 By Viktoria Syumar
On profession, law-making and changed priorities
The line between politics and journalism is very vague. So, no wonder, that some journalists become politicians, however, it never works the other way round. There is some logics about it – the journalistic profession is public, one has to get skills, necessary for a politician too: articulate speaking skills, good looks, being able to persuade people and work with information.
At the same time, people, who used to be journalists and now are politicians, still change their profession. And it apparently changes their priorities dramatically. For instance, once upon a time there lived principle journalist Hanna Herman, who worked on the radio Liberty and published a great number of rather critical, and sometimes even oppositional, materials, condemned any politicians intervening in journalism.
Then she became Mr. Yanukovych’s spokesperson and sometimes told journalists what questions they should not ask the prime minister. Having been elected to Ukraine’s parliament, Hanna Herman got down to law-making and it was quite logical for her to draft a bill on mass media. But the contents of the bill seem to have been written for politicians, but not for journalists – journalists will have to inform the public on performance of political parties, represented in parliament, as this information is socially important.
I wonder why former journalist Herman ignored the fact that journalists have a right to decide what information they want to cover. It is the key assignment of a journalist to be an actually independent intermediary between the government and mass media.
At one parliamentary session Adam Martyniuk said that you could never call journalists former. He meant it was diagnosis. Might the vice-speaker be wrong? |
