Kiev ranks in the bottom five countries in the world when it comes to being trusted by its own population.
Russian media, in contrast, is trusted according to the survey.
Ukraine’s media is not quite as bad as Mauritania where slavery is still practised openly and abolitionists frequently run into trouble with the authorities over campaigns to end it, but it remains the only white country where trust in reporting has all but vanished.
Mauritania had the least trust in its media followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and then South Sudan. Tied at fourth place were Gabon and Ukraine, the only European country in a field where ethnically-torn Africa has dominated.
Ukraine also ranked 129th out of 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.
The Ukrainian ranking however, would not surprise many familiar with recent developments in the Ukrainian media. The now defunct Ukraine Today was only a short lived outlet, because viewers had voted with their remote controls and switched off the non-stop ultra-nationalist and anti-Russian deluge.
Ukraine Today had its 15 minutes of fame of slandering RT….on RT. In October 2016, “quota for radio – to broadcast Ukrainian songs and programs maintenance in Ukrainian” were introduced in an effort to push out Russian. Fifteen more Russian TV channels were banned in March 2016.
In February 2015 already, the law “On protection information television and radio space of Ukraine,” banned Ukrainian television and cinemas from showing “audiovisual works” that contain pro-Russian content. One year later Russian productions on Ukrainian television had decreased by 3 to 4 times.
While the media market in Ukraine is large, the country’s 10 most popular television channels are all owned by businessmen whose primary focus is not media, but fleecing whatever current scheme is available. For them TV is used to accumulate political influence, Reporters without Borders said.
“Corruption and lack of financial transparency further inhibit the healthiness of the country’s media landscape,” the Media Ownership Monitor (MOM), a research and advocacy project carried out in Ukraine by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Institute of Mass Information (IMI) concluded.
Although the government is, in fact, obligated to regulate media and ensure fair practice through the National Council for TV and Radio Broadcasting, it rarely interferes.
“Government is nothing for them,” Roman Golovenko, the head of the legal department at Ukraine’s IMI, pointed out.
Golovenko believes that one of the reasons why the government does not regulate against unfair media practices is because President Poroshenko fears starting a “war with the [television] channels” in which he might end up as a casualty.
Due to missing or dysfunctional safeguards for effectively controlling media oligopolies, the media remains too highly concentrated into the hands of too few.
Even the annual anti-Russian Freedom House’s report “Freedom on the Net” revealed that Ukraine has been downgraded in the ranking compared to the previous year. “The situation has mostly worsened in the area of access to certain content and its publication on the Internet,” Tetyana Lokot, Dublin City University, author of the chapter on Ukraine in the report “Freedom on the Net 2016” said at the presentation of the report at Ukraine Crisis Media Center. The report covers the period from June 2015 to May 2016.
Lokot said that the downgrading is explained by the increased number of arrests for expressing separatist views on the Internet, and the fact that the providers have blocked access to the Ukrainian websites to citizens of the Donbass.
Ukrainian experts were furious with Freedom House because they had applied a standard methodology to Ukraine. Tetyana Popova, head of the Council, Telecommunication Chamber of Ukraine noted that the report contained “inaccuracies”.
According to Oleksandr Danchenko, head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on IT development and Communications, in this situation it is acceptable for Ukraine to deviate from “peacetime standards” because this is a matter of “national security”. Other rules are required, Danchenko said. “This is the war. A fifth column is using freedom of speech to spread aggressor country’s propaganda here,” he stated.
Meanwhile the Andrei Stenin International Press Photo Contest has drawn submissions from around the world while commemorating the Russian photojournalist who was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 while reporting for Russian media. Ukraine remains a highly dangerous country for journalists.
Only in its third year, the competition is officially backed by UNESCO, UK’s Royal Photographic Society, and media organizations, including RT and has attracted over 6 000 entries from 71 countries.