The West’s Brawndo Journalism

TND Guest Contributor:  Captain Fifteen |

I’m appalled at just how crude, self-righteous, and horribly one-sided our mainstream reporting is. What baffles me even more is that the majority of the people I’ve spoken to on the Western side of the Iron Curtain don’t notice it and shudder when I mention the word “propaganda” when referring to it. It seems to be such a Pavlovian response that every time I see the reaction, the electrolytes scene from the movie Idiocracy immediately comes to mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vw2CrY9Igs); hence the title of the article.

Living in Ukraine in the 90s, I started learning English by listening to The BBC and The Voice of America on my parents’ 70s-era short-wave VEF 201. The war in Yugoslavia was raging at the time. Even though I was very young and highly apolitical, I was exposed to the news on a daily basis through the BBC and VOA’s programming, and as I learned to understand spoken English, I was taken aback by the rather crude and highly biased reporting on that very complex conflict, where both the BBC and the VOA, instead of impartial reporting, had the primitive cast of the bad guys (the Serbs), the poor victims (the Bosnians and the Croats), and the good guys (Western Europe and the omnipresent United States of course). As Serb-bashing was gaining popularity and tortured Sarajevo and demonized Milosevic were becoming the main buzzwords for the war, nobody seemed to care about the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of Serbs forced out of their homes and off their land by the Croatian military – it just didn’t fall into the framework built by the Western propaganda. A few years later, during a blatant NATO-led aggression against Serbia, neither The BBC nor The Voice of America seemed to care about the tragedy of regular Serbs and their civilian infrastructure being destroyed; instead it was about the bad guys (the Serbs) getting what they supposedly deserved from the good guys (NATO).

Fast-forward to a different time (2015) and a different place (Eastern Ukraine). You have another bloody conflict in Europe with the same roles: the good guys (Western Europe and the omnipresent United States), the victims (Ukraine with its “Western aspirations”), and the bad guys (the “Russia-backed” separatists and Russia in general). As Russia-bashing has gained popularity and “Russian aggression” and demonized Putin have become the main buzzwords for the war, the media has been deliberately diverting attention away from the complexity of this bloody and highly destructive war and from the tragedy of the people caught up in it. Instead, the media is shamelessly pawning off the false narrative of a number of Western governments – governments whose irresponsible behavior led to this war in the first place. This time, there is no Sarajevo: the cities of Donetsk, Gorlovka, and Lugansk apparently don’t qualify for the role, despite them and a whole number of other rebel-controlled cities and towns having suffered much heavier damage from Ukrainian shelling than Sarajevo; these cities happen to be on the “wrong” side, and it just again doesn’t fall into the framework built by Western propaganda.

Pretty much all (sic.) the buildings in the Gorlovka neighborhood I grew up in have suffered some sort of shelling damage (ranging from direct hits to shrapnel damage and broken windows), and destruction can be seen in every single part (from downtown to the outskirts) of the city, where more than 300 thousand people once lived. Despite the so-called ceasefire, the Ukrainian military stationed in nearby Mayorsk and Dzerzhinsk shells the city very frequently and at random, though mostly at night. Occasionally, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) vehicles do appear from the Ukrainian-controlled territory, OSCE observers come out to inspect some of the damage, ask a few questions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFw8j7B-RKc), and then quickly retreat back to the Ukrainian-held territory. Although most shelling incidents go unmentioned in their reports, OSCE does talk about a few of them, inevitably ignoring what the locals have to say (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyScIVQygQc) and qualifying the reports in such a way, where the damage is downplayed (http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/157061; search the report for “Horlivka”) and the Ukrainian side is not implicated (http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/160611; compare this report to Anna Touv’s story of the same shelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4MvStLhmxk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDsE72qePvc).

