LET’S START FROM SCRATCH

There are journalists considered models of the highest professional standard and criteria, and others tend to look to them at the worst of times. They realize that so long as such journalists exist, there is an opportunity to learn from good teachers and be told what to do not to lose one’s touch. This is a very difficult problem. After tasting freedom many rejected it or became disillusioned, some quit journalism and others took up service, believing that journalism as such was no longer needed. Still, we see new names appear in newspapers, magazines, and on television. People elbowing their way and showing what one can and should do to keep real journalism alive. Probably among the younger ones will be those refusing to recognize any taboos, relying on their own brief experience. True, they may lack the experience of all those schools of journalism we should normally have had by now and rely upon. Here is an example I consider very important and informative. A journalist of high-ranking repute, at a recent reception with a Cabinet member who is careful to win friends among the media people, said that everybody in Ukraine — President and Cabinet included — stands for the free and independent press, so here is to such media finally taking shape in this country! When it was my turn to speak, I said sure, everybody is for the free press, the President, the reformist Cabinet, even most advanced reform-oriented ministers. But there is the rhetorical question: Who is against the free press? I think that journalists are. Our newspaper wrote the other day that today’s freedom to do away with one’s opponents makes one hate the very notion of freedom. Journalists who have been made to suffer more often than they care to remember are not likely to find it in themselves to make a fresh start and come out with something pleasing to the eye and mind. Healing the old wounds of some and teaching others better stability takes a long course of treatment. And such treatment must be parallel, because there is not enough centrism in the political spectrum, no new ideas, no funds with which to attract fresh minds with fresh ideas to revive this society. This is probably why current politics is sufficiently extremist, and the same is true of journalism where professionals are becoming extinct, replaced by hacks bound by no ethics at all. Now this is really dangerous because when such bacteria penetrate an exhausted organism the latter can hardly be expected to perform more or less adequately. I think that we have received a painful but perhaps quite valuable experience of the transitory phase, so that forming a Ukrainian school of journalism sounds quite real. We are no longer spellbound by all those benefits of freedom and we already understand that our freedom largely depends on us journalists, as well as on that sense of resistance present in every person claiming morality.

Journalism meant to lead a given society astray will inevitably face very serious problems, and most likely final degradation. Therefore, hard as our life is, we have no alternative or opportunities other than to learn from our mistakes, sort them out, expose them before the public eye, and analyze them in as unbiased a manner as we can manage, and then work on it as best we can, perhaps the way The Day has tried. Indeed, some may lack the sharpness of approach manifest at the peak of political evolution, as is the case with the presidential campaign. Anyway, we have always tried to abide by the rules of a newspaper meant as a mouthpiece for the entire nation. Here, the most important thing is to have something to say.

We must try our best, this is our number one task. We may be accurate or miss something, but we must rid ourselves of depression and change our don’t-give-a-hoot approach. We all know what must be done, yet we are not trying hard enough, far from it. In journalism one can moralize all one wants, but there are different countries with different liberties, including freedom of expression. And in every case the road to such liberties was also anything but straight and smooth. No regime likes to be controlled or exposed to the public eye. Therefore, people taking up journalism must know what this profession is all about. If they want to ride smoothly, avoiding portholes and crawling round sharp bends, they ought to have chosen a different occupation. After all, living in a society with independent media pays off. Anyway, it makes one’s life diversified, at least, not boring. There is a man in Ukraine we have always listened to with interest and respect. The ever youthful Mykola Amosov [once a world-reputed Soviet cardiac surgeon, researcher, and author]. He says that one can get sick and tired of everything in this world except information. Regrettably, his concept of information is a far cry from what we have now. Now there is another aphorism describing information as made up of something one wants to keep secret; the rest is ads and commercials. In other words, we will have real journalism after ads and commercials change places with information proper. Of course, this requires tremendous educational and organizing efforts, but most importantly it takes firm resolve. It still does.