The First Casualty

There’s no shortage of news about the war in Ukraine, but how much of it is true?

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to stomp out Ukraine’s independence, hospital-by-hospital, block-by-block, child-by-child, has underscored the emotional power of raw video and audio recorded and shared, sometimes live, by everyday men and women in the wrong place at the right time.

    Consider, for example, the indelible image of a family killed while trying to escape the violence, the videos of hospitals and apartment blocks destroyed by Russian artillery and missiles, the Ukrainian girl singing “Let It Go” in a bomb shelter. All those and an infinity of others have brought the carnage and cruelty of war not just into living rooms, but also into the hands of people around the world.

The Biden White House has noticed, and last week invited 30 leading TikTok influencers to a virtual briefing on the war, The Washington Post reported.

    Other images on YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Twitter and elsewhere, however, have raised a question that’s growing more urgent as time passes and technology becomes more sophisticated: What is real and what is not?

    There was the video of a young Ukrainian woman in a red stocking cap explaining how to drive what appeared to be an abandoned Russian armored personnel carrier, the smiling blonde instructor a further insult to Putinesque Russian masculinity.

    Then there was the Russian jet fighter shot down by the Ukrainians, and the Russian soldiers parachuting into Ukraine, which got some 25 million views on TikTok.

    The driver, however, is a Russian auto mechanic named Nastya Tuman, and the video of her was made last year.

    The downed Russian jet? That was a Libyan fighter shot down over Benghazi in 2011. The Russian paratroopers were real, but they were participating in a military exercise near Rostov in September 2016, when the video was first posted on Twitter. Another supposed Ukraine war image was taken from a video game.

     Few people have the time, temperament or resources to uncover fake news, but journalism companies, fact-checking organizations and educational groups such as the News Literacy Project are doing yeoman work around-the-clock helping separate fact from fiction. A quick Google search will verify that.

    As an old saying in journalism goes, however: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts it shoes (or in a more common version, its pants) on.” Fittingly, that observation is often attributed to Mark Twain, although no one is sure he really said it.

    Today a lie can be retweeted or liked around the world thousands of times before even the best fact checkers can use reverse image searches, study the weather and position of the sun and use other tools to catch up, and by then it’s too late to straighten out millions of unwitting consumers.

Then, too, in some cases, as Simon and Garfunkel pointed out 53 years ago: “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

    The disinformation game favors the offense, and it’s grown more complicated in this age of information overload. CNN reported that Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has spawned what amount to social media double agents — Russian posts that claim to expose fake Ukrainian posts that in fact were made elsewhere, often involve training exercises and have nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine. ProPublica has unearthed other evidence of phony Russian fact-checking.

    The goal is simple: Sow enough confusion that people abandon all efforts to find the truth and call the whole thing off. The Russians have been doing that for years, for example issuing multiple contradictory accounts of who downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014. (An official Dutch investigation concluded that pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists using a Russian-supplied BUK anti-aircraft missile were responsible.)

Winston Churchill famously said that, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”. In Putin’s Russia, however, there is no truth, only battalions of lies.

    To further complicate matters, though, not everything that emanates from Russia is false, especially since Putin’s attempt at a cyber curtain has holes, and not everything Ukrainians post is true.

    There’s no easy way to clean the sea of polluted information, and the frantic competition for speed, scoops, clicks, likes, retweets and celebrity has done nothing to improve the quality of today’s journalism, as the industry’s dismal trust ratings show.

    None of that relieves readers, viewers and listeners of the responsibility to view all the information they consume with critical eyes, ears, noses and brains. Who said it, and what’s her or his agenda? Does it make sense? What’s the supporting and contradictory evidence? Is there some sin of omission? Is it true?

    That said, there’s still a vital need for old-fashioned, on-scene shoe- (or boot-) leather reporting. The breadth, depth and context of the courageous coverage of the Ukraine war by established news organizations demonstrates what sets the best of them apart.

    There are bloggers and tweeters — folks such as Olga Tokariuk — doing incredible work. They, too, are accountable for what they publish, broadcast, podcast, post and tweet. But unlike freelancers, some news organizations still have more resources— reporters, editors, fact-checkers, even lawyers — to help ensure that they get it as right as humanly possible. Credibility is their currency, literally as well as figuratively, and it’s a precious commodity these days. Consumers are, as Great White put it, “once bitten, twice shy”.

    Granted, for all their resources, news organizations are still human, and they err, sometimes monumentally.

    In Ukraine today, though, turn to the words and pictures of The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, The New York Times’ Lynsey Addario, Clarissa Ward and Matthew Chance from CNN, or Sarah Rainsford from the BBC, to name unjustly just a few of the journalists who are risking — and in the case Sunday of Brent Renaud, losing — their lives in the face of a subject to whom the word “Press” on a Kevlar vest either means nothing or can be translated as “Target”.

It will be standard practice to seek advice and collaboration from others for posts on Making Sense of a Mad Mad World. This one was inspired by a virtual seminar with the Williams College Class of 1971. Thanks to organizer Steve Brown, to all the participants, and especially to my classmate Rob Farnham and to my former colleagues Clark Hoyt and Jeff Trimble for their corrections and suggestions.