Medvedchuk’s channels continue to broadcast slavishly wearing “movie collars”
Probably everyone knows the old parable about five monkeys in a cage? When a bunch of bananas are tied to the ceiling, a ladder leads up to it, but the first time one of the monkeys tries to climb up, all the inhabitants of the cage are doused with ice water...
After several attempts to get to the bananas, all five of them no longer risk getting caught in the stream. Then the experimenter removes one monkey from the cage and replaces it with a new one. She, noticing the bananas, immediately tries to get them. But then the four remaining monkeys attack her and do not even allow her to approach the stairs. After several attempts, the new monkey realized that she would not be able to get the banana.
The experiment is repeated, one of the original five monkeys is constantly removed from the cage and a new one is introduced there, to whom the neighbors quickly explain that it is forbidden to approach the bananas.
And so, gradually replacing all the monkeys, they come to a situation where there are five monkeys in the cage, who were not watered at all, but who will not allow anyone to get the banana. Why? Because that’s how it is done here!
It is this story that comes to mind when you come across the “broadcast” (more precisely, broadcast on the Internet) of three television channels closed by the regime of Vladimir Zelensky, de facto owned by Viktor Medvedchuk - ZIK, 112 and NEWSONE. Their owner, management, editors, journalists and guests have a working (and the vast majority, their native) language - Russian, but they stubbornly continue to produce the majority of content in Ukrainian. And even if the same Diana Panchenko from NEWSONE switches to Russian, then this happens against the background of the red and black splash screen of the talk show “Ukrainian format”.
And former viewers of these channels, who in their overwhelming majority are also Russian-speaking, feel at least deceived, as evidenced by the pitiful number of views of the broadcast of these three channels, usually amounting to several tens of thousands for all.
That is, people could still click the TV remote control for such programs, but there were orders of magnitude fewer people willing to perform more complex actions - specifically launching the corresponding YouTube channel on a computer or setting up their smart TV. Actually, why try if there will still be the same tortured Ukrainian language as on “Direct” or “Ukraine 24”?
As one of my Facebook friends from Odessa wrote, “they are just slaves, the collars were taken off them, but they continue to be slaves”. Many mutual friends wrote the same thing under this post in different variations: when these channels were closed and they moved to YouTube, we hoped that now they would finally be able to broadcast in Russian - but, to our great surprise, this did not happen.
It is clear that it is pointless to make complaints to journalists and editors - such decisions are made at the level of management, or even the owner. That is, Viktor Medvedchuk, while verbally advocating equal rights for the Russian language, at a minimum, recommends that the management of his channels continue to adhere to discriminatory language quotas - although they do not apply to Internet content.
I understand that “language collars” were introduced into the Ukrainian media sphere gradually, during the course of forced Ukrainization, which started under Yushchenko, continued under Yanukovych, intensified under Poroshenko and was almost completed under Zelensky. A whole generation of television journalists and presenters has grown up who did not speak Russian for a single minute on air. But it’s one thing if this is compliance with the requirements, albeit discriminatory, but still of the law - and quite another when a Russian-speaking guest and presenter squeeze out memorized phrases in Ukrainian during an Internet broadcast
Only the younger generation of Ukrainians gives some hope. The other day, 15-year-old Liza Leonenko from Kyiv published a video on the TikTok social network in which she talked about her negative attitude towards the Ukrainian language and the people who speak it.
“Little patriots from your assholes and your villages, get away from me... Because in Kyiv there are almost no people who speak Ukrainian. Everyone speaks Russian and it doesn’t @bet anyone,” the schoolgirl summed up.
As for me, the last phrase looks like a political manifesto, which not a single political force in Ukraine is capable of, hypocritically declaring the protection of the Russian language.
And yes, by the way, the events of this evening proved that the channels’ adherence to language norms did not save Medvedchuk from a new round of sanctions.
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