Mediacracy

The word used in the heading is a coinage having nothing to do with the traditional fifth estate, even less so with freedom of expression. The fifth estate implies freedom of the press and all the other media in accumulating and communicating public opinion among the three constitutional branches of power. Mediacracy is, actually, no different from the old Soviet propaganda machine and its worst possible totalitarian analogs abroad, except that it is complemented with progressive technologies, wrapped in the attractive package of modern entertainment, and subordinated to the «Ministry of Truth». Like oligarchy, it seems to be simultaneously present and absent in Ukraine. The fifth estate and freedom of speech are inseparable from the information industry making money for its own benefit selling the world's most expensive commodity earned by the journalists' back-breaking labor. Mediacracy has no connection with the information industry as a business, as its revenues come from the sale of the advertiser's powerful influence. In this system, the journalists seem to be on a non-sabbatical leave; they do not hunt for information but are supplied it in strictly determined places. Hence trying to assess their performance in terms of an independent information product would be impossible — let alone in terms of the freedom of expression. The fifth estate and this freedom do not exist in a society most of which is in the so-called shadows. Mediacracy creates this shadow itself, for benefit of the shadow economy and politics. It was precisely under pressure from mediacracy that the current President could commit such a blatant violation of the law as the refusal to form the National Television and Radio Council. However, the time for discussing the legal aspect is past.

Under the circumstances, save for this mediacracy and blatant falsification, the President does not seem to have any other means of winning the election campaign.

In fact, the chief executive holds meetings with the electorate only as a pretext to appear on television. This is the main distinction between him and the other presidential candidates, most of whom are barred access to the information theater. In other words, if a media outlet does not present Mr. Kuchma's attractive image that outlet will simply vanish. The most interesting question is how much this technology is a professional image-making product, how much it is determined by the number-one customer's preferences, or how effective it will prove on the election date. An answer to this will show whether today's mediacracy is here to stay as the only real power or will vanish immediately after the elections, giving way to the development of a normal information industry.

The latter is the purpose of a psychological experiment being performed using the Ukrainian people as guinea pigs. Leonid Kuchma's reelection is only one of the rules of the «business game,» securing the experiment's «purity» — i.e., using all means available. The gist of this game is to hawk to the people merchandise which is not only obsolete and, mildly speaking, useless, but the worst of the assortment displayed on the election campaign's market. Moreover, it is part of the game making the buyer pay the maximum price for the stuff, getting resources from the buyer's future.

Why experiment? Not only because it is being staged in a young nation state having experienced only two parliamentary and two presidential elections held in conditions fundamentally different from what we have today. Ukraine has never been offered to bring back to life a political corpse, doing so of its own free will rather than by coercion (without the «right to chose» as in Brezhnev's USSR) — not during its independence, colonial status, or as an historical entity (this author may have got mixed up with these periods, so she will welcome historians' corrections). Strange as it may seem, such precedents are hard to find in Europe or anywhere else in this wide world.

Of course, political corpses are known to have retained power for decades, in many countries, yet this was done either with the aid of dictatorship and military force or — in the case of a totalitarian regime — using dictatorship and the military, but always combined with a socioeconomic situation more or less acceptable to the populace. Most importantly, in the presence of an attractive omnipresent and domineering ideology, religion, etc., which would often make up for the absence of other benefits, securing positive concepts and sentiments. Thus, absence of the freedom of speech would be compensated by a sense of individual security, however illusory; absence of education and the freedom of expression, by faith; low living standards, by the absence of reasons for envy (equality), and so forth.

Nothing of the this sort is present in today's Ukraine, hence the regime's using its last resort. We all know that those in power are trying to play out the 1996 Russian scenario. However, the Ukrainian mediacrats must have arranged for borrowing this scenario sometime before August 1998, because it does not allow for a substantial amendment: the world financial crisis. Mildly speaking, what Ukraine's northeastern neighbor could accomplish without much ado before the crisis, using its own tangible assets, was borrowed and is being attempted in Ukraine after the crisis, even without any such assets.

While in Russia the presidential campaign passed under the motto «Win or You'll Lose!», which sounded relevant and had solid ground at the moment, Ukraine is offered just the superstructure, without any foundation. This alone raises the said experiment's purity many times over, since the Ukrainian people is being fed a secondhand propaganda product with a lot of seasoning, considering the alleged incriminating evidence against Boris Yeltsin's family, Russian rackets laundering IMF money, but without any opportunities for the current regime to solve any of the problems of the Ukrainian electorate, even if only for the duration of the campaign. And there is not much time left for the big date, October 31. Arrears accumulated over a number of years are expected to be redeemed in hryvnias and the national currency is going down as a result of the financial crisis drawn out over a year, concealed emissions, and with price jumps triggered off by the fuel crisis.

However, even now, two months before the election date, the media project (something like «Kuchma — Our Leader, Helmsman, Lenin, Mao, Pinochet, de Gaulle, Washington, et al.») is drawing to a close. Perhaps because of recent forum held by 20 pro-President parties, offering less virtual and more practical (compared to mediacracy) methods of pushing the President through to the second term in office. The multiparty host, of which Leonid Kuchma spoke so degradingly quite recently, strained its brain and came up with an optimally simple decision: collect the voters' signatures again to secure 16 million votes for Leonid Kuchma. We all know that this maneuver is meant to lend credibility to crude falsification of the election returns. Yet the President's men are going along with it, meaning that mediacracy cannot guarantee the desired effect and has to be reinforced using such techniques. As for technologies (most likely paid for by the customer in advance), they cannot even promise to reach the target set. Neither the President's false assurances, other affiliated politicians' blather (even less so the said parties' support), nor the gala shows with pop stars being staged all over Ukraine can play the role of agents of influence. Either the people are no longer as brainwashed as they used to be, or the reason is the quality of the commodity being hawked. One cannot help but notice that this commodity — I mean the current President — does not have even a handful of enthusiastic buyers, just soldiers acting on their commander's orders. Perhaps because this commodity lacks the required consumer value which makes one buy things like soap — so as to use this real soap to wash off real dirt, even given minimum publicity ratings. No ideology, no personal charms, no previous merits, no plans for the foreseeable future which one could seriously discuss. Just the pet word stability, something no one can assess or sense in any conceivable way, and which no one believes, of course. The thing is that all of Mr. Kuchma's image-makers are violating a key law of advertising: address the public's positive mental associations, if not needs, relying on the commodity's minimum positive «ingredients.»

Our mediacracy should be congratulated: it is falling into a trap it has itself laid. After trampling on such a human trait as confidence, it is once again referring to this basic factor of normal democratic power, in other words finishing off the reelection project. Still, the experiment continues. Regardless of the outcome, we are in for either of two things: a new President with fresh opportunities or self-understanding which cannot be compared to anything else, along with the final victory of mediacracy, of course.