A familiar question: Is the media fair in its Ukraine coverage?

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As the Ukraine war drags on journalists are looking for new angles, and so we have reached the point of introspection. In this way the world’s latest major flare-up has made up ground on the veteran Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its endless kerfuffle over media bias. Ours is a turbo-charged era indeed.

Appearing on the Tel Aviv-based international channel I24, I was asked whether journalists have an obligation to be more impartial than they have been, by and large, in covering Vladimir Putin’s invasion. It is something I’d often pondered  at AP during coverage of conflicts, where I often found myself pushing for more analysis and dot-connecting. It was never more so than with the Israeli context, with its competing narratives, fuming partisans, and genuine moral complexity.

On the show I argued that there is a difference between fairness and impartiality – as, for example, impartiality toward mass murder would be inhuman. Proponents of the Anglo-American school often deride European reporters for excessive personal perspective, but perhaps the opposite extreme is also not quite right (and what’s worse, often both feigned and unbecomingly self-righteous).

“One of the challenges (in) journalism is to not just say ‘one side says this and the other says that’  –  because one side might be lying, or lying more, which (occurs) more often,” I said. “Putting things in context, as opposed to what’s being called bothsidesism, is important in complex events.”

A case in point discussed on the show might be Russia (the undisputed aggressor) somehow blaming Ukraine for the disruption of shipments of its own grain (causing a crisis in Africa and elsewhere) when in fact the Russian navy is blockading Ukraine’s ports. I suggested that when the situation is bewildering, access limited and propaganda deafening, one might consider who benefits.

In this case, Russia has an evident interest in creating a global grain crisis in order to compel African and other countries to sound the alarms. That in turn might embolden those around the world (like Henry Kissinger) who in the name of realpolitik would like to see Ukraine concede a little – perhaps territory in the Donbas? – to enable Russia to stand down with a victory narrative of sorts.

Here too, the Israeli parallel is interesting. Israel is an oppressor in the West Bank, yet also by far the more democratic and introspective party. Both sides are to blame for the failure of peace talks, but my assessment is that the Palestinians benefit  from failure to partition the Holy Land (as long as they’re willing to suffer for a few decades more), because a non-Zionist binational state will result.

My effort to connect the dots concludes that this is the goal, it is why they’ve not usefully engaged with peace offers, and the Israeli right is too blind to see it and so unwittingly assists with West Bank settlement expansion, deepening the mutual entanglement. It is not a popular analysis – not among the foreign press and not among partisans of either side. But that doesn’t make it wrong, and it does have its supporters.

With Ukraine, it certainly could also be argued that the presence of so obvious a bogeyman as Russia’s Vladimir Putin — with his diabolical toolbox of poisonings, sham trials, election interference and other monkey business — causes the media to paint too rosy a narrative of a heroic and scrappy Ukraine. Ukraine is far from a perfect democracy: it suffers decades-long corruption and excessive oligarch power, a politicized judiciary with dubious arrests, some reliance on far-right extremists and more. Perhaps such shortcomings have been underplayed because Russia, with its brutal police state and naked imperialist ambition, so vastly more horrible.

Journalism may be a business, a calling and a public service. But an exact science it is not. It is also not a vast conspiracy.

 

 

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