On June 20, it was announced that 27-year-old Serhiy Kurchenko bought UMH. Media reports, including Forbes Ukraine which he now owns, have often referred to him as being a front for a group of individuals close to Oleksandr Yanukovych, the elder son of President Viktor Yanukovych.
On this day, Ukraine’s media world was turned on its head.
Most likely, in the next few months we will see the last big independent publications disappear, together with any hopes of resuscitating Ukraine’s media market. The editors and journalists we still like will continue to conscientiously fulfill their duties, but they will look like the musicians on the sinking Titanic. In their tuxedos and bow ties they will stoically face the end.
Don’t expect a miracle. The redistribution of the media market was the result of a silent (or even active) agreement with the public. News that entertains? Excellent! Lies instead of investigations? Bring them on! Primetime celebrities with secret instructions from their boss under the guise of truth-seekers? Sure!
There is no need to rescue the existing media market. There is no need to help it anymore. There is no need to even train journalists for it, regardless of how good the training is. The milestones of media owners can grind even the strongest of young spines.
In the short term, Ukrainians will have learn to do without the Ukrainian media – or those whose editorial policy is set in Ukraine – because they are poisonous. Where possible, the public will have to migrate into the higher quality foreign information spaces, and find other ways to stay informed.
Today, Facebook is our public television, and the bobtailed Ukrainian site of the BBC will have to become our nourishing meal – like those military biscuits distributed in natural disaster zones that allow you to stay alive and stave off starvation.
In the mid to long-term perspective, we have to understand that the existence of a healthy society is impossible without independent and professional media. That’s why staying without proper media in the longer term is disastrous for the nation. The general degradation, caused by a worsening education system, will speed up because of the absence of social reflection and debate that typically comes with a healthy media.
Instead of preparing journalists for the ritual sacrifices to dragon owners, we should be preparing citizens to become insightful and learn to differentiate between truth and likelihood, between scrutiny and skepticism. Media literacy, or the ability to distinguish between what you can consume and what is going to be poisonous, becomes a skill necessary for the survival of people of any professions, conditions and classes, ethnicities and religious convictions.
A handful of journalists who are left adrift should be given management tools which will help them to become managers and businessmen if they’re willing to be retrained. A modern, non-oligarchic business can do it – and this is something that is much more valuable than money.
New journalists should be trained to face the uncertainty and risks of true pioneers. They will have to know that there will be more poorly paid martyrs among them than rich stars. The job of the journalist has to be de-glamorized.
It’s time to start thinking how an embryonic new market can be spawned. It will be born as soon as the first rays of the sun turn the new monster into a heap of ashes. If that new market is not created, the respite will be short, and will only last until the next sunset.
Yevhen Hlibovytsky is a partner of Pro.mova, a strategy and communications consulting company, and a former journalist.
