Press freedom during the 1994 and 1999 presidential elections in Ukraine: a reverse wave?

Abstract

THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have reshaped the institutional context for media development in Ukraine. Against the backdrop of changes in the political, economic and legal spheres, the media set out on the path of transformation from a party adjunct to a democratic institution. As evidenced in numerous articles and reports, the route to media democratisation is full of roadblocks and U-turns in Ukraine. 1 In the early 1990s a common approach to an appraisal of media reform was to contrast the newspaper market in the post-Soviet era with that under the communist regime. 2 In the light of those studies, a tangible improvement in the extent of press freedom was observed in Russia and Ukraine. Notwithstanding the theoretical value of that approach, it is necessary to move beyond the ante/post-communism dichotomy to unravel the dynamics of media development in the 1990s. This article seeks to provide a cross-time analysis of media development in post-communist Ukraine. Two time points—the 1994 and 1999 presidential elections—are selected for the study because such major events, when a lot is at stake, illuminate most vividly the strengths and weaknesses of media development in the post-Soviet era. Drawing upon Huntington’s discussion of democratisation processes, this analysis can serve as a probe for evaluating the possibility of a reverse wave in the sphere of mass communication. Since there are few empirical studies that investigate the extent of press freedom in successors to the former Soviet Union (FSU) across time, the contribution of this article lies in filling the gap and enriching the debate on media democratisation in the 1990s.