Into my WhatsApp over the weekend popped a short video of my friends’ four-year-old son Taras in his Kyiv apartment packing his most valued toys into his backpack to carry them to safety in the city’s bomb shelter. He looks up to listen to his father, zips the bag closed, stands up straight, tests the bag’s weight. He’s ready to go.
Last thing, he turns around to his room to say goodbye to the toys he has to leave behind.
The video was shared by Taras’ parents, two Ukrainian friends in Kyiv who I think about every day of this war. (Even now that they’re a bit safer in western Ukraine.)
So forgive me if I’m neither as cool — as cynically savvy — as modern media practice dictates you should be, nor so eager to embrace the catastrophist predictions about the future that is increasingly standing in for reporting what’s happening right now.
I #standwithUkraine because, right now, that’s where the front line runs between a lawless authoritarian populism and our continually constructing global edifice of peace, democracy and human rights.
In Australia, the cynicism is playing out with an uncomfortably distanced pose. Sure, our commentariat says, the invasion is the big moment of our time — but what about us? What does it mean for our forthcoming election? Morrison’s national security scare might make it irresistible. Hopefully today’s Newspoll will let us move on.
Like too much of journalism and talking heads commentary right now, it fails to meet the needs of this moment. The core of the problem? News is everywhere. Media have figured out that there’s no point reporting what is happening when social media has long beaten us to the public.
Look at Ukraine. We turn to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok — even Wikipedia and Google Maps. In Australia, only the ABC has the resources, experience and reach to feed the continued demand for updates.
The best of journalism is being churned out through the social channels by local digital journalists, on the ground giving their communities the information they need and bringing it to the world, like the work of the courageous team at the English-language, journalist-run Kyiv Independent, which has become essential reading and now has almost a million Twitter followers.
When traditional media are no longer central to the present moment, value must come from trying to predict what happens next. Pump up your experts. Pump out their op-eds. Problem is, as the saying goes, it’s hard to make predictions.
No worries: traditional media and the commentariat have constructed a workaround: you don’t have to be right, you just have to be catastrophic enough to pull the eyeballs. If you’re wrong, don’t worry — just as long as you’re wrong at the right time, like everyone else.
It’s clickbait meets commentary.
A little over a week ago, the consensus was: “Invasion? You’ve got to be kidding!” In the AFR, Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer, found not one but four reasons to suggest Putin wouldn’t invade.
Come Thursday, come the invasion, the prediction shifted to a blitzkrieg overrunning Ukraine. On Friday morning, Australia’s last foreign minister but one, Julie Bishop, was on ABC Radio predicting the quick end of the conflict with Russia’s occupation of Ukraine.
Shrug. Who really knows? It’s not so much the predictions that are (or may be) wrong; it’s the genre that is worthless. Tells nothing. Takes understanding nowhere. Denigrates the agency of people on the ground to change what happens.
Meanwhile, the hot war has eliminated the most noxious of the pre-war commentary from those right-wing, pro-authoritarian-apologist, cos-playing journalists on Murdoch-owned Fox News. Now, they’ve pivoted from Biden doing too much on Putin, to doing far too little to support Ukraine.
On Wednesday, for the network’s star commentator Tucker Carlson, Ukraine was a client state of the US State Department. By Friday, Putin was to blame for the war.
It has also largely silenced the fringe left eagerness to pin the war on a US-driven expansion of NATO as though the Ukrainian people would be somehow safer if Eastern Europe had been compelled to be less safe.
Me, I’ve always thought solidarity made the world safer for all of us.
Spot on Christopher Warren. As Taleb has long cogently argued, all prediction (outside physics and maths) is bulls*t. And I am personally fed up with the phalanx of blowhard ‘analysts’ who, as you correctly point out have no intention to be ‘correct’, but simply whatever ‘newsworthy’ is. Authentic expertise looks at the evidence actually available and devises action, on the basis of that evidence, that is more likely to do good than harm. And when the evidence changes, adjust the action accordingly. Instead we have to suffer vapid journalists demanding ‘certainty’ from politicians and ‘experts’ about the future, the very thing about which certainty is a fantasy.
The Black Swan, by Taleb. it’s a good read.
So much of the media have long been forming a circle in the face of oncoming competition – turning their backs on what’s going on ‘outside’, to compare navels – and fire inward.
Good insight into part of what is wrong with our consolidated right wing legacy media, and to the anodyne ABC trying to keep below the LNP, IPA & Murdoch radar, while we become the ‘new GOP lite Americans’.
However, related to Ukraine, a good example of what is wrong with our modern media lacking journalistic and reporting resources, is like many Australians without skills of critical literacy, deferring to sub-optimal content or feeds (under the watch of experienced and senior media people?).
When the original invasion kicked off in 2104 SBS used a Fox News feed (?!) on Ukraine then to criticise Obama and the Dems as ‘weak’; fast forward and it’s the same message (in US/Oz linking Xi-China too), but till recently SBS could have been citing their RT or Sputnik feeds (after much analysis SBS management decided RT was possibly not an objective source? Other week SBS had news article sourcing, only Sputnik….).
Further, via Twitter, we have influencers like former diplomat Tony Kevin, a Russophile, sure well meaning but also uses suboptimal media outlets or sources, that follow the Kremlin line, on Saturday it was RT; his followers inc. a former SBS News presenter, movie maker Oliver Stone et al.
Like the ABC and government departments, which are hollowed out and lack resources to deal with events, it follows Thomas Franks’ thesis in the ‘Wrecking Crew’ a symptom of radical right libertarian economics to crash public service delivery and advice to keep citizens ignorant?
On Ukraine, Private Eye did a whole investigation on Russian money and Londongrad several years ago (ppl are now furiously returning to, for insight), The ByLine Times inc. with (long term) ppl on the ground in Ukraine and very important, Bellingcat, using networks of volunteers, focuses on authenticity of images including video that are flooding social media to muddy the water.