Carefulness, tact, and… ability to run fast

Tens of journalists highlighted the events in Kyiv Maidan. At that time a bulletproof vest was a rare thing on a media worker, and many of them at first refused from helmets. Now the military operations have moved to the east and south of Ukraine, and the number of journalists there has dropped. Various mass media send to tasks for the most part male reporters, but Ukrainian journalist of Russian origin Kateryna Serhatskova is her own master, so her streams can be viewed from all the “trouble spots” of the country. On May 2 in Odesa Kateryna was in the epicenter of the events. In the hardest transition periods in the Crimea she went out to the street and showed the situation on the peninsula as it is live on her YouTube channel. After the situation became more acute in Donetsk, the journalist called her colleagues and ordinary people to go on May holidays to the east and support the victims – at least morally, at least visit them in hospitals. And she herself went to Donetsk, to Horlivka, to show what was going on in fact and what puppets the self-elected heads of illegal “people’s republic” are. A significant fact is that Kateryna Sehatskova was born in Russia and has studied at the Volgograd State University; she has lived in the Crimea. But she is absolutely pro-Ukrainian.

“A journalist must understand that during the war, especially an information war, people become more emotional and aggressive, and the society gets polarized. The task of a journalist is to sort things out, not provoke a conflict,” Serhatskova says. “It is important to learn to listen to people and find a key to everyone. Like in peaceful time, the aim should be to show the sides of the conflict and the expert opinion. Armed people are people, too. And it is important to make them understand that you are not going to provoke them, but that you want to look into the situation. Of course, it is better to ask for permission for shooting, just in case.”

Should journalists who don’t have any experience of war correspondents, stay in the places of military actions?

“In the conditions Ukraine has found itself, everyone has the right to choose whether to go to a trouble spot, or continue to work with his usual topic. Actually, before the Maidan events I had been working on the topic of socio-cultural innovations, I wrote about the ideas and prospects of social development. But when everything started, I simply could not ignore what was happening around me. And then the Crimean events broke out, and I considered it my duty to go there, because I have lived for quite a long time on this peninsula, I have friends and family there. I lacked information on what was going on there, and I could not sleep calmly. Then there was a chain reaction across the regions, and it was important to use the Crimean experience.

“In critical situations the journalist has to take up the function of a mediator. In this case only some special knowledge makes him different from a war correspondent, but this is not a problem. And you can keep safe from kidnapping, if you are careful and tactful, don’t get into conflicts, and can run fast.”

How not to give way to information demoralization and work with information properly?

“It is important to verify every fact. In the case with the House of Trade Unions that burnt in Odesa a thorough independent expertise is needed. The reports of the heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs departments can be political information, and it is on the whole quite logical in terms of information war. To make up an objective picture, a journalist must become an investigator: interview the witnesses and the victims on both sides, turn to experts, including foreign unbiased specialists.

“And people who are not journalists must read news from different sources, not only the ones we traditionally trust – any mass medium makes mistakes from time to time. So-called analytics in blogs should be always put to question, because social networks are currently an instrument of propaganda as well. And there are also many crazy people on the blogs, as well as those who think that they are able to explain everything in the world. You should listen to people who have preserved an ability to think soberly under these circumstances.”