Ukraine’s national public service broadcaster UA:PBC maintained the high quality of its weekly political talk show Countdown, increasing its audience by 30% in the last six months and reaching 30 million viewers. It was also praised by Ukrainian watchdogs as the most balanced and unbiased political talk-show on the air. Countdown became a launch pad for young newly elected MPs and public officials, who were able to discuss crucial political, economic and social issues with independent anchors and experts showing the viewers a realistic picture (positive and negative steps) of reforms in Ukraine.

The Toronto TV team produced content for Instagram TV, YouTube and Facebook. Using Instagram TV feedback tools, they carried out a series of fun polls to test their audience’s skills in recognizing disinformation, hate speech, hidden advertising, clickbait, and bad journalistic practices. For example, Toronto tested the audience’s knowledge about the journalistic standard of verifying information with more than one source before posting vlogs about violations of this rule. Only 37% out of 5,300 respondents answered correctly. In a similar test conducted at the end of the project, 88% of the 7,200 respondents gave correct responses. The ability of respondents to identify hidden advertising also improved, with correct answers increasing from 49% to 80%.

Most of the investigative reporters contribute to the anti-corruption reform by exposing corruption schemes at national and regional levels. Internews partner Regional Press Development Institute improved the professionalism of 49 regional investigative reporters through three webinars and provided an opportunity for 338 national and regional journalists who participated in the 11th Annual Conference for Investigative Journalists on December 13-15, 2019 to share their practices and experiences.

A new draft law On Media (No.2693) was registered by parliament on December 27, 2019. Internews partners Center for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM) and the National Association of Media (NAM) were members and organizers of the law’s working group set up by the Parliamentary Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy. The bill consolidated the basic principles of regulation of the media sector, adapts Ukraine’s media regulatory sector to European norms, updates registration and licensing systems, introduces the concept of community media, describes media co-regulatory mechanisms, and strengthens the role of the national media regulator (National TV and Radio Council). The process of creating the draft was praised by Ukrainian civil society and the Council of Europe as being transparent and open to public consultation.

The IUA team and a group of 252 volunteers identified 3,325 suspicious profiles and worked with Facebook to close the accounts. So far the Facebook team has deleted around 5% of the suspicious accounts identified by TrollessUA. Facebook is hampered in its ability to take down suspicious accounts by its internal and privacy policies, but the team is working with them to find ways of improving responsiveness to their data.

The Academy of Ukrainian Press introduced six new media literacy modules at 129 schools throughout Ukraine; the modules were downloaded 13,403 times from the AUP media literacy portal. For the very first time, a workbook for the school textbook “I Explore the World” was approved and financed by the Ministry of Education and Science as a mandatory supplement and will be used at schools in the 2019-2020 academic year.

which people could use to see which of the candidates most closely aligned with their own views. The quiz used an algorithm that was based on correlating users’ interests and positions with the information provided by presidential candidates to the Central Election Commission (CEC). As a result, the quiz tended to throw up inconsistencies in the ways the candidates formally represented themselves in their official manifestos, and how they presented themselves differently depending on the region in which they were campaigning. The quiz created a national stir because it pointed out the fact that some of the presidential candidates had failed to mention important issues in their campaign platforms, such as where they really stand on membership of the EU and NATO. Nearly 105,000 unique users took the iVote quiz.

encouraged young people to get out and vote, with five Instagram influencers reaching 1.5 million people in two weeks. Singer and TV presenter Volodymyr Dantes got the highest number of individual views (over 120,000) with a video from his car as he was driving to Kharkiv, where he is registered as a voter. In the video, he described how this would be the first time he would be voting in an election, and called on young people to get off the sofa and exercise their right to vote.

A group of long-term USAID U-Media and MPU partners started a movement called Media for Conscious Choice on their own initiative, gathering 65 national and regional media outlets, non-governmental organizations, and journalists in Ukraine under a banner of honest journalism, rejecting requests for hidden political advertising, and refusing to publish black PR (the practice of paying for broadcasting and publishing negative stories about competitors). While media solidarity under the previous regime of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych was galvanized under the banner of the Stop Censorship movement, in recent years Ukrainian media organizations have decried the lack of initiatives to come together and mutually respect professional media standards and ethics. In a major positive step forward for media self-regulation and standards, this new movement was created in February 2019, just in time for the presidential elections. Media for Conscious Choice has recently received 15 more requests from media outlets wanting to join the movement.

showcased the presidential candidates and tripled the public broadcaster’s audience for its time slot, reaching 8.5 million viewers in the two weeks running up to the first round vote. It was praised by Ukrainian media watchdogs and media commentators as being by far the most professional and impartial political talk show of all of the national TV channels, filling a big gap in what was otherwise a very polarized campaign. While other political talk shows were selective in the candidates they invited (often depending on the political preferences of the owner) with anchors asking soft-ball questions and giving unlimited time to reply, the Countdown stood out because it identified the top 18 candidates according to reliable polls and invited all of them to attend; the anchors, experts in the studio and audience members asked tough questions; and the candidates were held to strict time-limits in their responses, monitored by a big studio chronometer.

(UA:PBC, Hromadske Radio, Internews Ukraine, Detector Media, Suspilnist Foundation, Information Press Center, Mirror Weekly, Institute of Political Information, Kharkiv Press Club, Ternopil Press Club, Donetsk Institute of Information) produced high-quality engaging TV, radio and online content about the elections, the reform process, and other important issues that reached over 10 million Ukrainians during this period.

which people could use to see which of the candidates most closely aligned with their own views. The quiz used an algorithm that was based on correlating users’ interests and positions with the information provided by presidential candidates to the Central Election Commission (CEC). As a result, the quiz tended to throw up inconsistencies in the ways the candidates formally represented themselves in their official manifestos, and how they presented themselves differently depending on the region in which they were campaigning. The quiz created a national stir because it pointed out the fact that some of the presidential candidates had failed to mention important issues in their campaign platforms, such as where they really stand on membership of the EU and NATO. This prompted complaints from some candidates (e.g. Anatoliy Hrytsenko’s team in Odesa complained to IPI that the candidate did support Ukraine joining NATO and EU, although he did not mention this in his official manifesto to the CEC). Nearly 105,000 unique users took the iVote quiz.