Covering war today, new and old in reporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Raymond Aron used to say that each generation needs to live through its own war because it always forgets the terrible tragedy of the previous one. For the French political scientist and thinker, the mantra that "never again" was merely the corollary of the traumatic experience of those who had been lucky enough to survive the war of their time. He recognised, however, that by dint of bleeding to death every few years, mankind had learned to seek by all means solutions that would prevent direct confrontation with war, resulting in death, injury, lifelong crippling and the enormous material losses that all warfare entails.
Well, the reality is that, since Aron made those confidences to me in 1973 in Paris, against the backdrop of World War II, the planet has not ceased to suffer partial armed conflicts on practically every continent. From a global news perspective, such tragedies affected only the populations that had the misfortune to suffer them, and only came to the forefront of the news when they affected a major Western power, namely the United States, the United Kingdom and France. In fact, it was only when the Balkan war broke out, i.e. in Europe, that the long period of peace that began after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 came to an end.
Now, from February 2022, Europe will once again be the scene of a major war, which projects from Ukraine the great struggle to change the world order, hitherto governed by the universal acceptance of the laws and rules of international law, consolidated through multilateral institutions.
As in any conflagration, in addition to the military confrontation, the great information war is being waged, which as always is decisive not only for its influence on the unfolding of events on the battlefields but also for the shaping of the narrative for the future negotiations that will put an end to the war.
In terms of global influence, three major conflicts have preceded the current war in Ukraine: Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States was involved in all three, all of which ended in American defeat or non-victory. Vietnam was the last conflict in which war correspondents enjoyed a great deal of freedom in their reporting. It is true that, as in many other wars, there were always those who dispatched their writings from the bar of the Saigon Hilton, after collecting the testimonies of colleagues or local hustlers able to infiltrate that cloud of special envoys, but most were able to interview more or less freely with the huge cannon fodder of those replacement soldiers, black and Hispanic in large numbers, who had been promised American citizenship if they survived the carnage of Vietnam.
Aware of the great influence that journalists had had on the change in American public opinion, which forced the White House to get out of that hornet's nest by conceding victory to communist North Vietnam, the more than five thousand special envoys sent to Iraq were forced to write their articles based on official sources and to use exclusive CNN images, which were then distributed worldwide. Such was the European anger at the time that the European Commission, then chaired by Jacques Delors, together with the socialist governments of France (François Mitterrand), Italy (Bettino Craxi) and Spain (Felipe González), decided to create Euronews as a pan-European multilingual continuous news channel to counter CNN's de facto monopoly.
As for Afghanistan, the practice became widespread for correspondents to be handpicked for embedding in various units of both American troops and their allies. With very rare exceptions, the journalistic accounts recounted these experiences without most of them being able to do the work and capture the Taliban rebels' vision of the conflict, which would finally return to power after the disastrous departure of US troops, twenty years after the punitive operation decreed by President George W. Bush.
This brings us to the current war in Ukraine, which has many different characteristics, both in the handling of information and in the work of the war correspondents deployed there.
The first of these distinctive points is that social networks, technology and mobile devices have given an enormous role to the Ukrainian citizens themselves, who provide a huge amount of images and first-hand information to the special envoys. This gigantic torrent of information obviously requires on-the-spot verifications by the reporters, in addition to those of the basic newsrooms, both for the authentication of images and for the production of maps and cartography, which in this war have undergone considerable development, popularising generalised knowledge of the regions, cities and battlefronts where the bombing and fighting is taking place.
The emergence of the platforms has also helped giants such as China's Tik Tok to change its role as a provider of small entertainment videos into a platform for informative content, which has been used, especially at the beginning of the war, both by the major traditional media and above all by the new digital media. Thus Tik Tok has come to succeed the so-called youtube war in Syria. The suspicion that Tik Tok, like all Chinese companies, may be in one way or another in the service of the Chinese Communist Party, has led to the banning of European American politicians from using the network.
War correspondents, whether from NATO or allied countries, enjoy the cooperation of the Ukrainian authorities, whether to embed themselves on a rotating basis in combat, demining or damage monitoring units, or to capture images and conduct interviews with casualties of all kinds. Ukrainian security is careful to ensure that the enemy, i.e. Russia, does not identify locations, weapons or fighters that could be targeted by the missiles that are literally ravaging the country.
A characteristic point, not least in my opinion, is the presence of very senior war correspondents, "because in the newsroom the younger ones had declined to take the risk", as two famous journalists from major media confessed to me, with more than grey hair under their helmets. Perhaps this is a symptom of the change in society in Europe and America, where heroism may be abandoning its former status as the supreme value. Let us also say that, on the contrary, and in view of the serious economic difficulties many media are going through, Ukraine's war is that of freelance journalists, that is, those who go out at their own risk and get paid per piece published. They are not few, indeed, and they keep alive the flame of action journalism: seeing, checking, talking to the protagonists and witnesses, verifying and sending the result of all this.
No less important is the multidisciplinary nature of the correspondent, who must be willing to tell his or her story or news in different formats. It is true that, although it has subsided, the struggle between media outlets to be the first to publish a story has not ceased, but in exchange, the war correspondent is required, especially for audiovisual formats, to be constantly updated, which requires an extra effort, in addition to the traditional work of seeing, asking questions, contextualising and reporting what is happening.
From the countries that support Ukraine there is evidently a significant flow of information about what Kiev and its allies are talking about, saying and even planning. The United States and the European Union voluntarily banned Russian media outlets, especially Russia Today and Sputnik, depriving themselves of the version that the Kremlin wants to project to the international audience. Moscow registered as a criminally prosecutable offence any statement by journalists or citizens that contradicted the lexicon or the official version of the "special military operation". Many media outlets have had to close their correspondents, and those that remain are under severe surveillance, which can lead to random and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment at any time.
Since the beginning of the war, President Vladimir Putin's regime has launched a crackdown on independent online media, starving the Russian population of any foreign news, while arresting and imprisoning dissidents. As verified by the BBC's Monitoring Unit, the digital rights watchdog Roskomsvoboda, the Kremlin blocked 7,000 websites in the first six months of the conflict, including those of major independent media and human rights groups.
The BBC itself proceeded to experiment with dozens of searches on Russia's main search engine, Yandex, one of the big stars of the local tech scene. The results of their experiment, using a virtual private network (VPN) to make it look like they were searching the internet from Russia, reveal an alternative reality dominated by Russian propaganda about the war, obscuring any mention of the atrocities in Bucha, Lyman or Mariupol, for example.
Propaganda and disinformation are thus also a perfected feature of this war, in which verifiers therefore have more work to do than ever before. In this regard, and in the wake of leaked Pentagon intelligence reports, and beyond highlighting Ukraine's weaknesses and uncertainty about its potential counteroffensive, they have also highlighted that the US spies on allies and adversaries alike, which may not exactly help to keep coalition strength and confidence in sharing critical information intact.
The war in Ukraine is being fought with 20th century weapons, but correspondents are increasingly using and developing 21st century technology. Many of them from different nationalities and countries are reaping the year's top journalistic awards: World Press Photo, International Press Club, Madrid Press Association, Cirilo Rodríguez, and many more. They are the witnesses of what is happening now, whose story will help future generations to learn the story of history. And, if they wish, they can contradict the wise Raymond Aron and then stop living their own war.