As we promised, we are publishing the best pieces of the
contest named The Press and the State conducted by the Institute of Mass
Information (president Alla Lazareva and director Yuliya Sabri) together
with the international organization, Reporters Sans Frontieres, and the
Europeen French dailies’ trade union , with assistance of the Embassy of
France in Ukraine and the A Travers l’Europe Association. I, as a jury
member, would like to say a few words about the difference in perception.
For example, the French cartoonist Pierre Wiazemski (incidentally, a descendent
of Russian tsars, who seems to have some personal plans about our Vorontsov
Palace confiscated long ago by the Soviet regime) was more fond of another
Vozniuk cartoon we publish here. It depicts, as you see, oligarchs who
keep newspapers like dogs, walking them out to brag about their new possession.
This must be an international situation. But we wanted to represent the
situation in Ukraine, so preference was given to Vozniuk’s sketch which
portrays a king with a television set in one hand and a newspaper in another.
(See the next issue of The Day).
Differences also arose about the cartoon of Yuri Kosobukin.
For most of the jury, its character is a newspaper killer loading his gun
with lines. But it seemed to Wiazemski this is a suicide.
“Look what a miserable and unshaven face he has,” he put
forward his argument.
“You know,” said I, “all Kosobukin’s characters are unshaven
and miserable in a way.”
“But this one is quite happy...,” Wiazemski found a grinning
colonel in one of Kosobukin’s cartoons.
I, as a journalist (while the jury comprised even an animated
cartoonist), was especially touched by the work of Mykola Kapusta. This
negotiating table prepared for a meeting between the representatives of
the state and newspapers is the most precise representation of the current
plight of Ukrainian periodicals. And the tablecloth rolled up to the table
middle even provokes a fit of light, but hysterical, laughter.
As to the rest of the works, they evoked no deep differences
of opinions.
I wish the press would not turn a saint into the devil,
as it does in Oleh Smal’s sketch, or supply the truth in the interpretation
of Yevhen Samoilov, but be kind of a warning bell cast out of newspapers
by Oleksandr Bazylevych, so that we could rob the nomenklatura of the umbrellas
under which they freely pass through any newspaper rainfall in the fantasies
of Ihor Lukyanchenko (Den/The Day). And let our life be slightly
better than the garbage can in the vision of Volodymyr Kazanevsky (and
not only him).
№11 April 04 2000 «The
Day»
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mandatory. © "День"
