It was ten hours into his marathon press conference back in October 2019 that the recently elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke about de-oligarchisation of the media, something he’d previously said would be a priority during his presidency.
“Owners of TV stations and other media outlets should be businessmen, not politicians,” he told journalists. “They shouldn’t be influencing editorial policy of any mass media.”
Last month, Zelensky signed a decree to take three oligarch-owned TV stations off air. It provoked a national debate about acceptable limits to free expression. For some, it was huge news: the president was acting decisively to stop Russian disinformation. For others, the decision was not subject to enough scrutiny, and other means should have been used “that were less of a threat to media pluralism”.
