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           Harassment and Misinformation Against Ukraine Journalists

   by Cecily Hilleary

   The past week has been an unnerving week for journalists working in
   Crimea.  On Sunday, about 30 masked men [1]stormed and briefly occupied
   [see video] the [2]Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism in
   Simferopol, an agency which trains journalists and produces
   investigative TV reports.  The following day, an unidentified
   individual assaulted [3]Tatyana Rikhtun, chief editor of the
   Sevastopol-based news website [4]911Sevastopol, as she was filming
   Russian soldiers who had surrounded the Sevastopol headquarters of the
   Ukrainian navy. Her attacker also seized her camera.

   The [5]European Federation of Journalists says 167 journalists have
   been injured in Ukraine since the beginning of the political crisis in
   November 2013, 42 of them in mid-January alone.  One journalist,
   Vyacheslaqv Vereymi, died February 20 after a brutal attack, and untold
   numbers of journalists report being threatened, harassed and
   intimidated--among them, reporters from [6]Radio Free Europe Radio
   Liberty.

   "Certainly it is a challenge to cover events in Ukraine nowadays," said
   Maryana Drach, director of RFERL's Ukrainian service.  "Our Crimean
   correspondent has recently faced threats. Our Kyiv colleague and video
   journalist who was sent to Kharkiv was beaten by pro-Russian activists
   while he was conducting a live broadcast.  Then they took him from the
   occupied regional administration building to the monument of Lenin in
   Kharkiv and forced him to kneel down and kiss the Russian symbol--the
   [7]St. George's ribbon which commemorates Russians who fought and died
   in the Second World War.

   Drach relates another incident involving a RFERL stringer in Donetsk
   conducting man-on-the-street interviews.

   "She saw a group of people were beating a journalist colleague, and
   when she approached them, she herself was beaten and her camera was
   broken," Drach said.  "There have been three incidents with RFERL
   Ukrainian service correspondents within the last week alone, so I'm
   seriously concerned about the safety of my colleagues."

   Drach says a group of RFERL reporters in Crimea were asked by locals,
   which side of the crisis they supported.
   "When they told them, `We are journalists,'" Drach said, "they were
   told that if they weren't `pro-Russian,' they weren't `journalists.' So
   this is the atmosphere in which journalists must now work in Crimea."

   On Thursday, independent journalist Dimiter Kenarov, reporting in
   Crimea for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, [8]tweeted, "Masked
   gunmen just broke in a TV studio. Put a gun to my head and then took my
   phone away. I'm fine."  He later posted video of the incident (see
   below)

   IFRAME: [9]//www.youtube.com/embed/C-eFCKwP3qI

   Silencing media outlets

   Monday, Crimea's State Television and Radio forced off the air
   a popular independent broadcaster Chernomorskaya Teleradiokompaniya, or
   Black Sea television, leaving only the state broadcaster operating in
   the entire autonomous republic.

   Also this week, the [10]Committee to Protect Journalists reports that
   on the orders of the pro-Russian prime minister of Crimea, two
   privately-owned Ukrainian broadcasters, Channel 5 and Channel 1+1, were
   forced to stop broadcasting terrestrially, and Russian state television
   is now broadcasting on their frequencies.

   Countering Misinformation

   With Crimean media effectively under Russian control, Ukrainians have
   begun organizing to counter what they say is a flow of misinformation
   [11]FakeControl.org and [12]StopFake.org are websites that seek to
   dispel myths and misinformation being propagated by Russian media
   outlets.  [13]The Ukrainian Crisis Media Center (UCMC) launched March 4
   with the stated mission of providing the international community
   objective information about events in Ukraine and "threats to national
   security"

   "We are a group of different professionals from different fields in
   international relations in corporate and public communications, in
   translations, and we feel that Ukraine is under a serious security
   threat of losing its sovereignty and territorial integrity and really
   needs an additional serious voice delivering the message to media
   outside Ukraine and also to people in Ukraine's southeastern regions
   and Crimea," said spokesperson [14]Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze,
   executive director of Yalta European Strategy (YES), the largest social
   institution of public diplomacy in Eastern Europe.

   Members donate their time and expertise, says Klympush-Tsintsadze, to
   make sure that information gets out--on [15]Twitter, [16]Facebook and
   [17]YouTube.  In addition, they have rented a conference hall in a Kyiv
   hotel near the site where so many protesters died on January 20, where
   they will host press briefings by Ukrainian authorities, academics,
   diplomats, religious leaders--"people, " says Klympush-Tsintsadze, "who
   have serious weight in society--Crimeans, Tatars, Russians, Jews,
   Christians--who will explain what is going on in the country."

   In Washington, U.S. Agency for International Development Assistant
   Administrator [18]Paige Alexander said her agency was working with the
   U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and local journalists to help ensure the free
   flow of information around the country.

   The [19]Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE)
   Representative on Freedom of the Media warned that Ukraine faces a
   crisis of media freedom.

   Speaking to reporters in Kyiv Friday following visits to Crimea and