If journalism is a profession that everywhere exists in the shadow of power (e.g., Champagne 2005; Neveu 2017), does its ethics then depend on how power networks are organised, and on how power is perceived to operate? In February 2014, the Maidan revolution in Kyiv brought down Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Eight years later, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with the goal of replacing president Volodymyr Zelensky with a more pro-Russian figure. In the intervening eight years, Ukraine’s politics was characterised by conflicts among several factions of plutocratic rentiers, and between the rentiers and their opponents: the rising lesser bourgeoisie, and the national-liberal intelligentsia led by Western-supported reformers. In this context, Ukrainian journalists often became key protagonists in, rather than detached reporters of, their country’s political struggles. Split between mainstream broadcasters—outlets predominantly owned by several oligarch-controlled media...
In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting
Abstracts
This article examines the relation between political economy and ethics of news journalism in post-revolution, pre-invasion Ukraine. It explains why journalists working for the independent and the mainstream media evaluated their proximity to political and economic power in radically different ethical terms. In both cases, the journalists’ chief ethical problem was the subordination of their work to the material interests of powerful patrons. But independent and mainstream journalists interpreted interests differently: the former, as a dangerous pollutant; the latter, as an unavoidable limitation. Consequently, distinct forms of ethics arose among them. Among the employees of independent media, it was an ethics of values, which foregrounded the voluntary, disinterested pursuit of pure ideals free from compulsion or material reward. Among those working for mainstream, oligarch-owned broadcasters, it was an ethics of pragmatism, which emphasised practical compromise between powerful interests and high professional ideals. I argue that “pragmatism” thrived among those who, unable to challenge the domination that they laboured under, sought to turn it to their own ends, and accepted rewards for their complicity. In contrast, pure “values” dominated among the minority of those who found a credible way to reject such domination, which placed them however in a materially precarious position in their profession. Through these two forms of ethics, journalists navigating distinct structural positions in Ukraine’s media economy could meaningfully realise social goodness and square their autonomy with social determination, in ways that made use of, but were not reducible to, the resources available to them.
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Keywords :
éthique, intérêts, journalisme, médias indépendants, médias traditionnels, valeurs, UkraineExcerpt
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Bibliographical reference
Taras Fedirko, “In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting”, L’Homme, 243-244 | 2022, 61-94.
Electronic reference
Taras Fedirko, “In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting”, L’Homme [Online], 243-244 | 2022, Online since 01 January 2026, connection on 17 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/43812; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.43812
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