studio, saying she was from Kremenchug, a city in Poltava Oblast, and a big fan of NewsOne. She wanted to speak about the Trump-Putin summit but quickly derailed.
“It was very nice to watch a great president like Putin,” the woman started, but the host changed in face and stopped her.
“Now now,” he said, “I have to ask our viewers to be more accurate with what they’re saying on air.”
As he was saying it, both the host and his guest giggled.
