Mediawatch: Ukraine's war and the media

Some are already calling the invasion of Ukraine a turning point in world history. How we react is shaped by the media coverage - and most of what we get comes from outlets in countries that have taken sides. Does this matter? And how are both sides making the media a part of the battle plans?

Mediawatch asks two offshore experts in international journalism and conflict.

Our government’s initial contribution to Ukraine’s defence was cautious and pretty meagre: an RNZAF Hercules plus aircrew and intelligence experts to Europe, and some spare equipment to Ukraine itself. 

Commentators with little military experience or knowledge didn’t shy away from opining on what ordnance and artillery Ukraine could use from us. 

“We've given blankets, old tat from the secondhand cupboard, nine personnel. We've been dangerously slow and we've been embarrassingly resistant to weapons,” Mike Hosking told listeners on Newstalk ZB. 

(If he had been in charge, it might not have been a rapid response though. “There's a couple of skirmishes on the border and some posturing going on, but I think someone's going to step back,” he said on air just days before Russia invaded)

But he was not the only on-air armchair arms expert calling for more - and more lethal - support from New Zealand. 

Subsequently, the government did step it up late last month by paying into a fund to buy arms for Ukraine from the UK.  

This time, the media mainly backed the government’s approach. 

An editorial in Stuff papers nationwide rated the government‘s response as “well judged” two weekends ago. 

"Those who have argued that this marks the end of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy have got it wrong,” said the unnamed editorial writer. 

“We have not turned into hawks overnight . . . and the morality of assisting Ukrainian defence is clear”.  

In the New Zealand Herald, political pundit and lobbyist Matthew Hooton reckoned the government was just pragmatically lining up with Five Eyes partners. 

“We’ve chosen Washington, London and Canberra - not Moscow and Beijing,” he wrote. 

Politics lecturer and commentator Bryce Edwards proclaimed our independent foreign policy was “virtually dead".

“For the first time since the 1930s this country has sent troops to a European war,” he said, overlooking World War Two campaigns in Italy and Greece among others.   

He also identified “a growing hawkish atmosphere” here, citing “the number of yellow and blue flags flying.”  However, the flags could simply symbolise solidarity or even just sympathy, rather than aggressive intent. 

Edwards also cited “the revulsion caused by the atrocities shown nightly on the TV news” -- and while opinions of pundits half a world away are of little consequence, the news coverage people elsewhere get certainly does have an impact on them. 

Nightly news impact

But sometimes, that has happened in unexpected ways. 

TVNZ’s US correspondent Anna Burns-Francis recently told Newstalk ZB the celebrification of Ukraine’s president had an odd political outcome in the US.  

“The Republican Party did an almost a complete u-turn (when) they watched Volodymyr Zelensky become this overnight sensation with his social media messages,” she said. 

“All of a sudden they said: “Oh, Putin actually is the bad guy. We should be helping Ukraine here.”

She also said while the visceral images of death, destruction and the displacement of millions have moved global news audiences in the first weeks of the war, it won’t always be that way. 

“The problem is that it will become a long bloody battle almost like a siege and where do we go when the world diverts its attention and isn't so interested? The further that conflict moves back towards Russia . . . the less interest there'll be because the threat to the West subsides. I am such a cynic -- but that's what I think will happen,” she said. 

Where our news comes from 

As ever here in New Zealand, it’s established Anglo/American-based news outlets feeding our media the reports of conflict: on air, the likes of the BBC, CNN, ITV - and in print and online The Telegraph, The Times, The Economist, Washington Post and others. 

Plenty depends upon the appetite of those outlets to stick with the story in Ukraine - and in Russia too.  

So does it matter if the news we get comes from a country which has also taken Ukraine’s side? 

“I don't think the Ukrainian crisis is quite as complicated as an election campaign or a political issue where there's lots of different sides. The UN voted 141 to 5 to condemn it. So I don't think we really need to worry about the idea of ‘sides’ too much in this situation,” says Melanie Bunce, a New Zealander who is the head of journalism at City University in London.

“Having said that, we do want to think a little bit about who the news is being made for and whether it's best suited to a New Zealand audience,” said Bunce, who is also Professor of international journalism at City University.  

“It’s sad we don't have as much original foreign reporting coming from New Zealand but it's extremely expensive to have a foreign correspondent abroad. The organizations that do have the resources to do the reporting . . . are primarily catering still for a western audience."

"Some of the news coverage we've seen has been quite ethnocentric  - about how surprising it was to have a crisis there because it's ‘civilised’ and ‘European,’” she told Mediawatch. 

“What is that saying about where other crises happen  - and the kind of bias running through the coverage?”

“In our journalism department, we have Russian students and Ukrainian students. I think our news coverage is being fairly open and understanding of the complexities faced by everyday Russians as they navigate the situation. So on the one hand, I agree Putin is very much being characterised as an absolute villain.” 

“At the same time, I hope, we are seeing enough nuance in the coverage that that isn't characterising Russian citizens. We are seeing coverage of the dissidents as well, and the people that are trying to take a stand,” she said. 

