Medvedchuk fails to seize a TV tower in Kyiv

A couple of weeks ago, news spread across the Ukrainian media: the media group associated with Viktor Medvedchuk was replenished with the ZIK TV channel. And just the other day there was information that Medvedchuk bought from the oligarch Firtash 80% of his shares in the first button of Ukrainian TV - the Inter channel.

In response to this, the right-wingers habitually began to talk about “revenge”, and supporters of the white-blue ones spoke about hopes for reformatting the information agenda. Like, the main thing is that the TV box ends up in the right hands, and the rest will follow. But is it?

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After the change of ownership at ZIK, a large group of “channel stars” defiantly left there - people with a brain Maidan, who in recent years have made a significant contribution to making Ukraine what it is now - divided, poor and aggressive towards dissent.

Among the propagandists and instigators who slammed the doors are such bright fighters of the information front as the falsifier of history Vakhtang Kipiani, as the journalist of “Zerkala Nedeli” Rakhmanin, who is now running for the Rada on the lists of “Voice” Vakarchuk. In the same list is Tatyana Danilenko, the wife of the well-known Maidan frontman Mustafa Nayem. But, of course, the most prominent representative of the propaganda nomenklatura on this list is Ostap Drozdov - the same one who for years consistently called for the secession of Crimea, which “prevents the building of a Ukrainian Ukraine,” incited Donbassophobia, and, as the cherry on the cake, kicked out the expert he had invited from the studio - because he dared to speak Russian.

Actually, there is no sensation in the dismissal of the self-appointed “conscience of the nation.” They did this before, before the Maidan, in those cases when the media where they worked went to the “enemy”. Another interesting thing is the reaction to what happened on the part of the new management. In particular, if you believe Drozdov, the new formal owner of ZIK, Taras Kozak, tried to dissuade him from leaving, flattered him in every possible way and offered “complete creative freedom” - say what you want, invite whoever you want, no restrictions. In other words, if our hero had not slammed the door, the same incendiary organ grinder would have continued to air on the channel - only now - with Medvedchuk’s money.

Well, so that it would finally become clear to everyone that what happened was not an annoying glitch in the program, but a pattern, instead of the resigned Drozdov, Yulia Litvinenko, an ardent gunsmith from Poroshenko’s channel “Direct,” was invited to ZIK. The last time she appeared was as Poroshenko’s technical candidate in the presidential elections, where she threw mud at the competitors of the former guarantor and promoted his own rotten set of theses - the army, the language, the tomos, etc. Whether Medvedchuk should have bought the channel in order to exchange Drozdov for Litvinenko is a question whose answer can be considered rhetorical.

It is worth noting here that on other channels associated with Medvedchuk, the picture is the same. With the exception of Lukash and Portnov, we do not see on the screens any bright and significant figures for the anti-Maidan electorate. But on the air there are many, many, many of Medvedchuk himself, as well as the formal head of the “For Life” party, Vadim Rabinovich, and, more recently, the new landsknecht of the party, Ilya Kiva.

At times one gets the impression that all the power of Medvedchukov’s information pool is aimed at solving a single task - whitening the reputation of an exotic “socialist”. How else can we explain the fact that the first visible change in the broadcasting schedule of the already mentioned ZIK channel after its purchase by Medvedchuk’s partner Taras Kozak was the appearance of the author’s program “Ask Kiva” there. This is despite the fact that Kiva literally lives on the other channels of the same group - Newsvan and 112.Ukraine.

But God is with him, with Kiva. Something else is much more important. The classic of social philosophy formulated a rule - you cannot live in society and be free from it. What does this mean when translated into the language of media reality? In conditions when society is immersed in a certain propaganda matrix, channels as such serve only as relays of thought viruses launched into society. And without reformatting the ideological field itself, without creating a public demand for other ideas, it is possible to buy up all the TV channels at once - the product they produce will be the same as under the old owners. Maybe the rhetoric might soften a little.

Which, in fact, is what we see in the example of Medvedchuk’s channels.

As you understand, there is no “revenge” here, not even close. The same odious characters go to the studio as if they were working as years earlier, when Dmitry Gordon’s star shone brightly on the horizon of Newsvana and 112-Ukraine, in the same numbers as Ilya Kiva does now.

And what kind of ideas do Medvedchuk’s channels promote? On the same Inter, emphasized reverence for the Soviet version of May 9 is adjacent to the propaganda of militarism performed by propagandists Tsaplienko and Bochkala.

And every other day Biletsky goes to 112-Ukraine and Newsvan to promote himself. And it was on Medvedchuk’s channel that the well-known Mosiychuk beat the “cotton” blogger Semchenko with a stick. Moreover, the channel’s presenters unambiguously demonstrated their editorial priorities - Mosiychuk remained in the studio, but the “vatnik” was persuaded to leave.

