Olha Danyliuk, journalist, Volyna Gazetta, Ukraine on the panel “History and future of uncompromising commitment to democracy, human rights, and media freedoms”, at the Conference “Defending Democracy and Human Rights”, December 12, 2024 Skopje.
We are facing this very pragmatic problems, it’s something that we face every day and it’s not about theory. We face problems with democracy and threats to media in real life, with real problems that we see every day, as I mentioned before, with psychological stress, obviously a shortage of staff and so on.
I would also like to mention that about lack of funding, because as I mentioned before too, I am journalist of western, northwestern local media and for example, I would share with you that there was a study in 2023, 2024 by Media Development Foundation. This is a Ukrainian center for development of independent local media and they said that, for example, local media in western and central Ukraine receives less financial support than frontline regions.
Also, for example, in our media, we were thinking what we can do because for example, only 45% of income of local editorial offices in western regions of Ukraine have funding from donors and they can obviously work freely and independently and in comparison, for example, 73 of regional media in northern Ukraine, 87 in south and 93 in eastern Ukraine, which is obvious because this region suffered the most from Russian occupation, from Russian invasion, also missile attacks and so on.
But this is a very bad comparison, I would say, because the whole Ukraine obviously suffers a lot in different ways from war that we are facing today and what it causes, what’s the problem, right, with this underfunding of western, also parts of Ukraine in terms of media, is that because it creates news deserts.
What are news deserts? I think you all know here that news deserts is when people in certain regions don’t have access to information freely, so they are in a bubble. They don’t know what’s happening and it happens a lot in my region too, because, for example, northern parts of our region that borders Belarus, they don’t have access to Ukrainian media freely.
In Belarusian media, we try to reach to people from northern parts of our region with our newspaper. We try to talk to them, we try to build some dialogue.
Also I would like to share, I think it’s important to say, that the Ukrainians face these horrible crimes against humanity, horrible crimes against our democracy face-to-face, and this is, for example, in the two years and nine months, in the start of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was 762 crimes against journalists and media committed in Ukraine, and also since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war, 329 Ukrainian media outlets have shut down, according to several studies of Ukrainian NGOs who are supporting independent local media.
Camera: Atanas Petrovski/ Igor Chadinovski
Editing: Arian Mehmeti
Photo: Robert Atanasovski/CIVIL
CONFERENCE, FULL VIDEO, Streamed live on December 12, 2024:
https://youtube.com/live/1f2Eo1ZXEQ0
PHOTO ARCHIVES: #DefendingDemocracy, Panel 1: Democracy under Siege
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.994398716055531&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy, Panel 2: The Rise of Far-Right Nationalism
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.995019619326774&type=3
#DefendingDemocrcy Panel 3: Countering Authoritarianism
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.995771969251539&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy conference, Panel 4: Commitment to democracy
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.996548069173929&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy Conference (overall)
https://www.facebook.com/media/set?set=a.993726732789396&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy – workshop and meeting with the press
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.992924672869602&type=3
#DefendingDemocracy PRESS CONFERENCE
For more information on the Conference, please visit the special website DefendingDemocracy
