Leonid Kuchma Takes Umbrage at Foreign Mass Media in Advance

At a Lviv press conference, which was taped for broadcast by local television, the President said he is aware of the intention of one presidential candidate to publish a report in a Western newspaper that his daughter was arrested several times in Belgium,” Interfax-Ukraine reports.

It is unclear, why the President should make such a statement at all. On the one hand, there is an iron rule applied the world over: politicians have no private life, and Mr. Kuchma knows it. On the other hand, the Ukrainian press had reported nothing about any incident involving his daughter (and no one knows if there was any such intention). Given this, the President, in the language of politics, has exposed himself. Obviously, this is a result of the hothouse information regime, artificially created for the head of state.

However, no matter what may occur in Belgium, of much more importance for us is what happening in Ukraine.

Leonid Kuchma denies the information, spread by his opponents, that he puts pressure on the press. According to him, ”simple calculations show that the current anti-presidential pressrun is over four million copies [a day]... Just name a newspaper which glorifies the President.”

Simple questions sometimes have simple answers. At a Democratic Process in Ukraine and Elections round table Oleksandr Vyshniak, a senior fellow of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology and director of the Ukrainian Sociology Service announced the results of analysis they had conducted: 90% of information resources belong to only one candidate, the incumbent President, and only 10%, to other presidential candidates, UNIAN reports. According to Vyshniak, open support for a candidate is only permissible for private, not state-owned mass media, and is absolutely illegal for the government television and print media paid for by taxpaying citizens to take a partisan stand.