Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly proclaimed in 1991 enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine provided the basis for the development of independent Ukrainian journalism. However, traditional media in Ukraine in the late nineties, chose the path of tabloid journalism, having not managed to get rid of post-colonial dependence on the technologies of the Soviet propaganda machine. Independent journalism has developed in an alternative or informal way. On the one hand, official Ukrainian journalism has Soviet genetics with a traditional attitude to journalism as propaganda to establish the power of man, elite, idea or product, not as a means of communicating with the local reflection of the world in its diversity. On the other hand, more then two hundred years of history of Ukrainian alternative journalism is evidence of the permanent search for forms of existence of the discourse of human rights and social activism in the conditions of political pressuring. As the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 in Ukraine showed, in the face of political changes, not traditional media, but the public, becomes a protagonist of social life reality, and cultural practices become soft power of promotion democracy values. In this study, I outline the ways that helped cultural activists with their alternative practices to re-open discourse of independent journalism in the Ukrainian media. In the research, I use the method of discourse analyses taking into account concrete cases of cultural public events.