MPs to debate national status of DOM TV on 22 February

DOM

On February 22, the Verkhovna Rada will consider in the second reading the draft law # 4487 on Amendments to the Law “On Ensuring the Rights and Freedoms of Internally Displaced Persons”. This is said in the agenda of parliamentary sittings for February 22-25, according to Detektor Media.

If the MPs support the changes mentioned in the bill, the TV channel will get into the Universal Program Service, which is provided free of charge to Ukrainians. Currently, the Universal Program Service includes the Suspilne (public broadcaster) and Rada TV channels.

Thus, the state-run Russian-language broadcaster Dom, which was set up to broadcast to the temporarily occupied territories, will de facto acquire a nationwide scale and be able to compete with private TV channels.

We will remind, on March 1, 20 2020, the state-run TV channel Dom which was created on the basis of the UATV foreign broadcasting channel began broadcasting. 

The main purpose of the channel, as it has been declared, was to provide an informational assistance for reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories.

According to the Ukrayinska Pravda, the zone of confident reception of the signal of the Dom channel barely reaches occupied Luhansk.

Dom can be watched in the free territories of Ukraine via satellite, on the Internet and on OTT platforms, it is gradually gaining the status of "all-Ukrainian Russian-language state TV channel."

In 2021, the State Enterprise “Multimedia Platform of Ukraine” (which includes Dom and UATV TV channels) received UAH 977 million from the budget.

In 2022, UAH 362 million will be allocated from the budget for the foreign broadcasting platform.

As IMI reported, on January 26, the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy instructed the chairman of the committee Mykyta Poturayev to address the Chairman of the Parliament with a proposal to withdraw the bill #4487 from plenary sessions until the committee considers the validity and compliance of the above amendments with the requirements of the Rules of Procedure of the Verkhovna Rada.

The Media Movement spoke out against the strengthening and reorientating of the state-owned media (including the Dom and Rada TV channels), which have recently taken place at the behest of the head of state, his team and the Servant of the People parliamentary faction. We emphasize that the attempts to develop a number of state-run TV channels for the Ukrainian audience in parallel with the Public Broadcasting system are a backtracking on democratic reforms and contradict Ukraine's international standards and commitments..

A number of NGOs are outraged by the attempt to restore state broadcasting in Ukraine and warn MPs against passing the #4487 bill, which extends Dom's broadcasting to the entire country.

This is said in the statement of the organizations, which was published on the CEDEM website.

“We emphasize the inadmissibility of expanding Dom's broadcasting to the entire territory of Ukraine, as this is a restoration of state broadcasting as opposed to the Public Broadcasting system, which has remained underfunded for five years", - the statement reads. 

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