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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Television Wars

23 March, 1999 - 00:00

By Natalia LIHACHOVA, The Day
The latest events in our television space resemble a landslide wiping off
everything on its way without noise but with a formidable might. The murder
of Oleksandr Deineka, surveillance, robberies, and muggings of those, who
have something to do with STB channel: all this continues, as reports Mykola
Kniazhytsky. The other day, the apartment of this channel's information
director Maryana Chorna was broken into. The programs News of the Week
and Evening News produced by Mykola Kanishevsky's Vikna (Windows)
information agency were forced to leave the ICTV channel. And although
the channel management assure us that it was done for purely economic reasons,
we may doubt this, the more so that Vikna in fact produced, at its own
cost, the most expensive information product for ICTV. The channel paid
them exclusively with screen time. There is every reason to believe that
Mr. Kanishevsky's information and analytical programs were removed for
certain political reasons.

The Era Company has changed almost all its executives. As asserts Vasyl
Klymchuk, who now controls the entire screen time of the programs Good
Morning and Good Night, Ukraine, this is only the reorganization
of a private company. But according to editor-in-chief Vitaly Lukyanenko
and chief producer Olha Kysla, who are now outside Era's new table of organization,
no complaints about their creative and professional work had ever been
raised. Moreover, the night channel still preserves the concepts worked
out by the former executives, the people (including the presenters) who
implement them, and even the flow chart. In other words, we are witnessing
only a change of personalities.

As we know, any decision in the television business are never based
on economic reasons alone. Thus one can only assume the television space
is being actively carved up by certain forces that are not only close to
the President but also vying with each other for a bigger share of both
the commercial pie and the political influence. Of course, total purging
of the nation's television from all more or less independently thinking
and still unsubdued individuals might seem strange. After all, as chairman
of the Ukrainian Union of Journalists Ihor Lubchenko recently told The
Day, when those who are now setting the new rules of the game on the
information market relinquish power, they will be able only to express
their opinion in a house-maintenance office wall newspaper if the office
director allows them to... But when statesmen are unable, for example,
to protect the national media for so many years from the quite certain
methods of stifling dissidents by means of excessively high judgments in
lawsuits, then is there any logic of action in the name of state (and not
personal) interests at all?

But what is more symptomatic is not the actions of the powers-that-be
but the reaction of journalists themselves. Not a single national channel
has said a word about unprecedented developments concerning STB. 1+1 was
the only station which reported in a few words about the cancellation of
contract between ICTV and the Vikna Agency. Not a single national channel
has supported the appeal of STB journalists to the President to defend
their right to engage in professional activities without fearing for the
life of themselves and their families. Only the Dossier program
(UT-1) showed an item on the murder of Deineka, pushing through one possible
version, almost pointing an accusing finger at a specific oligarch who
might allegedly be involved in the affair. We would like to believe this
was done out of solidarity with their STB colleagues, although, in the
words of Mr. Kniazhytsky, they were again set up, being drawn into the
squabbles between various financial and political clans.

What makes channel executives react so to the mayhem surrounding adjacent
television companies? What makes them keep silent? They hardly gloat over
the woes in their rival's house. Then what? Ban by the channel's true owners?
But in this case it still reinforces the idea of our TV moguls' nefarious
involvement in the total war of all against all (code-named Zlahoda). Fear?
But is corporate solidarity not a duty of professionals who know that journalism
is a job that requires a certain civic courage?

 

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