On "new" trends in "new" journalism
By Anatoly LEMYSH, Natalia LIHACHOVA, The Day
On February 17, on the eve of parliamentary hearings of the Lazarenko affair,
the UT-1 Dossier program demonstrated the new cool chic in reporting. People's
Deputy and chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada Committee for Procedures,
Parliamentary Ethics and Organizational Work Viktor Omelich, who is reported
by a soundtrack voice to have "secret investigative information on P. I.
[Lazarenko]," enters the Hromada party office filmed by a hidden camera.
Exit a journalist who "may have interviewed Pavlo Ivanovych for the last
time."
Oddly enough, this program did not trigger an adequate reaction either
in the media or society. For, in pursuit of compromising materials, journalist
Yuri Nesterenko and the Dossier film crew violated the most important human
right, that of privacy. Only the former Procurator-General Oleh Lytvak
said from the Verkhovna Rada rostrum that "any items of objective information
should only be gleaned by an investigator or a journalist alike only under
the law. And sanctions to use operative technical devices should be obtained
in courts, not simply by the wish or consent of a journalist."
No less piquant in the candid camera operation was the fact that those
sequences came up on the "Good night, Ukraine!" television show, and among
the hosts was also Serhiy Naboka, who suffered much in Brezhnev's time
from the arm-twisting methods of our valiant law-enforcement (he did several
years in prison camps for participation in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group).
"This material, included in our program as a scoop, was an absolutely
unexpected thing for me," says Mr. Naboka, "Seeing it on the monitor, I
felt how strongly it stank. But, since the program was being broadcast
live, I was not very attentive. Then I re-watched the program on purpose
and saw it was a shame. The next day I raised one hell of a scandal at
UT-1 in this connection. This Dossier was to have gone on the air again
on Thursday, but it was canceled, maybe, because of my protests. The Dossier
may only show outside our program, if at all."
Also supporting a negative assessment of the candid camera method is
leading Ukrainian television journalist Natalia Kondratiuk. She added:
"There are no journalists in Ukraine who know how to use hidden-camera
filming to advantage. In this country such footage is only used to launder
compromising materials through TV by some 'appropriate' people against
their opponents. To watch people with a hidden camera is the job of the
security services, but never journalists. Journalists have to do it openly.
The more so in that nobody hampered them from so doing in the program.
In general, that was a frame-up film. The deputy filmed by a hidden camera
in no way concealed his entering the Hromada office. He was going to the
office of his party to greet a colleague. But the viewer was offered a
different angle: it is not a journalist who breaks the law, but a deputy
who hides himself, so there is something secret and illegal in the actions
of the one under observation. Thus, the journalist knowingly distorted
facts, shaping the impression he wanted. This is no longer journalism,
this is the oldest profession."
Frankly speaking, somewhat surprising is the reaction to such methods
from Ihor Lubchenko, chairman of the Union of Journalists of Ukraine, a
respected figure and editor who suffered much from bureaucratic arbitrariness.
However, he gave rather a melancholic answer to The Day's question:
"Filming deputies? If they cannot be arrested without Verkhovna Rada
consent, they can be filmed only with the Prosecutor General's sanction,
and only then if a criminal case has been opened. And the filming should
be done only by a police operative, not a journalist!
"This is a matter for our debate and thought. Thank you for telling
me this. We should hold a round table or a conference on this at the Union
of Journalists."
It would seem the Union of Journalists should be the first to take a
most active part in condemning unlawful actions by media people. For the
first thing it should do is work out a code of professional ethics and
take a clear-cut stand in defending them among the journalists of independent
Ukraine.
Let us also recall that Dossier comes out within the framework of the
Era channel cofounded by Andriy Derkach, which was confirmed by Era editor-in-chief
Vitaly Lukianenko in an interview with our newspaper. No doubt, the use
in the program of both hidden-camera filming and police operative footage
looks even more ambiguous in this case. Will the program use the archives
of the KGB-SBU, which Mr. Derkach's father heads?
The theme took an interesting twist in a direct talk with program author
Yuri Nesterenko. He began to assure us that there was no hidden filming
at all! After the camera started filming Deputy Omelich, the reporter told
the latter about this, and Omelich allegedly did not mind. This is in a
glaring contradiction to what the same Nesterenko said during the broadcast
where he not only admitted the fact of hidden filming but also presented
it as kind of heroism.






