Just Plain Wrong
Politics is not about designing some ideal computer program, feeding in all the data, and coming up with the “optimal” solution to every conceivable question of public policy. According to what criterion was slavery bad when the American Civil War started? After all, Southern planters were making big money feeding cotton produced with slave labor to the British textile industry, and “King Cotton” in the first half of the nineteenth century was as economically important to that region as hydrocarbon “black gold” is to some OPEC member states today. For this reason the argument can certainly be made that slavery was good for the American economy to the extent that it brought money into the country. Still, most Americans in the North decided it was just plain wrong to allow other Americans in the South to own still other people of a different race as though the were cattle and elected a president who advocated a policy of what might be called the containment of slavery. The South left the Union, and the North forced it back in at the cost of a bloody Civil War, freeing the slaves in the process. Few today would question the value judgement that people owning people is just plain wrong, even if there is no way to demonstrate this empirically.
Regardless of where one sits on the political fence, closing down media outlets of opponents is also something that all those who place some value on the freedom of expression have to condemn as just plain wrong. Of course, limiting the expression of opposing ideas can lead to more effective government policy, at least temporarily. After all, Mussolini did make the trains run on time, Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression, and Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union, albeit inefficiently, but all three experiments ultimately turned out less than successful. If we decide that we have certain rights — a collective subjective value judgement not subject to being empirically proven or disproved — and we think it important to secure those rights for our posterity, then we have to defend those rights even for our opponents with only one argument: the violation of such rights is just plain wrong.
With this writer’s prejudice, produced by having been brought up in the spirit of the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights, what has been happening in terms of media policy in Ukraine recently includes a number of episodes that have to be considered just plain wrong. The latest such event is the February 11 announcement by Radio Dovira to remove the Ukrainian Service of Radio Liberty from its schedule, thus making it possible for the listeners of that program to find it only on short-wave. Dovira, had long put up with official harassment and was even named RFE/RL Affiliate of the Year in 2001. When harassment failed to work, those closer to the figures being criticized seem to have bought it and announced a “commercial decision” that RL did not fit into its format, although the latter had worked amicably and fruitfully for years with the station’s management to make its format more FM friendly.
Coming on the heels of the drive to close the mass-circulation newspaper, Silski visti, through the courts on dubious charges of anti-Semitism, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on the Freedom of Expression Mykola Tomenko commented on the Doviria action, “It is a pity that active purging of the national mass media has started on the eve of presidential elections... [T]he government is using a primitive but effective approach to fighting opposing mass media. All mass media that aim to provide truthful, objective, and critical information are downsized and taken off the air by force.” Maybe my old friend is wrong, but his case is strong enough that some fairly important people also believe it.
Even Washington, which had wanted to cut US broadcasting in Ukraine to the bone, has begun to take notice, and RFE/RL President Thomas A. Dine has condemned the move as “a political act.” Perhaps Radio Canada, which was planning to cut its Ukrainian programming altogether, might also reconsider. Indeed, Ukraine’s reputation in terms of media freedom is viewed as far from adequate anywhere except perhaps in countries where the situation is worse. In any case, when those with the power to do something decide that something is just plain wrong, they have a tendency to try to make things, if not right, then at least better, or, if that is not possible or not worth the trouble, simply go somewhere else.
In a free society, those in power are always aware that the media will often criticize them. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen” is an old Washington maxim. If Ukraine is serious about joining the Euro-Atlantic community, it must play by the rules already agreed upon by that club’s current members. Otherwise, the latter will decide that there is something just plain wrong here and that they do not want any part of it.
And what about the millions who tuned into Radio Liberty on their short-wave radios even when the broadcasts were jammed? The radios are still there, as are the jamming towers. The former will certainly be turned on. And the latter?
