The “great power” reporting mindset of Australian media (and much of the commentariat) on foreign news is getting in the way of the understanding we need of what seems set to be, suddenly, the first big offshore news story of 2022: the possibility of war in Ukraine.
The challenge is more structural than ideological — part how we understand what’s “news” and part how the news supply chain is designed, and where Australia fits in it.
The result? Our traditional media practices encourage us to think of the world through 19th century ideas of the conflict of great powers rather than the interlinked globalism of the 21st. All those other countries (Australia too) become just interchangeable pieces in a world understood through old imperial ideas of “spheres of influence”.
We see only dimly what’s actually happening in Ukraine — and what Ukrainians are thinking and doing. For that we have to reach to emerging voices on the spot, like the recently launched English-language Kyiv Independent, set up by a collective of journalists in December after they were fired by their former real estate developer owner of the Kyiv Post.
In a column published this week the paper went to the heart of the problem:
As presented by the international media, the situation seems to have little to do with Ukrainians … While there is endless speculation over what Vladimir Putin may want or how the West should respond to the threat of a major European war, Ukraine has been reduced to the status of bystander in its own national drama.
News relies on conflict, and the bigger and more violent it is, the more newsworthy. Think of it as the foreign news equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads”. But as economic historian Adam Tooze aggregated in his substack newsletter Chartbeat this week, the short attention span of global media means they misread how the conflict is being played out through strategies of public affairs and economic pressure over the long term.
The decision by the emerging eastern European democracies to join NATO from 1999 is understood not as an act of self-determination (and self-interest) in a time of global networking, but as the outsider United States extending its sphere of influence to push the Russian sphere back within its 1991 national borders.
Similarly, Russia’s action in massing troops on the Ukrainian border is not so much a strike against the modern rights-based order, but a (more or less) legitimate reassertion of its rights as the pre-eminent regional power.
Part of the problem is news: what great powers like Russia — and more particularly superpowers like the US — do is inherently more newsworthy, more likely to directly affect our lives than what middle-range countries like Ukraine do. (Same is true for the way other countries look at Australia: we’re just not that newsworthy for them most of the time.)
It’s reinforced by how we get our news: funnelled through UK and US media using their reporters usually based in what are subsidiary news centres — in this case, like Moscow. It’s a “news” that prioritises the interests and concerns of their home market.
In Australia, we get what we’re given as that content gurgles down the global news funnel.
For traditional commercial media, it’s a low-cost commodification of content. Particularly, on television, the impact of the visuals outweighs the news value: from hurricanes in Florida to Russian tanks on the move in the Donetsk Basin.
It’s worse than it used to be. Australian media used to invest in foreign correspondents who spoke directly to and for Australian audiences. This was critical in ensuring access to information from our region came unfiltered through European or North American perspectives.
It drove the belated political recognition that Australia is on the Asia side of the Asia-Pacific rather than in a more virtual Anglo-American space.
The ABC’s European correspondent Steve Cannane is in Kyiv. It’s a temporary replacement for the correspondent the ABC had in Moscow for half a century until 2013. In 1991 its reporter Monica Attard broke the global story of the collapse of the attempted coup which led to the end of the Soviet Union (and, through 30 years of twists and turns, to where we are today with the 100,000 or more Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border).
Globally, digital media is helping fill the gap. Most famously, in 2014 crowd-sourced journalism innovators BellingCat scoured local media and web postings to expose within days Russian involvement in the shooting down of MH17 in eastern Ukraine (and the deaths of 298 people, including 38 Australians).
Reporters from those handful of aspirants to be global voices are also turning up in Ukraine. The BBC has correspondents there (feeding, too, into the ABC). The Washington Post Moscow reporter Isabelle Khurshudyan was reporting on the ground from Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, at the weekend.
Local journalists, human rights activists and pro-democracy campaigners pay the price for the media’s great power focus. Global press freedom groups are still fighting for the release of pro-democracy journalist Raman Pratasevich, arrested when Ukraine’s neighbour (and Putin ally) Belarus scrambled its air force to illegally force a RyanAir plane to land so he could be arrested.
It remains a chilling reminder that rogue states, no matter their “sphere of influence”, threaten us all.
“While there is endless speculation over what Vladimir Putin may want or how the West should respond to the threat of a major European war, Ukraine has been reduced to the status of bystander in its own national drama.”
It’s a fair point. There’s a distinct echo of the international response to Germany threatening Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. All the attention was directed to how France and Britain, in particular, would respond to Germany’s concerns. Czechoslovakia itself was incidental and its national aspirations for independence or survival irrelevant; as Neville Chamberlain memorably put it in 1938, “… a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
I’m more concerned about the Wests ongoing refusal to listen to Russia’s legitimate security concerns and the usual Western Media beat up.
