Good journalists around the world earn a living by seeking out scoops. Ukrainian journalists don’t have that problem. They look either for handouts from paymasters who want to publish dirt about their rivals or else for a foreign shoulder to cry on.
And sympathetic listeners beware: the local scribes and talking heads on the sleep-inducing boob tube sure know how to spin a tale.
There is no freedom of speech in Ukraine, they will tell you, because the media is controlled by powerful vested interests and persecuted by an authoritarian government. There is no fairness because a journalist who must feed a family cannot afford to turn down a fat payoff for a smear. There is no justice because killers of reporters don’t get punished.
All those complaints are true, and all of them miss a point.
he greatest enemies of free speech in Ukraine are the trimmers who are ostensibly paid to practice it. They have renounced their birthright by swallowing their courage and becoming bystanders in the fight for the chance to write as one pleases.
Fittingly, when the profession looks in the mirror, it can now see the boyish good looks of Oleksandr Tkachenko. Otherwise, it is not a pretty picture.
Tkachenko is perhaps this country’s best-known journalist. He produces Pislyamova, the most popular public affairs program on the country’s most popular network, one with powerful friends in the government.
Tkachenko is in the news himself this week because he agreed to take Pislyamova off the air until after the parliamentary election. He and his boss, Oleksandr Rodnyansky, cited unspecified pressure and anonymous phone calls.
We would never condemn any journalist for backing off in the face of a legitimate threat of violence. But Tkachenko never said his life was threatened. And he is not some cub reporter in a provincial backwater.
If some vague pressure and a few phone calls is all it takes to shut up Pislyamova, how easy is it to silence softer voices?
Tkachenko’s message to thugs wielding guns, microphones or dollars all over Ukraine is that it’s as easy as dialing a number.
Sayonara, Pislyamova.
The program had been a symbol of sorts in the struggle for freedom of speech in Ukraine. Two years ago, it was taken off the air after publicizing a power struggle within President Leonid Kuchma’s administration.
A year ago, leftists in Parliament tried to quash it after the Cuban Embassy took issue with a critical report on Fidel’s paradise. Fittingly, it has now died by its own hand.
We are told the show will return after the election. At that point, who really will care?
Whether he has told the truth or fibbed to obscure some hidden motive his network may have for pulling the show, Tkachenko stands revealed as a coward. When the heat was on, he wilted. Pislyamova is Ukrainian for ‘postscript.’ Our own is that free speech in Ukraine is a lost cause as long as its most vocal champions are the Tkachenkos of this world.
