Former Pioneer Press reporter and editor Brian Bonner, whom I profiled last year after he took the editorship of the Kyiv Post, has been fired from the Ukrainian paper after refusing to knuckle under to the owner’s censorship.
At least that’s the view from this Facebook page from the Post staff, which is on strike supporting Bonner. Ownership has posted a statement calling the claim “nonsense,” saying Bonner was dismissed for not making the paper’s Ukrainian/Russian version as “editorially captivating and interesting” as the English-language edition.
The controversy is a big enough deal that U.S. Senators have complained to the Ukrainian government about it. It is also a window into two worldwide issues: grain shortages and state influence over media.
The short version appears to be that the Post ran an interview with Ukrainian Ag Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk in which he defended price controls on grain. The move has angered farmers who will get a reduced price for their crop; food prices have soared amid a bad worldwide harvest. (Food prices are believed to be one impetus behind the Middle East revolts, for instance.)
British-based owner Mohammad Zoohar reportedly ordered Bonner to kill the interview, saying the paper would be “liquidated” if it ran. The Facebook page also claims Zoohar called Prysyazhnyuk a “good friend” who was angered by the contents.
The Post’s response is that Zoohar’s objection was to “speculative questioning without any factual back up. There were no calls from government officials to remove the interview.”
The Post staff now says Zoohar’s representatives were pushing for more supportive coverage of President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration for the past several months, which they resisted.
In the MinnPost interview last May, Bonner didn’t mention Zoohar specifically but noted, “Most media outlets in the nation are owned by a handful of billionaire oligarchs who call the shots with government and in the economy, most often to the detriment of most Ukrainians. So there is still a lack of critical, independent and investigative journalism.”
For more on the firing see ZIK.com; Hetq.com, and Bonner’s Facebook page.
Having worked with Brian, I’d go with his version of events.
Who is Zoohar? The profile was as flabby as this article. Blech!