Its NATO membership would be counterproductive due to unresolved conflicts and dubious contributions to common security. Ukraine would not be a supplier of security to NATO, but a consumer of same. Large-scale aid is stolen and institutions remain corrupt (9th most corrupt in the world). Ukraine is a source of numerous problems and bailing it out would be troublesome and costly and of no real benefit to NATO. There are already quite a number of “consumers” of security in NATO and they certainly don’t need another one.
More than twenty years ago Lord Carrington, at a Chatham House do, asked non rhetorically “What is NATO for?” and answer came there none.
Apart from his previous posts in Thatcher’s government – resigning as Foreign Minister over the Falklands fiasco, he was also Secretary-General 1984-88 of OTAN.
One imagines that he would have been nonplussed to discover that the North Atlantic now includes the north Black Sea.
Considering that Lord Carrington presided over Nato 36 years after Turkey joined it, I doubt his level of nonplussment would have been very high at all. (Last I checked Turkey was even further from the Atlantic, but I get it, European geography is complicated.)
To say that NATO has no use shows a complete lack of understanding of the US economy. NATO is an important customer for US military arms; like tanks missiles, planes etc etc. When you leave the airports of the various new NATO countries you will see advertisements for Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing et al.
Every country that joins NATO has to use “NATO compatible equipment” This is code for US arms manufacturers and their European friends to make large profits at the expense of the US Tax Payer.
War is a racket and the Americans and Poms are the Worlds greatest racketeers. That’s what NATO is about.
It’s not rocket science, although they do sell a lot of them as well.
“‘Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’ Those were the words of NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, when explaining the aims behind the new military allianceto ke “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”ep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”
All you say here can be true without any contradiction of the claim “Ukraine has been reduced to the status of bystander in its own national drama.” In fact, your comment reinforces it. Other nations might well prefer to consider their own narrow interests and Russia’s concerns while ignoring Ukraine’s. Perhaps they should. And so Ukraine is reduced to a bystander.
Where are you even pulling these figures from? Transparency International’s Corruption Index has them far from 9th last, and several steps above Russia, so is this some other, less well known index?
Anyway, to offer a counterpoint, if Ukraine would be a consumer of security (presumably you’re implying their addition to the alliance would reduce collective security because they are militarily and politically weaker), then the same could be claimed of the Baltic states and smaller members, and IIRC in previous postings you have basically argued that (but apologies up front if I’m mischaracterising your views).
But of course new members add new funds, and even smaller economies begin to add up, especially when their GDPs improve through increased integration with the world’s largest economic union. Increased military cooperation also improves overall quality through training and integration, that’s pretty basic stuff.
Not to mention that Russian aims appear to include having Ukraine in their own military bloc, like with Belarus. Think about it: if Ukraine is such a troublesome potential partner, then why would Russia be disputing over it in the first place?
The fact is that the last few decades of Russian politics have been the greatest advertisement for Nato membership imaginable. The issue of Nato membership was basically off the radar in Sweden and Finland until this recent escalation, and now their citizens are debating asking to join as well.
It depends on where you source your rating from doesn’t it? Ukraine has a long history of corruption:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Ukraine
The point was that Ukraine, like all of Eastern Europe, offers little either economically or militarily and consume far more than they contribute to either the EU or NATO. They will be the millstone around the neck of both the EU/NATO.
NATO already has enough “free-rider” members and adding yet another Eastern European millstone will only exacerbate that situation. Adding Ukraine to NATO (which requires the universal approval of all NATO members including Hungary who are not predisposed to agree from all reports) will increase costs for all existing members and yield little additional benefits to existing NATO members. As you say, increased military cooperation also improves overall quality through training and integration however you have ignored that this requires a considerable capital outlay in standard equipment and both initial and ongoing training etc. How will that be funded?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_Agreement
I think you will find that Russia is only interested in Ukraine due to Donesk, Lugansk and Crimea and in securing their Western Border and access to the Black Sea.
It’s all a moot point anyway. Ukraine won’t get a say in it either way.
Darth Putin himself has articulated Russia’s concerns quite clearly:
“The US is ignoring our concern that our borders are only secure with Russian troops on both sides of them “
History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes – can be said about both the aggression and the reaction…
Bellingcat………another MI6 fed “alternative” news site.
Most of my news comes from people, often ex military analysts, who have a far greater understanding of what is going on, than “reporters on the ground”
The best article I’ve seem on the situation recently is this one
https://johnmenadue.com/ukraine-crisis-is-a-pivotal-moment-in-history-for-the-us-not-russia/
Sane, reasoned and looking calmly at the situation – as much as you can in a short article.
That was indeed a good article. After Hong Kong in 2019, I also get most of my information from people I know. “Reporters on the Ground” only spew forth their Editors paid viewpoint rather than what is actually happening.
Good post. That was a very good article by Cameron Leckie.
