To understand what is the Telethon In Ukraine, the best thing is to imagine what its equivalent would be in Spain: a 24-hour programme broadcasting the same news, supervised by the Government, on TVE, Tele 5, Antena 3, Cuatro and La Sexta. This has been happening in Ukraine since February 2022, when the Russian invasion began. The Ukrainian presidency decreed, due to the exceptional nature of the situation, the creation of a unified news programme that covers most of the day and is broadcast by public and private channels. Media groups that rejected it lost the option of having a broadcasting licence and operate on cable or internet platforms. Two and a half years later, citizens are turning their backs on the news programme. Telethon considering it an instrument of propaganda.
The leading Ukrainian polling centres regularly ask questions about space, and with each passing month the credibility of the project is diminishing. On September 9, the latest survey by the Razumkov Centre on this issue was published: 51% of respondents believed that the project is a good place to start. Telethon is no longer relevant as a source of information, compared to 17% who think it is. The rest do not know or do not choose either option.
Andriana Kucher is a presenter on Channel 24, a television channel that is not part of the Telethon. Channel 24 news programmes are broadcast online, it is the audiovisual medium with the most followers on YouTube in Ukraine (7.6 million). The channels that are not included in the programming of the channel are: Telethon do not have access to broadcasting on digital terrestrial television. The most notorious cases have been that of Channel 5, owned by former president and businessman Petro Poroshenko, and that of Espreso TV, both media critical of the head of state, Volodymyr Zelensky. “The Telethon “It made sense in the early stages of the war, because the situation was chaotic and it provided security, but just three months later it became something negative, it became propaganda,” says Kucher, adding: “It has no in-depth reporting, nor a diversity of opinions, which is why I hardly watch it.”
“The key problem of the Telethon “It has lost its weight because it has become propaganda that avoids reporting on the government’s mistakes,” says Petro Burkovskii, director of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation: “In itself it is neither good nor bad, it is just another tool during the war. But the public has considered it to be an instrument in the wrong hands and often for negative use.”
Burkovskii, like Kucher, points out that the programme was a useful tool at the beginning of the invasion to counter Russian disinformation, which sought to destabilise the population by convincing it that the army was not fighting and that the government had fled. Based on data from another survey from 2024, Burkovskii points out that currently only 36% of Ukrainians have the unitary news programme as their reference source of information. To reverse the situation, the director of the Foundation for Democratic Initiatives believes that it is time for control of its programming to be transferred to professionals from Suspilne, the public radio and television corporation.
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The editorial staffs of the networks participating in the Telethon The media are responsible for different broadcasting slots. The plurality of opinions is slightly greater when the news is produced by public television. This was confirmed by a study published last April by the Centre for Media Plurality and Freedom, an agency of the Robert Schuman Centre of the EU. The author of the document, Dariia Opryschko, pointed out that while public media are obliged to give voice to opposition parties, no critical voices are invited to private channels. Opryschko noted that “journalistic standards are frequently violated in the media”. Telethon”.
The content is decided in meetings between representatives of the networks, but with the direct intervention and supervision of the president’s office, as revealed by journalist Simon Shuster with several examples.in The Showmanone of the most prominent books published to date on Zelensky’s handling of the war. Shuster was able to spend the first year of the invasion with the president and his team. “Nothing like it had existed in Ukraine since the Soviet era, and many of its critics have lamented that it reeks of war propaganda,” the author writes of the book. Telethon.
Criticism from Brussels and Washington
The European Commission, in a document from November 2023, already warned that Ukraine’s path to EU membership needs to address the lack of plurality in television: “Ukraine needs to consider measures to ensure plurality and independence of non-online media, in particular television, in the post-war period.” “The Russian war of aggression has had a profound impact on media plurality,” the European Commission concluded.
More severe was the report of the United States Department of State on the situation of human rights in Ukraine published last April: “The martial law decree allows for further restrictions on media and press freedom. Telethon “The television news media has allowed for an unprecedented level of control over prime-time information.” The U.S. government analysis includes a recurring warning from human rights and journalistic institutions in Ukraine: “The government has blocked, banned and sanctioned media outlets and journalists it believes undermine the country’s sovereignty. Some voices critical of the government have been blacklisted from government-controlled programs.”
Opryshko points out that the media diversity in Ukraine has declined, but the situation is better in terms of traditional newspapers, online media and radio. The problem, he says, is in television. Three channels lost their broadcasting licenses “without any basis in arguments”, simply because they were against the unified news. Telethonsays this expert, is one of the reasons for “the massive shift of the audience to social networks”, especially to anonymous information channels on Telegram. For a year, Ukrainian authorities have been warning of the danger posed by the use of this application among military personnel – it is the most common communication system among troops – but also of the access that Ukrainian citizens have to pro-Russian information channels.
The president’s office has insisted that the Telethon It is precisely a reliable source of news in the face of Russian disinformation. This is what the new Minister of Culture, Mikola Tochytksii, has argued. He said in parliament on 6 September that it was essential to maintain it “because it is important that there is a single voice that tells what is happening”. The minister conceded that it is necessary to reform the programme “to find a way to make it interesting for the public”.
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