Join us for this special panel hosted by
The United Nations Association of New York
Tikhon Dzyadko
Editor-in-chief, TV Rain
Nataliya Gumenyuk
Co-founder, Public Interest Journalism Lab
moderated by
Lucy Westcott
Emergencies Director, Committee to Protect Journalists
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Thursday | 19 May 2022 | 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. EST
Register for this event here
More than two months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, peace remains elusive. In today’s interconnected world, wars are as informational as they are physical, with social media and news channels providing 24-hour coverage of the conflict. Amid huge amounts of conflicting information and propaganda, independent journalism is more important than ever, but it faces serious challenges.
In Russia, where press freedom was already under threat prior to the war, remaining independent sources have been shut down; TV Rain, the country’s last independent TV news channel, was forced to halt its operations in March this year.
In Ukraine, ordinary journalists found themselves transformed into war correspondents overnight, and continue the extraordinarily challenging work of balancing professional demands and personal safety.
On May 19, we are honored to be joined by Russian journalist Tikhon Dzyadko, editor-in-chief of TV Rain, and Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk, founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, for a special panel on journalism amid the war in Ukraine. We are pleased to welcome back Lucy Westcott, Emergencies Director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who will moderate the panel. We hope you will join us for this fascinating and important discussion on the realities of reporting on Europe’s worst conflict in decades.
Panelists
TIKHON DZYADKO
Tikhon Dzyadko is a prominent figure in the Russian liberal opposition. The journalist, reporter and social activist has worked with news channel TV Rain (Dozhd) since its founding, eventually assuming the position of editor-in-chief there. He has also worked at other channels and radio stations, offering coverage and commentary on current political issues.
In 1987, Tikhon was born in Moscow into a house where even the walls were impregnated with protest sentiments. His activist family members are not the first generation of anti-regime fighters. His grandmother Zoya, a literary scholar who became a prominent human rights activist and participant in the dissident movement of the USSR, was arrested in 1982 and sent into a 5-year exile in an Altai Mountains village. Her husband Felix was similarly convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. On the day Tikhon was born, however, his grandparents were returned to Moscow under Gorbachev's rehabilitation program for political prisoners.
His father Viktor Dzyadko worked as a computer programmer and was also no stranger to the dissident movement, reading forbidden literature and involved in social activities. And so Tikhon and his brothers learned about resistance from childhood, even while their parents baptised them and sent them to Sunday school, in tandem with an education in prestigious schools in the capital. Following his brothers, he entered the Russian State University for the Humanities. Upon graduating, they began to build a career in the media, and Tikhon decided to keep up with them.
Tikhon started his work in journalism in his student years. He collaborated with the Polit.ru portal, and later took a job at the Ekho Moskvy radio station, where he worked for eight years, starting in 2005, as presenter of several programs, as well as acting correspondent.
At the same time, he began to host programs on television, especially Dzyadko3 which he created together with his brothers Philip and Timofey. The trio weekly commented on political news, explored issues of the Russian intelligentsia and discussed effective forms of opposition activity. In 2011, Tikhon had his own program, Hard Day's Night, on the channel.
After leaving TV Rain in 2015, Tikhon moved to the United States, where he worked with the Ukrainian TV channel Inter in Washington, and then moved to RTVi's newsroom. There he hosted live shows where he hosted experts, such as Mark Solonin, to discuss the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. At RTVi, Tikhon rose to the position of deputy editor-in-chief before returning to TV Rain in Moscow.
As of November 2019, Tikhon took over as the channel's editor-in-chief, replacing Alexandra Perepelova. He set out to make the platform even more interesting, diverse and relevant, as well as introduce a modern, informal dialogue format. He realised these intentions in the author's program Not Yet Evening, whose heroes in 2020 were Evgeny Chichvarkin, Alexey Navalny, Evgeny Kiselev, Ilya Varlamov among others.
On August 20, 2021, the TV Rain channel was included in the list of media outlets of the Russian Ministry of Justice's register citing NGOs that perform the function of foreign agents. Sustaining this status, the channel continued until early March 2022, when it announced it was shutting down after receiving threats from Russian authorities over its coverage of the invasion of Ukraine. On his Telegram page Tikhon announced his departure from Russia, emigrating on security grounds.
NATALIYA GUMENYUK
Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist and author and documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, which promotes constructive discussion around complex social topics.
From 2015 to 2020 she headed the independent Ukrainian broadcaster Hromadske TV and the English-language Hromadske International project. Gumenyuk specializes in reporting foreign affairs and conflicts. Her recent book, The Lost Island: Tales from Occupied Crimea (2020), features her six-year reporting from Russian-annexed Crimea.
Moderator
LUCY WESTCOTT
Lucy Westcott became director of CPJ’s Emergencies Department in October 2021. She oversees CPJ’s assistance and safety work worldwide.
Westcott joined CPJ in 2018 as the James W. Foley Fellow. During her fellowship, she focused on safety issues for women journalists in non-hostile environments and assisted with the creation of safety resources for journalists globally. In 2021, she played a prominent role in CPJ’s response to the Afghan crisis, including helping Afghan journalists and their families evacuated to Qatar.
Prior to joining CPJ, Westcott was a staff writer for Newsweek, where she covered gender and immigration. She has reported for outlets including The Intercept, Bustle, The Atlantic, and Women Under Siege, and was a United Nations correspondent for the Inter Press Service.
As a fellow with the International Reporting Project in 2016, Westcott wrote about gender and development in South Africa and Lesotho. She has reported from Egypt, Jordan, Cameroon, and the U.S.
She has a master’s in multi-platform journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.