NEWS AND VIEWS: The media and corruption (01/27/02)

NEWS AND VIEWS

The media and corruption

by Roman Kupchinsky
RFE/RL Crime, Corruption and Terrorism Watch

The media in post-Communist societies have played a dual role when it comes to reporting on high-level corruption. While some news outlets, mostly independent Internet publications, have been critical of official corruption - and at times have printed investigative reports on their activities - many have remained silent about the most glaring of crimes.

There are numerous reasons for this duality. Many newspapers and television and radio stations rely heavily on national and regional governments for indirect subsidies in order to remain in business. The low advertising base in most post-Communist countries makes many news outlets reliant on such revenues. These "indirect subsidies" are often paid ads from political parties in power in the region. Fear of losing this revenue often leads to self-censorship, at best - or to brutal pressure by sponsors as the norm - when it comes to writing about corruption.

Those who rely on commercial advertising revenue are faced with their own set of problems. For example, last year one commercial radio station in Kyiv broadcast an investigative report about the dealings of one of their commercial sponsors. The next morning the sponsor called and canceled his advertising contract, and one of the station's founders was summoned to the president's office to be read the riot act by the president himself.

The broadcast correctly stated that the president's daughter was working in a management position in that company and that the president's brother-in-law was a managing director of the company. The report also stated that the founding capital of the company had come from one of the overseas accounts owned by Pavlo Lazarenko, the former prime minister of Ukraine who was arrested in the United States on money-laundering charges.

It is hardly a secret that many websites and newspapers in Russia and Ukraine are owned or funded by corrupt officials or people close to organized crime groupings. These websites specialize in spreading "kompromat" (compromising information - true or otherwise) about enemies of their sponsors. The net result is a distorted picture of who is corrupt and who is not.

For example, in the campaign to remove Viktor Yuschenko as prime minister of Ukraine, media owned and controlled by criminal groups close to the president published daily diatribes about Mr. Yuschenko, accused his wife of being a "CIA agent" (she is an American citizen) and denigrated his accomplishments.

The price of exposing corruption is high. The most visible case is the unsolved murder in September 2000 of Heorhii Gongadze, the founder of the Internet newspaper Ukrainska Pravda. Mr. Gongadze took it upon himself to expose high-level corruption in Kyiv.

Unfortunately, his is not the only case of this kind in the former USSR. Many journalists have been killed, beaten, arrested or threatened. This pressure has forced numerous journalists to examine their attitudes toward their own honesty and ask themselves: Is it worth the consequences to expose corruption?

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