RSU Graduate, Radio Personality Viktors Pupiks Takes Us Behind the Scenes of Latvian Radio

In the conversation, I sense that he has high professional standards and that the young radio journalists he teaches benefit from. He studied at Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) and graduated from both the Journalism bachelor’s programme and the Communication and Media Studies master’s programme, which helped him to develop broader thinking.

During the Barricades in the early 1990s, I remember we had the radio on all the time in our house. It played an important role then and it plays an important role during this war too. What is the mood over at the radio studio nowadays?

It’s very hard to get a sense of the mood at the moment, plus the pandemic isn’t over yet, which means that many people are working from home. Our correspondents are young and do not understand what it is like when war breaks out. They are very far removed from the WWII and have little to no memory of the Soviet era. One of my colleagues is now at the border between Poland and Ukraine border, another one is at the Ukraine-Hungary border, and a third is currently on the Ukraine-Moldova border. I feel how difficult it is for them to deal with their emotions, how difficult it is to talk to refugees. The more experienced ones try to support, comfort, and encourage them in various ways. A new colleague was worried about experiencing problems with getting through on air. I told her to take it in stride, because she is currently working in very difficult conditions outside Latvia. There is a psychologist on staff at the radio, because journalists need help now too.

Those who lived through the Barricades draw parallels. Recently, a colleague said that you can feel the former fighting spirit and there is a feeling that we, as journalists, are important because we are reporting on what is happening in Ukraine.

But I can’t say that the entire collective feels this way, because there are people here who were just born in the 1990s – everyone experiences the current events differently.

I assume that you do not have experience in war journalism either.

No, I don’t, but I experienced that very first night of the invasion. I woke up earlier than usual, at 5:00. I checked Facebook and the first page that pops up is Latvijas Radio. I read the news and I thought that I couldn’t be seeing clearly. I knew that I had to get up. Slowly, I performed my morning routine and started planning where I would send my people, because everything had to be re-planned. But I also felt a great peace inside myself, because it felt like the right thing to do. I know I made a mistake by turning on the TV the next day. I had to work that weekend and it only caused emotional chaos! What I was seeing on TV were images of new-born babies lying next to one another like dolls in a bomb shelter, some still on artificial respiration systems. These had to be worked manually, because they didn’t have the right equipment. That was the moment that tipped me over the edge. Now I avoid watching television because I need to keep a level head.

As a journalist, have you noticed anything new and surprising in this information war?

Nothing surprises me because the Russian side has been trying to influence its media all along. Should I be surprised that they have now eliminated the remaining outlets who were trying to report objectively? Am I surprised that the Ukrainian side is only reporting one type of content? Also no. I have close friends in Ukraine whom I follow and who send me Whatsapp messages on a regular basis. The media is currently upholding a level of pathos there, but that is probably as it should be. At the same time, there are areas where they are losing and we know it, so it is important for us as a third party to report the events comprehensively and from both sides.

I have relatives in Ukraine, as well as in Russia, and I can see from talking to them that even in Latvia there is a somewhat distorted picture of the situation in Russia. The idea that socity is about to collapse, that there are massive protests, that they have nothing to eat, and that civil war is about to start is nonsense.

Everything happens gradually. There are people who have not heard about these things yet, and a part of society does not understand what is happening in Ukraine. So, I follow not only our media, but also a lot of YouTube channels to get a sense of what it is like in Russia.

Do you think journalism like this is justified during a war?

I would probably not say that, and I would like to praise my foreign editors who report from both the Ukrainian and the Russian side and try not to only highlight what is good for one side. I am grateful to my colleagues who are trying to illuminate the bigger picture. I feel like direct quotes from Russian politicians are missing, I hear them too little. At the same time, I hear a lot from Zelenskyy and other Ukrainians, but I hear very little from people living in Russia. It is confusing.

Have you been working in journalism since you were a student?

Not really. In the beginning, I didn’t have a very strong feeling that this would be my profession. Every new lecturer we had asked: ‘Do you see yourself working in journalism?’ Every time different people raised their hand, because apparently no one was absolutely certain. But I also didn’t get into journalism because my horoscope said I should, like one on my course mates did – she just didn’t know what to study next.

