NOTES OF A JURY MEMBER

As we promised, we are publishing the best pieces of the contest named The Press and the State conducted by the Institute of Mass Information (president Alla Lazareva and director Yuliya Sabri) together with the international organization, Reporters Sans Frontieres, and the Europeen French dailies’ trade union , with assistance of the Embassy of France in Ukraine and the A Travers l’Europe Association. I, as a jury member, would like to say a few words about the difference in perception. For example, the French cartoonist Pierre Wiazemski (incidentally, a descendent of Russian tsars, who seems to have some personal plans about our Vorontsov Palace confiscated long ago by the Soviet regime) was more fond of another Vozniuk cartoon we publish here. It depicts, as you see, oligarchs who keep newspapers like dogs, walking them out to brag about their new possession. This must be an international situation. But we wanted to represent the situation in Ukraine, so preference was given to Vozniuk’s sketch which portrays a king with a television set in one hand and a newspaper in another. (See the next issue of The Day).

Differences also arose about the cartoon of Yuri Kosobukin. For most of the jury, its character is a newspaper killer loading his gun with lines. But it seemed to Wiazemski this is a suicide.

“Look what a miserable and unshaven face he has,” he put forward his argument.

“You know,” said I, “all Kosobukin’s characters are unshaven and miserable in a way.”

“But this one is quite happy...,” Wiazemski found a grinning colonel in one of Kosobukin’s cartoons.

I, as a journalist (while the jury comprised even an animated cartoonist), was especially touched by the work of Mykola Kapusta. This negotiating table prepared for a meeting between the representatives of the state and newspapers is the most precise representation of the current plight of Ukrainian periodicals. And the tablecloth rolled up to the table middle even provokes a fit of light, but hysterical, laughter.

As to the rest of the works, they evoked no deep differences of opinions.

I wish the press would not turn a saint into the devil, as it does in Oleh Smal’s sketch, or supply the truth in the interpretation of Yevhen Samoilov, but be kind of a warning bell cast out of newspapers by Oleksandr Bazylevych, so that we could rob the nomenklatura of the umbrellas under which they freely pass through any newspaper rainfall in the fantasies of Ihor Lukyanchenko (Den/The Day). And let our life be slightly better than the garbage can in the vision of Volodymyr Kazanevsky (and not only him).

№11 April 04 2000 «The Day»
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