This story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net/en/.
   License: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/
   international.
   --------------------------------------------------------------


How Zelenskyy can challenge Ukraine's media magnates
By:   []
Date: None

It was ten hours into his marathon press conference back in October 2019 that the recently elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke about de-oligarchisation of the media, something he’d previously said would be a priority during his presidency.

“Owners of TV stations and other media outlets should be businessmen, not politicians,” he told journalists. “They shouldn’t be influencing editorial policy of any mass media.”

Last month, Zelensky signed a decree to take three oligarch-owned TV stations off air. It provoked a national debate about acceptable limits to free expression. For some, it was huge news: the president was acting decisively to stop Russian disinformation. For others, the decision was not subject to enough scrutiny, and other means should have been used “that were less of a threat to media pluralism”.

But this move also demonstrated how little Zelenskyy has actually done to fulfil his campaign promise, to permanently reduce the long-standing dominance of oligarchs over the media in Ukraine.

Most Ukrainians still get their news from television, yet all the country’s biggest channels are owned by just a handful of oligarchs. Costly and unprofitable, TV stations have for years served less as investments and more as tools to sway public opinion and influence policy in their owners’ favour.

Assessing the 2019 election that brought Zelenskyy to power, the Election Observation Mission from the OCSE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) was unequivocal in its view of these privately owned channels. They “provided imbalanced and biased coverage […] and continued to follow their owners’ political agenda”.

Throughout Ukraine’s 2019 presidential elections, TV stations were unsubtle in their support of particular candidates. The Ukraina channel – owned by Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in the country – gave disproportionate coverage to Oleksandr Vilkul of Opposition Bloc and Oleh Lyashko of the Radical Party. The 1+1 channel, owned by Ihor Kolomoiskyi, dedicated most airtime to Zelenskyy. Channel 5, owned by Petro Poroshenko – Ukraine’s president at the time – unsurprisingly “showed strong support” for its own owner. Channels owned by Dmytro Firtash, Serhiy Lyovochkin, Viktor Pinchuk and Viktor Medvedchuk also showed support for their owners’ preferred candidates.

Taking sides in elections is just one example. Oligarchs’ influence over editorial policy is pervasive and often actively undermines Ukraine’s troubled reform efforts.

Tools in their owners’ hands

It was after a clean-up of Ukraine’s banking sector that Ihor Kolomoiskyi was accused of embezzling more than $5bn from Privatbank, which he owned until 2016, when it was nationalised.

Last year, parliament passeda law that would prevent the return of the bank to Kolomoiskyi. Ahead of the vote, anyone tuning in to the prime-time current affairs show on the oligarch’s 1+1 channel would have heard a very one-sided case against the law.

If you’d switched channels to the flagship political programme on Akhmetov’s Ukraina station, you’d have heard an argument about why a corruption investigation into his DTEK energy company should be ended. According to prosecutors, DTEK colluded with officials to overcharge Ukrainian consumers by $1.4bn and pocketed the profits. DTEK has consistently denied the charges, and the case was later closed.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/how-zelenskyy-can-challenge-ukraines-media-magnates/