Who proved for sale in December?

The initiative “We’re not for sale!” states that in December “Energoatom” bought the most news items, the TV and radio company “Era” sold the most, and an ICTV presenter read the most.

The results of monitoring carried out by the Initiative in December show that the NNEGC [National Nuclear Energy Generating Company] Energoatom figured most often in material prepared with infringements of the standards of topicality, significance and balanced presentation during news broadcasts on national television channels.  The programme with the largest amount of such material was found to be “Pidsumky” [“Summary”] on “Era”.

These were the conclusions reached by Natalya Ligachova, Chief Editor of “Telekritika”, Victoria Syumar from the Institute for Mass Information, Taras Shevchenko from the Media Law Institute and Vitaly Maximov from the publication “Dyelo” [“Business”] on the basis of the above-mentioned monitoring.

Of the 20 pieces of material which the media experts were unanimous in concluding had been prepared with infringements of the standards of topicality, significance and balanced presentation, 8 were about Energoatom.

During the first report for November, the Initiative refrained from naming actual colleagues observed broadcasting news material to order in the hope that the journalists involved would rectify the situation.  This time they named names, with Olena Frolova from ICTV identified as the presenter with the largest amount of material infringing journalist standards.

According to Vitaly Maximov “We are publishing anti-ratings of presenters for the first time, not in order to humiliate our colleagues who are effectively being used to carry out dirty work, but to stress the huge responsibility which the face of the channels bears.

If journalists and presenters jointly engage in discussion with their managers, corruption in the news in the Ukrainian media will disappear”.

The initiative “We’re not for sale!” began in early November 2007 with a statement issued by dozens of television presenters, editors and journalists pledging to boycott any news material prepared to order.

The Initiative carries out daily monitoring of the news broadcasts on the 11 nationwide channels.

Based on material at www.telekritika.kiev.ua