Ad van Loon, Head of the Council of Europe Media Project in Ukraine. Photo: Media Law Institute, Ukraine

With the joint support of IMS and the EU-Council of Europe's Project “Promotion of European Standards in Ukrainian Media Environment”, the Media Law Institute convened a 2-day expert meeting on reforming (privatising) state print media in Vorzel  in the region of Kyiv

By Antonina Cherevko, IMS

The meeting was held to improve the text of the government draft Law “On Reforming State and Municipal Print Media”. Currently, Ministry of Justice of Ukraine is responsible for the development of this draft. The draft Law was submitted several times to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine (for approval and further sending to Parliament) but was sent back to the Ministry for improvement. The event was also aimed at reconciling different positions of key-stakeholders and promoting good practices of print media reforming.

Struggling to get the reform moving

The Expert Meeting gathered representatives and experts from the Council of Europe, OSCE, Parliament of Ukraine, National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, Ukrainian Association of Press Publishers, Media Law Institute, Association of Communal Press, National Commission on Freedom of Speech.

During the first meeting day participants discussed possible models of reforming print media and international experiences in providing state support for the print press. The second meeting day was devoted to the work on the text of the draft Law and to the development of the further strategy for the promotion of print media reform.

The  discussions resulted in a joint agreement between the civil society media organisations to initiate an open letter to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine with the request to facilitate the process of privatisation of state print media in particular through the immediate submission of the respective draft Law to the Parliament of Ukraine.

Ad van Loon, Head of the Council of Europe Media Project in Ukraine said:

- Ukraine will need to restructure the press sector in such a way that newspapers are financed in a much more independent way and that journalists can work independently of the public authorities whose behaviour and performance they are supposed to monitor and to report on. Privatisation of newspapers owned or controlled by public authorities is one way of meeting these requirements; another way may be to continue to finance those newspapers from public funds, in which case the criteria for the assignment of such funds to individual newspapers need to be objective, transparent and non-discriminatory. Such funds would need to be granted by an organisation which is independent from any public authority. A third way may be that the private publishers launch new newspapers in areas where newspapers are owned or controlled by public authorities and start competing with the only existing newspaper.

- In such a case, the Ukrainian legislator must ensure that private publishers can build a business case and that regulatory measures are taken to create a level playing field. This could be done by forcing state-owned newspapers to raise their newspaper prices to a more realistic level, Ad van Loon added.  

The root of the problem

Ukraine has hundreds of state and municipal print media outlets which are funded by local government. Their quality varies, their independence is questionable and they provide unfair competition against privately-owned print media. State print media are often used during elections to campaign for the incumbent politicians. The process of drafting a law to privatise these state-owned media was initiated, but progress is very slow due to the lack of political will to reform. Various stakeholders are involved and opinions on the effects, methods and needs differ.

As a general rule, journalists working for state media are the first to confront prospective reforms, mainly because their salaries and what is more important their pensions are calculated based on the scale used for public servants and this makes their financial conditions often more favourable than those of journalists working for private media.

In addition to this, because they have received state support, print media readily offer much lower rates on the advertisement market, thus, undermine the financial sustainability of their privately owned “counterparts”. And, of course, selfgovernance and local administration are quite resistant to any reforms as they do not want to lose control over the media resources they currently “possess”. The situation described contributes to the creation of unfair media market conditions and impedes free development of Ukrainian regional print media.

Tetyana Kotyuzhynska, Secretary of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, said:

-First of all, we should answer the question: "Who needs a local newspaper?" We, in the National Union of Journalists, think that the local newspaper is needed by readers i.e. the local community and the journalists who live in it and want to work for the good of the community. That's why we are talking about reforming and not de-statising or privatising  municipal press. It is not enough just to ban local government from founding local newspapers. It is important to establish a framework of state support for the local press which would allow local community to have full access to local news and let local journalists to do the job they love, she concludes.  

For more information about the event please write to Antonina Cherevko, IMS Programme Officer for Ukraine, at AC[snabela]i-m-s.dk