If I had known where I would fall, I would have put some straw underneath. This Ukrainian saying describes the reaction of the public to the disaster in the Strait of Kerch. Over the past 10 to 12 years, after heated debates on the ecological and economic viability of the Odesa oil terminal, the Ukrainian media have never discussed such things as the likely consequences of an oil or sulfur spill, the disastrous condition of the vessels that ply the Azov and Black seas, or the low skills of ships’ crews.
It is no wonder that American commentators are saying that if an event does not make it into newspapers, it never occurred. The same applies to the potential threat of an environmental disaster on our seas. Practically nobody has written, discussed, or filmed anything about this. Accordingly, the government has not adopted any serious measures to forestall a disaster. Now we are reaping the fruits of this silence.
If we continue to keep silent, the powers-that-be will once again direct their efforts at resolving only one problem: who, Russia or Ukraine, will pay for the damages? Instead, they should be analyzing the technological impact on the sea, and drafting and implementing recommendations as to how this impact can be reduced and/or neutralized.
The lessons of the Kerch disaster have yet to be analyzed, but one of them can be learned instantly: environmental information is vital and no less important than information in the spheres of business and politics.
The fact that Ukrainians do not have access to a sufficient amount of proper ecological information has been repeatedly raised by environmentalist activists. But now they can also confirm it. The international journalists’ organization Article-19 and the NGO EcoPravo- Kyiv have studied access to ecological information in Ukraine and are now drawing up a detailed report to this effect. As you may guess, the results are quite dismal.
In particular, the researchers came to the conclusion that formally there exists a system of public access to ecological information in Ukraine. It is even enshrined in laws and institutionalized in the shape of special government agencies, a system of public outreach plans, reports on the fulfillment of these plans, civic boards, Web sites, etc.
But in reality this system works only formally. There is only the pretence that there is access to information. Meanwhile, it is furnished incompletely, untimely (although formal deadlines may be met), incorrectly, or is not furnished at all. The same applies to public involvement in the formulation and pursuit of an ecological policy.
The exception is when the interests of bureaucrats and the public coincide, for example, when members of the public involuntarily help one bureaucrat in his struggle against another. Another exception is the bona fide work of bureaucrats with whom an NGO has good personal contacts.
In the opinion of Hanna Hopko, a Lviv-based environmental journalist and a participant in this study, what could provide an impetus for this is a few well-publicized court actions against bureaucrats who have failed to properly carry out their information-related duties.
As for journalism in general, there are very few journalists that write regularly on environmental topics. To trace the causes of this phenomenon, one should conduct a special analysis. At the same time, ecological problems are not popular with the media. The exceptions are the newspapers Den/The Day, Dzerkalo tyzhnia, and, until recently, Ukrainska stolytsia, which three months ago changed from being an “analytical weekly” to a “glamour weekly,” and a few regional publications. Television does not show any ecology-related programs at all. Or should we apply this name to the endless round of imported popular-science programs on the Tonis channel? Ukraine is tired of watching the life of hippopotami.
On the whole, journalists have enough ecological information, and they do not complain about its shortage. But, as Ukrainians say, cheap fish makes a bad broth. More often than not, newspaper articles and radio and TV broadcasts are superficial and wrongly accentuated. It is pointless to expect a journalist to discover the essence of an environmental problem, and when somebody tries to delve deeper, they come across the problem of obtaining full and verified information.
Television journalists have a special problem. They cannot visualize a problem unless they understand it, which immediately lowers the quality of the material.
Journalists are not taught ecology properly at higher educational institutions, or the teaching of this subject is of a purely academic nature. As a result, they do not understand the problem. This subject should be made more popular among journalists by means of competitions, workshops, press junkets, special publicity actions, etc. Journalists sometimes show their terrible ignorance of ecological problems. At the same time, the best journalists opt for business-related and political journalism — they are better paid there. Meanwhile, nobody asks readers or viewers what they want to read or watch.
This creates a vicious circle: deprived of high-quality information on the environment, people do not pay enough attention to this issue, while the media, seeing that readers, listeners, and viewers are not interested, do not consider it necessary to devote sufficient space on air and in print, as well as sufficient funds in their budgets for high-quality coverage of environmental issues.
