Beyond the front line: fighting the information war


Beyond the front line: fighting the information war

Date and time:

Thursday 19 June, 2014
19:00 - 20:30

Location:

Ukrainian Institute London
79 Holland Park
London
W11 3SW

Ukrainian journalists are taking on the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. One of their projects, stopfake.org, is a fact-checking website set up to expose the misleading, distorted, and sometimes completely fabricated reports created by state-owned Russian news-agencies by highlighting suspect stories on its website and explaining which propaganda techniques are being used and why.

Launched in March 2014, stopfake.org is a dedicated fact-checking website run by a group of Ukrainian journalists. The purpose of the stopfake.org community is to check facts, verify information, and refute distorted information and propaganda about events in Ukraine. The journalists started stopfake.org to help prevent Putin’s dangerous false narrative about Ukraine from gaining credibility in Europe and the rest of the world.

This event will be held in English.

Beyond the front line: fighting the information war

FREE

Speaker

Katya Gorchinskaya

Katya Gorchinskaya is an accomplished Ukrainian journalist who has been Deputy Chief Editor of Ukraine’s leading English-language newspaper, the Kyiv Post, since 2008. Ms Gorchinskaya is also the Regional Editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a non-profit network of investigative journalism centres, and a regular contributing reporter with The Wall Street Journal. Her work is widely cited in Western media reporting on Ukraine’s current political crisis. She is also a sought-after commentator at conferences and international and local television programmes on Ukraine’s politics and current affairs. Her varied journalistic experience includes hosting a television programme, Free People, devoted primarily to economic issues.

Speaker

Yevhen Fedchenko

Yevhen Fedchenko is co-founder of the fact-checking website StopFake.org and Director of the Mohyla School of Journalism and Head of the Ph.D. Programme in Mass Communications at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine. He has spent almost 20 years in the media industry, covering international stories for different types of media. He co-founded the Digital Future of Journalism programme for journalists and Digital Media for Universities Internet journalism curriculum development programme. He teaches courses in international news production and factual programming production. His main interests are digital journalism and innovations, journalism education in transitional societies, news standards, and coverage of international politics in media. He has contributed comments to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), BBC, NPR, Public Radio International, Radio Canada International, CBC, and Mashable.

Speaker

Nataliya Popovych

Nataliya Popovych is a co-founder of the Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre. The Ukrainian Crisis Media Centre was launched to provide the international community with objective information about events in Ukraine and threats to national security, particularly in the military, political, economic, energy and humanitarian spheres. During this crisis period, the Centre, on a 24/7 basis, and provides support to all the media who cover events in Ukraine. The Centre functions as a public platform for Ukrainian authorities, experts, representatives of international organizations and diplomatic corps to share day-to-day updates and analysis of the situation in the country.