Interference: the picture in Russia

One of her colleagues at City University is James Rodgers, a former BBC correspondent in Moscow who first went to Russia as a language student in 1987 in what was then Leningrad. 

In his recent book Assignment Moscow: Reporting Russia from Lenin to Putin, he said people who are interested in Russia deserve much more nuanced coverage. 

Few countries have experienced as much change as Russia has in three decades, he wrote.  But yet few people have been there to see it for themselves. 

Few Westerners know much about the economic chaos and the humiliation of the Yeltsin era which made much if a whole generation of Russians bitter and disappointed. 

“That is something that Vladimir Putin understood very well and he constructed his own entire political edifice around that. The western journalism of Russia has had a disproportionate effect on forming people's opinion,” he said. 

With international journalists kicked out or frozen out by Russia  - and the news media under heavy control by Putin's regime - how can we get any reliable sense of what the Russians really think and might do next? 

“If we think about the extent to which media has become a weapon in this war . . . the Russian government has successfully in the 21st century been able to impose 20th century-style media controls. It is very, very hard to get access to international media in Russia,” James Rogers told Mediawatch. 

“Most of the information people get here is from state TV, which portrays the conflict in Ukraine as a fight against fascism,” said Rodgers. 

“Whatever one thinks of RT (formerly the Russia Today TV channel) or Sputnik  - or any of those Kremlin-funded propaganda channels, it is useful for us in the West to be able to see  what audiences in Russia are being told,” he said.   

Russia and the PR/propaganda battle 

Rodgers reported both of Russia’s wars in Chechnya, in 1995 and again in 1999. 

Partly because of a lack of awareness of how the media works, he and others were allowed to report whatever they saw and travel with troops of both sides the first time. 

It didn't look good at all for the Russians.

“We would pass the local militia, we would pass Russian frontlines, and then we would meet Chechen fighters. There's a lot of coverage of civilian suffering and civilian casualties. This is quite hard to imagine in Russia now, but in the 1990s, after the end of communism, there was also political will to have a free press. A lot of very bold and brave Russian journalists were doing very critical reporting of this hamfisted and clumsy and murderous military campaign,” Rodgers told Mediawatch.  

“Go forward a few years to the second Chechen war, you saw much stricter controls. It is, of course, no coincidence that by the time that second war began in the fall of 1999, Vladimir Putin was Prime Minister of Russia - and was very shortly to become president of Russia for the first time,” he said. 

Another turning point was the Beslan school siege in 2004. Viewers around the world - including on TV One here - saw Russian forces bringing it to a violent end. 

“That really was an absolute disaster,” says Rodgers. 

“But already then there were attempts to try to control who was getting there. Anna Politkovskaya, a very courageous Russian investigative journalist who was actually shot and murdered some years later - was a great critic of the war in Chechnya” 

“I met her some weeks afterwards and she thinks she was poisoned on a flight to Beslan in an attempt to make sure that she wasn't going to be there because they knew how critical her reporting would be,” he said. 

In Assignment Moscow, Rodgers details how subsequent Russian attacks on Georgia and Crimea - orchestrated by Putin - were accompanied by costly international PR campaigns. In 2008, Georgia and Russia hired PR companies located just a few blocks away from each other in Brussels. 

“The Georgians had a very pro-Western government, and we had this really odd spectacle of a President - whose country was at war with a much more powerful and larger neighbour - spending huge amounts of time live on television. They'd obviously accepted they were not going to win a military battle so they really, really focused on winning the battle of world public opinion,” Rodgers told Mediawatch.  

“But at the same time, the Russians were keen to get their accounts out there - and I don't remember any other time when the Russian authorities were quite so eager to engage Western journalists. This was clearly on the advice of their western PR advisors.” he said. 

“Thinking back now, it is quite unimaginable to think that the Russian Foreign Minister (Sergei Lavrov, then and still today) would talk to a Western media outlet before their own tame ones,” James Rodgers said.  

Enduring images 

Melanie Bunce has extensively researched the media image of Africa and how reporting of crisis and conflict and corruption over decades past drowned out reports of progress in recent times and left an impression that was almost impossible to shift. 

Around the world, people still regard former Yugoslavian republics as some sort of war zone even though more than two decades has passed since the last of the wars there ended. 

Does she fear this could happen with Russia and Ukraine too? 

“When you're only exposed to a single story of any place that does start to dominate how you think about it. But, perhaps counterintuitively, I think it's most likely to happen once the coverage dies down,” she said. 

“Right now, we're seeing wall-to-wall coverage on the sports pages, on the cultural pages  - everywhere. So we're actually . . . thinking of Ukraine in a very full rounded way in all of those different dimensions.” 

“But I believe the news coverage will taper everywhere, and we will start to get just low-level updates about what's happening. And if you aren't following it closely, that will become the only story that you hear about Ukraine, especially if you're a distant audience, there is certainly a good chance that that will come to dominate how people think about Ukraine for the medium term.”