Also from John Menadue’s site:
https://johnmenadue.com/james-oneill-ukraine-crimea-and-the-push-for-war/
https://johnmenadue.com/gregory-clark-war-in-ukraine/
https://johnmenadue.com/cavan-hogue-ukraine-is-not-just-about-goodies-and-baddies/
And you are right about Bellingcat, which is heavily involved with and financed by the UK-USA-NATO state military/espionage framework and its ‘think tank’ fronts, producing pro-Western/anti-Russian/anti-Syrian propaganda lapped up by the mainstream news media in most ‘western’ countries.
Why am I not surprised the author of this article does not consider Assange to be a journalist, but considers BellingCat to be a credible source?
Nobody except ignorant people consider Assange to be a journalist.
Oh deary me. Bellingcat exposes too much of the far right for your liking, does it? In particular, the far right in Ukraine.
Cameron Leckie | Australian Army Research Centre (AARC)Cameron Leckie served 24 years in the Australian Army retiring with the rank of Major. As member of the Royal Australian Corps of Signals he served in a number of regimental and training appointments, concluding his service as the Executive Officer of the 1st Signal Regiment.
That article pretty much nails it.
It is clear that US, UK and by extension Australian media is in lockstep with Anglocentric hegemonist foreign policy led by the US. NATO is basically a captured extension of the US foreign policy. This Ukraine crisis is really sideshow Number 1, thwarting Russia is sideshow Number 2. The main event is China. Trump tried to smooch Putin to get Russia onside with the US to help surround China. To do this he had to cast off NATO and Ukraine. Now Biden is in with the opposite approach and he’s trying to play hard ball by destabilising Russia with manufactured conflicts like with Kazakstan and now Ukraine. He can’t deal with Putin so is aiming for a colour revolution with the end game of a “democratic” Russia to push it away from China. The Ukraine is meat in the sandwich and is expendable for NATO and the US.
If parts of Ukraine want to fight with the Russians I say let them. Ukraine is of no strategic interest to the US and even less to Australia. The US wants to contain China so it doesn’t become a regional or global hegemon, and so do I, so why pick a fight with the Russians?
Haven’t they learnt anything from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan?
In the UK Boris is using the potential conflict to try to appear as a great statesman when in fact he is a great dick-head. Giving arms to the Ukraine won’t change the outcome, it will just result in much more damage, injury and death.
Some knob from the Brookings Institute claimed that Putin didn’t have a genuine security issue with NATO moving into Ukraine. She said the reason Putin is threatening Ukraine is that he doesn’t want the example of a liberal democracy on his doorstep. What rubbish. Is Finland a despotic totalitarian dictatorship, what about, Poland et al?
Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to join NATO as this puts NATO between Russia and Crimea which has a strategic naval port for the Russian Navy. When the USSR moved a few missiles to Cuba, the yanks went ape-shit. It’s OK for them to place their war machine on Russia’s border, but not the reverse.
The US is once again a world leader in hypocrisy and stupidity. And as a vassal state no doubt our politicians from all sides will cheer them on.
I hope Guy Rundle reads this.
I agree with the thrust of this article and I also had similar reservations about the usually adept, original and insightful Rundle. Both right and left can be too tempted into arc of history, great power clash of ideologies/civilisations, abstractions. Imperialism is built on the likes of these and it’s a scaffold for crushing humanity and self determination.
A few other notes, Attard did not break the collapse story but she did some good reporting and provided an Australian presence on the ground. She actually had an extremely good young Australian fixer who, unlike Attard, spoke fluent Russian and had been living in Moscow among Russians for some time. She was considered invaluable by many of those working there at the time. Attard won a deserved Walkley, but seriously, if you could not have won one reporting from Moscow in 1991, you would have to be completely incompetent.
Thus to my other points, Australian correspondents yes, to avoid the second hand perspectives, but they have to be well embedded in the language, culture and the politics and history to be great. David Remnick was a superb American journalist during the latter part of the Gorbachev period. His Lenin’s Tomb still stands up as an excellent account.
Australia’s own late Robert Haupt, foolishly let go by Fairfax, immersed himself in the Soviet and Russian milieu and was a deeply insightful and very Australian reporter on Russia. In some ways he could be said to have been a translator of what Russians were thinking and feeling into Australian. If you get a chance to read his Last Boat to Astrakhan, grab it.
Finally, corespondents will only do good work with the backing of good editors who trust them. I know of one writer who filed a story from Moscow in 1993 with an assessment of what was happening and would likely happen. And so it did, about 2 weeks later. The story was spiked because, as the editor put it, that’s not what everyone else is writing…
That was very compelling, I’m going to check the archives for Robert Haupt’s work now. And thank you for some sane words here about the temptation of Grand Narrative, which I can forgive (the normally penetrating) Rundle for indulging in a bit of.
Thank you. See https://halloffame.melbournepressclub.com/article/robert-haupt. It’s an accurate summation of someone we lost far too early.