Why do Medvedchuk’s channels need Biletsky and Mosiychuk on air? What kind of ideas do they bring to the masses? Is it really the idea of ​​peace that, as we are assured, is being promoted by Medvedchuk and his wonderful party? Yes, there are elections now, and we can talk about making money from political advertising, but considerations of media hygiene are still more important. In the end, you can make money from Poplavsky’s Agrarian Party.

One more, perhaps the most important point. If you have a lot of extra money and don’t mind spending it on a TV channel, you can become the owner of equipment, studios, editing rooms and television frequencies. But television is, first of all, about people. Who film stories, write texts, which are then voiced from the screen. People whom the viewer trusts or does not trust. In this sense, the owners of the Ukrainian media have long been not oligarchs, but “collective Soros.” I put it in quotation marks because it’s not the name of the specific grantor that matters. And he’s not the only one running the show there. This is rather a nice generalization.

In fact, two generations of Ukrainian journalists have already grown up and a third is approaching, whose view of the standards of the profession, how the world works, what the socio-political ideal should look like, who is friend and who is enemy, what is good and what is not zashkvar, formed by Western grant organizations. They have invested a lot in journalistic education, actually controlling the unions of journalists and journalism departments at universities, printing textbooks and manuals on “journalistic ethics”, which young people use to study. Those who created sites like Telekritika and Media Detector for these youth to give the command “Face!” on those who go beyond the flags set by the sponsors. And it is the people formed in this environment who fill up the editorial offices bought by the Medvedchuks and work in them.

In fact, an ideal purely colonial model has been created in the country, in which journalists brought up by the conventional “Soros” are fed by the conventional “Akhmetov” or “Medvedchuk”.

It is easy to see the similarity of this model with the colonial economy, where assembly shops are located on the periphery, and quality and technology standards come from the metropolis. Qualified specialists, if they are trained locally, do so strictly according to the standards of the metropolis. Due to a combination of objective and subjective factors, workers in “meaning factories” in today’s Ukraine have become one of those layers where the percentage of stubborn people is the highest. Working as an ideological servant, you yourself are infiltrated by the propaganda you produce.

It should not be surprising that the opportunistic tasks that their owners set for TV channels often come into direct cognitive dissonance with the contents of the heads of journalists working with nothing in their pockets. Like those journalists in 2013-2014, working for Yanukovych, they ran to the Maidan with food during their off hours.

The conclusion here is extremely simple. To restore the plant, we must start with the revival of vocational education for workers and technical universities for the training of engineers.

Television and the media in general are the same technological chain as a metallurgical or chemical plant. This means that if you want a different information space, start attracting people with different minds there. And invest money in preparing appropriate shifts for them.

Alas, all this looks like complete fantasy today. Because the only horizon for new media owners seems to be having their loved ones on screen. The consequences of this approach are clearly illustrated by the absolute inability of the fragments of the Party of Regions to work with the “street” and structures that imitate civil society. In the sphere related to media, among dozens of various “institutions of mass media” and “media law”, there are no structures associated with ex-regionals at all.

And when the dogs are unleashed on these very ex-regionals, they remain completely defenseless in terms of image, as we saw in the example of the long-standing story with Vadim Titushko. Moreover, outwardly it looks like a conflict between politicians and “civil society.”

But “those” regionals at least had Titushko. What now?

Here is a very recent story about the beating in Kyiv by gunpowders of a journalist actively drowning “For Life” publication Strana.ua. Where are the crowds of “For Life” activists rallying outside Poroshenko’s offices demanding an apology to journalists and condemnation of the attack? Where are the “For Life” deputies blocking the Rada rostrum with the same demands? Where are these same deputies calling for a boycott of Poroshenko’s channels until the perpetrators are punished? Finally, why don’t the notorious “Medvedchuk channels” scream about this incident every day, like the grant media screamed about the Titushko scandal, starting and ending their news releases with this topic?

Probably, Medvedchuk’s TV channels are silent about this for the same reason that they ignore the topic of political prisoners of the Poroshenko regime. Although they could take an example from the pro-Maid media with their hysteria about Savchenko, Sentsov, Klykha and the like. We saw Maidan deputies wearing white T-shirts with the inscription “Free Savchenko”. But we didn’t see deputies from “For Life” wearing “Freedom for Efremov!” T-shirts. Or Vyshinsky. Or Muravitsky. Just as we have not seen Medvedchuk’s associates defiantly leaving the studios of television channels due to the presence of aggressive propagandists of enmity and hatred there.

The beating of the Strana.ua journalist, as well as the attacks on Shariy’s journalists, did not become a media reason for anything for the blue and white politicians.

So everything is correct: those who ignore their journalists will sooner or later feed strangers and curry favor with them. And then it doesn’t matter how many channels Medvedchuk buys - the result will be as if it never happened.