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Ukraine’s Security Council has sanctioned and effectively banned 3 all-news TV channels allied with Viktor Medvedchuk (ZIK, 112, NewsOne) for spreading “pro-Russian propaganda”. Nothing like this has ever happened in Ukraine’s media history.
One way to read this is that the channels are an important resource driving the growing popularity of Medvedchuk’s Opposition Platform party. Every UA president sought to gain support of media owners; Poroshenko reportedly tried to buy 112, and had informal agreements w/ NewsOne
After an unsuccessful attempt to purchase 112, at the time the most popular all-news channel, Poroshenko started a new, his second, all-news broadcaster. He also evidently had agreements with the mainstream channels, where he received predominantly positive coverage.
In contrast, Zelensky seems to be lacking such organised media power. But what this new move will have, is support within Ukraine’s national-liberal civil society and elite parts of the journalistic profession.
Western grant-funded media watchdogs like DetectorMedia and IMI, who work with Internews and USAID, have now for years tried to shape the discourse of media professionalism in ways that excludes reporting critical of Ukraine’s ‘turn to Europe’ as unprofessional and propagandistic
Western democracy promotion grants have effectively helped to stock up divisive tensions inside the Ukrainian journalistic profession, contributing to political polarisation and a right-wing turn of the public discussion.
Today’s Security Council ban is a testimony to the grip that the right consensus has onto politicians like Zelensky who ran in 2019 on a deliberately more pro-peace and reconciliation platform /end/
P.S. Under Medvedchuk’s de-facto ownership the channels have promoted closer ties with Russia, critiqued the war, and spread outright lies and bonkers conspiracies.
But they aren’t alone in this. the gov’t as well as professional self-ref bodies were patently unable to regulate them (or others), and Zelensky’s party has failed to have their new media law voted through.
The move reflects Zelensky’s administration’s profound weakness; and their ‘war on propaganda’ is *also* a convenient cover for undermining a strengthening political rival.