In secondary school, we were taught economics by an entrepreneur who owned a business. This was in the early 2000s. She knew what the State Revenue Service and a balance sheet were and. how to write a business plan. She said that the role of so-called communications people will grow and that more and more companies will hire them – if not as staff employees, then for individual campaigns. She talked about public relations. When I was in 12th grade, it was popular to go to Riga for preparatory courses. I decided to go to RSU every Saturday for several weeks. In the summers I worked on a construction site to earn money. The courses about PR and journalism that I attended were extremely interesting. I applied for both programmes. I didn’t get into public relations programme, but I was accepted into the journalism programme.

I was completely unfamiliar with this environment, and I didn’t know any journalists in Riga. In my third year of studies, I met Aidis Tomsons. I became like an assistant to him. An opportunity to train in radio language came up, as Latvijas Radio sets high language standards. Currently, due to staff shortages, people don’t uphold high enough language standards are also accepted. When I started working, my “problem” was my dialect – I speak the Highland Latvian dialect, because I come from Selonia. The intonations in how I pronounced the broad and narrow “e” and “ē” sounds had to be corrected.

Don’t you feel like you sacrificed a part of yourself by making these speech corrections?

No. I feel like I have gained something, because I know and understand the differences that linguists talk about. They don’t teach that in school. When life asks you to change something, then of course there is a dilemma, and you need to have a conversation with yourself about whether you are ready to do it. It was my choice, even though at first I didn’t think I would be able to deal with it. I haven’t lost my dialect, but now I speak a more literary Latvian. My teacher Aina Matīsa advised me to go to Selonia as little as possible, because ‘as soon as you’re there, you pick everything up again’.

You are an RSU graduate and you also have a master’s degree.

It seemed very meaningful to continue studying. A bachelor’s degree teaches you the basics, but you are still seen as a very unfinished product.

Studying in a master’s programme gives you an environment where you can develop much deeper thinking and start to be seen as a peer, or at least an equal, in the study process. I got this feeling.

In addition, my workplace hinted that getting a master’s degree would be good for me.

Is radio your only job and can you say that you are loyal to the medium?

Radio has been my main workplace since 2007. I worked in investigative journalism for seven years, but then I got a big change and switched being a news producer. However, I would not say that I am exclusively loyal to radio. At least I have never looked at my workplace and my profession in those terms. The most important thing is whether I like or dislike what I do and whether it suits me. Only those who can visualise what other people can’t see can work in radio. Not everyone can do it. On television, for example, no one has to explain that a man in a red jacket and a bright hat walked by, but on radio you have to. It’s the details that create the picture that the listener sees in their mind.

A great radio programme is one where each sound is in the right place and each sound has its own justification. Listeners have to be left with the feeling that they want to hear more.

This is something you can learn, but in practice I see that people also have to possess certain inner qualities, a visual and audio perception of the world. This is a quality that people either have or don’t, which means that either they can report well or not. That’s why, for example, people who come from written journalism have a hard time adjusting to the radio. It’s also important to be able to admit that you don’t know something – I don’t know everything and I’m still learning. The big economic crisis hit in 2008 when I was working on the radio programme Krustpunktā. There was an urgent meeting and everyone was talking about inviting “fuktuks”. I remember thinking, ‘I have been working here for two years and I don’t any economist by that name’. It turned out to be an abbreviation of the Financial and Capital Market Commission, known in journalistic parlance as the “fuktuks”.

It seems that you almost have to use your sixth sense to feel the material and then be able to pass it on to the listener. Would you agree with the statement that radio journalism is very demanding?

Experienced journalists taught me that it is important to learn not to offend people with your voice on the radio. It is important to remain yourself and read the texts without any specific intonation. This could reveal a journalist’s attitude.

I would agree that the voices I hear on the radio do not impose anything on me, but rather let me decide for myself what I think about what I have just heard. Radio has had one of the highest levels of public trust for years, probably because people feel this honesty.

Of course, I can manipulate what I say or what I keep silent about, but if a person is not sincere, the listener will certainly feel it. Everyone has their own voice and their own attitude, which can be felt in the volume and tone of the voice and in the choice of words.

Finally, what would you recommend listening to for those who want to study journalism or who want to get more information about what’s going on? What do you listen to yourself?

• Journalist Katerina Gordeeva currently interviews Russian intellectuals and journalists (YouTube channel) who have lost their jobs after the clamp down on media. She is my favourite because, like me, her other profession is documentary journalism.
• Meduza – a news channel about how Russian society lives and will live.
• The channel Redakcija and journalist Alexey Pivovarov, who used to work for NTV before it was taken over by the Kremlin. This media outlet was once the first to report seriously on the war in Chechnya.
• Yury Dud just gave a good interview about the war with the columnist Boris Akunin.