The President has issued a decree On Supplementary Measures to Improve Information Activity to better the collection, generalization, and delivery of information to the Presidential Administration and the Cabinet of Ministers about the situation in the regions.
The Ministry of Information is “to see to it that the mass media in timely fashion is provided with objective and scientifically grounded analytical information on contemporary political, social, and economic problems,... to reinforce oversight of the maintenance of legislative norms in the information sphere,” etc.
According to Oleh Bai, First Deputy Information Minister strengthening state control over the subjects of information activity (as released by the UNIAR Information Agency) is not the point of the presidential decree; rather the issue is of overseeing legislative norms in the advertising sphere, in propagating violence, etc.
However, independent experts consider this presidential decree to be nothing but a planned action to put local press, television, and radio under the gun in the upcoming presidential election campaign. It is interesting that the decree’s authors expressed their intention to help regional mass media materially since they are now deprived in fact of budget financing and are forced to beg.
However, the current authorities are unlikely to win the mass media over with budgetary crumbs, especially under conditions of financial crisis. They are most likely to use methods well-known from the Soviet Communist past of explaining regional social and economic problems to journalists. And a convincing illustration of how nice and clear the current authorities can do this is the Kievskie Vedomosti eviction.
