KIEV Pressure is growing in Ukraine against the national broadcasting company Suspilne.
At the end of April, a member of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Parliament Marjana Bezuhla criticized funding of state TV channels. Among the state-owned channels, he also mentioned Suspilne, which is actually a public broadcasting company. Suspilne belongs to socially critical media.
Later, Bezuhla accused the broadcasting company of hiring men as employees so that they could avoid military service.
At the same time, the idea arose to take away the best broadcast times in the national TV news marathon from Suspilne and leave only the morning and night times.
Suspilne suspects political reasons
Suspilne drafted this week counterpart to the criticism leveled at it. The company reminded that it is an institution independent of the state. Its existence is one condition for Ukraine’s EU membership.
Suspilne denied accusations of hiring workers for the army defections and said he opposed plans to take away prime-time broadcasting from the army. The company also appealed to the parliamentary committees and asked for help in eradicating pressure attempts.
Suspilne is the chairman of the supervisory board Svitlana Ostapa suspects that economic and political reasons are behind the pressure.
– Advertising televisions want Yleisradio’s best broadcast times for advertising sales. Politically, this probably has to do with the president to Volodymyr Zelensky until the end of the term of office.
In support of Ukrainian Broadcasting Corporation has expressed also Center for Development of Independent Ukrainian Media. According to it, the work of Suspilne’s regional offices is relatively important at the local level.
– If Suspilne is kicked out of the marathon, it will be more difficult to get decision-makers to comment on current issues, says Ostapa.
As a piece of controversy, a news marathon
In Ukraine, the subject of controversy in the media sector has long been a joint television broadcast called Yhteiset uutiset. The project, called the News Marathon, is a joint broadcast of six TV channels, which was established on the first day of the Russian invasion.
In the project, all channels broadcast the same picture, and the 24-hour broadcast slots are divided among the channels. Each media house is responsible for producing a few hours. The purpose of the idea was to unite the people in exceptional circumstances and to follow a common information policy.
But immediately after Russia’s blitzkrieg plans failed, the marathon began to be criticized inside Ukraine. The main reasons for the criticism were the violation of journalistic standards and the fact that a few large TV channels with connections to the former president were excluded from the broadcast. To Petro Poroshenko.
Ukrainians’ trust in Joint News has also been on a constant decline. In November 2022 it was At the level of 84 percent, in February 2024 it decreased to 36 percent.
In the US report on the human rights situation in Ukraine in 2023, the news marathon was mentioned as an example of restricting the freedom of the press.
Svitlana Ostapa, head of Suspilne’s Supervisory Council, believes that the time for the news marathon has already passed.
– I feel that it has only remained as a practical format for the interviewees, because they can give their comments to everyone at the same time.
Confidence high in Suspilne
Suspilne was founded in the spring of 2014, when Russia had occupied Crimea and started hostilities in Donbas. In the country, it was noticed that the media field is strongly owned by oligarchs. These cherish their own and not society’s interests.
The mission of the Ukrainian broadcasting company is similar to the missions of similar European companies. Suspilne is responsible for participating in Eurovision and broadcasts many sports events, including the Olympics.
Because Suspilne has a much shorter history in Ukraine than, say, or the BBC, and because it was already born in a very competitive industry, it has not had time to achieve the same status in society as European media houses.
The trust of Ukrainians in Suspilne was last year About 86 percent. Yleisradio had the same reading last year 76 percent and on Swedish television on SVT this year 75 percent.
Instead, Suspilne’s content is consumed by a clearly smaller proportion of the population in Ukraine, i.e 38 percentwhile, for example, Yleisradio’s content is consumed by 96 percent of Finns and SVT’s content by approx. 90 percent from Swedes.
Freedom of the press is worrying in Ukraine
Recently, the state of press freedom in Ukraine has also been talked about. Editor of The Kyiv Independent Olha Rudenko told yesterday in The Guardian about the pressure on the media from the country’s security service.
Svitlana Ostapa admits the existence of pressure. He reminds that in April, Ukraine’s oldest and largest news agency Ukrinform was removed From the so-called white list maintained by the Press Research Institute.
The white list is a list of the most transparent and responsible media in Ukraine, which is updated every six months. The institute criticized Ukrinform for the fact that with the new management, the office reflects too much the point of view of the state leadership.
Threatening investigative journalists has also returned to the pattern, says Ostapa.
– At the beginning of the war, investigative journalists focused on investigating war crimes, but then they noticed that those who stole before the war also steal during the war.