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The Ukrainian Elections: A Monitoring Report The European Institute for the Media, based in Dusseldorf, fielded a team of observers to study the Ukrainian elections during late March, 1994 for the first round, and again on April 11 for the second. There are approximately 38 million registered voters in Ukraine and about two-thirds voted. The following is excerpted and adapted from the report issued by the Institute team on March 28, 1994, shortly after the first round of the Parliamentary elections. Presidential elections are scheduled for June. The extent to which media coverage of the Ukrainian election could ever have been fair to voters, candidates and media was affected by the incompleteness of the electoral law. Article 28 of the broadcasting law states that “candidates for deputy shall have the right to use free-of-charge the state mass media, in a way of providing them with equivalent and equal in measure, time for broadcasting.” Accordingly, the bloc of time provided to each of the electoral districts on state radio and television was divided by the number of candidates running in that district. Yet the desire to fulfill the obligation of the law on the part of the state broadcast media led to anomalies in the coverage of candidates; in the many constituencies with large numbers of candidates (one of them has 31), candidates had insufficient time to present themselves. The obligations of the law also limited the value of the party debates organized by the state television company: firstly, a decision of the Central Electoral Commission denied party leaders who were also running as candidates the right to appear in these debates (although not before some leaders had in fact done so); and secondly, the organization of the debates has been rigidly structured to give each participant equal amounts of time, thus minimizing the possibility of meaningful questioning and argument. The financial clauses of the law are open to criticism. The spending limit of six million karbovanets for each candidate seemed inadequate in relation to the quoted prices for media space/time. Quotes for television time varied from USD 5 per minute (Lviv) to USD 100 per minute (the most expensive price quoted in Kharkiv); newspaper space was quoted variously at between 2,000,000 karbobvanets per page (the lowest price in the Crimea) and 200,000,000 karbovanets per page (the most expensive price in Kiev). This has encouraged candidates to circumvent the law in order to obtain the media coverage they consider necessary for their campaign. In order not to be seen to be breaking the law, candidates have often been featured in the media without the fact of their candidacy being mentioned, but rather in their professional or official capacities: this is an avenue which is particularly open to those already in positions of authority. More worrisome, the members of the team found it extremely difficult at times to distinguish between paid and editorial time and space, and significant testimony has been received from candidates and media personnel that money has changed hands during the campaign, or that other terms have been reached, to ensure coverage of certain candidates. Loopholes in the law and confusion over the competence of the various commissions—leading to the passing of complaints “up the ladder”—have made the correction of violations difficult. Of those media-related complains which have been submitted to the Central Electoral Commission—including the appearance of party leaders in some of the debates on state television—and of which the team learned, a large proportion remained unresolved during the time the team was in Ukraine. The circumstances which prevail in Ukrainian media, and the general economic situation in Ukraine as a whole, render the widespread commercialization of editorial space a likelihood. Journalists are not highly paid, and their editors-in-chief face enormous financial difficulties in running their media outlets; in the printed press, for instance, the shortage of paper, inflation, prohibitive newsprint prices, sharply falling circulations, the requirement of advance payment for distribution and the small advertising market are all factors which undermine the ability of the media to be properly independent. These problems are compounded by the passive approach of much of the Ukrainian media. Credit is due to those commercial broadcasters (notably in Kharkiv, Kiev and Lviv) who devoted large amounts of time to the elections without being under any legal obligation to do so. There has, however, been little critical analysis of candidates, their programs, and their party affiliations. This may be linked to the fact that the campaign itself has been so individualized, but also seems to indicate an undeveloped understanding of the role of journalists as intermediaries between voters and candidates. In Odessa, the election campaign in respect of two opposing groups of candidates was accompanied by considerable personal venom and acquired an unsavory and very public antisemitic tone. Among the more disturbing aspects of the instrumental use of antisemitism in a fierce local power struggle is the fact that insofar as media people have been critical, they have restricted themselves to condemning and questioning the way in which material such as recording of conversations was acquired and have not objected to the antisemitic use to which it has been put. The project manager for the European Media Institute was Dr. Alexei Pankin, Director of the Institute’s East-West Cooperation Program. For further information, contact the Institute in Dusseldorf at 49-211-90-10-40 (tel) or 49-211-90-10-456 (fax). |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
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