Where does the American and European media stand on this? Nowhere. Other than on occasion and in the context of Ukraine’s “response” to “Russia-backed separatists escalating the conflict”, they just don’t report on the ongoing indiscriminate shelling of residential areas of rebel-controlled cities – not since the ceasefire (of course, how could a US- and Europe-backed Ukrainian regime kill innocent civilians, right?). The US Department of State (as well as tame American and Western European media) stated that the fighting in Maryinka in early June was the result of “the Russian separatist forces” (Ms. Harf made sure to reiterate this several times) launching coordinated attacks against Ukrainian positions (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2015/06/243134.htm#UKRAINE). Really?! What else can they say? Read that report a bit further and see the questions asked to Ms. Harf and her reaction to them. After all, it was inconvenient to mention that residential areas of the city of Donetsk (once home to more than a million people) had been consistently shelled from that area just to provoke a response, as it was inconvenient to report that the city of Gorlovka had also been shelled for days on end also in order to provoke a response – right before the sanctions against Russia were to be reconsidered, by the way. It was very convenient for the Ukrainian regime as well as its powerful backers, however, to have the escalation occur at that time and use it as a pretext for extending the sanctions.

I have reached out many times to human rights organizations and mainstream American and British newspapers and magazines about Western media bias, under-reporting of civilian casualties and suffering, and consistent distortion of what’s going on in Eastern Ukraine. I have never (sic.) received a response other than a number of out-of-office replies and two automated and impersonal messages in the form of “Thank you. Your message will reach the appropriate person.” (Apparently, that appropriate person didn’t care – or was not allowed – to respond, because I never got a reply even on my follow-up attempts.) So I found some phone numbers and started calling the biggest regional newspaper in the area where I live. After I was able to get through to one person and tell her that the city I was originally from was being shelled consistently and inquired why the plight of civilians was getting so little attention, she replied – in a rather irate sort of way – that she had nothing to do with international coverage and gave me another number to call. I called that number, left a message, and received no response, so I went to the newspaper’s headquarters hoping to be able to speak to someone in person. The security guard didn’t let me in of course (what was I thinking?!) and told me to use the phone in the lobby to try to get through to someone in the newsroom. I was lucky to get someone’s attention this time, but when I asked him if there could be someone who could come down to the lobby or if I could come up, since I was right there in the lobby, he replied: “Things aren’t done like this here. You’d need to make an appointment.” “How do I do that?” I inquired. “Call me later in the day,” he said. After leaving three messages over the course of the next two days, I got a phone call back from the guy to be informed that the newspaper believes it is adequately covering the events in Ukraine and that they only rely on trustworthy sources. I said I’d be willing to accompany any of their correspondents, translate for them as well as provide room, board, and transportation – all free of charge, if anyone would be willing to travel to Eastern Ukraine with me and cover what they see there in an impartial manner. “We can’t send someone into a war zone just like that,” the guy responded. He also said their staff was limited, reiterated that they use “only reliable sources”, and hung up. I emailed the newspaper one more time, extending the list of contacts and asking them if they were not allowed to truthfully report on the subject. I received no response.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of the region I grew up in was getting destroyed and innocent people were getting killed, and practically none of that was seeping through. I shared my frustration with a friend who held a non-journalistic position in a well-known progressive American magazine. With the best intentions in mind, he said he might be able to help and introduced me (through email) to an editor there. I contacted the editor and received no response. I asked my friend for an update. He prodded them, but there was still no response. I asked my friend again. He said they were discussing on how to proceed with the topic and that they would get back to me in a couple of days. After two more weeks of silence, I contacted the editor again, asking them if they were still interested in talking to me or if the subject was a taboo and people were afraid to write about the issue. The response I got was that what was going on in Ukraine did not fit their beat for the near future so they would be unable to meaningfully engage with me.

A couple of months ago, I ran into two young reporters covering a local protest. I started talking to them and asked them why our newspapers have such limited and distorted coverage of the war in Eastern Ukraine. “I’m sorry, I don’t know much about the conflict,” one of them said, adding that he would love to know more but that his focus was local news. We talked a bit more, and one of them said: “You know, we can’t just publish what we want. We have the interests of our audience to cater to…and then there’s the editorial board.” “So you have censorship?” I asked. “No, but we have the editorial board.”

I’ve contacted many more media sources and received no response. I’m still yet to meet a professional journalist in this country who will openly admit to me that they are being censored or are engaged in self-censorship. You can use whatever euphemism you want (editorial board or first amendment rights), but it does not detract from the fact that the mainstream American media (just like mainstream Canadian and British media) are highly censored tools of indoctrination rather than sources of information. I know it’s hard to make Americans or Brits care about what’s going on in Ukraine, even though their governments are very much implicated in those events. It’s hard for them to even imagine that their “democracies” bring oppression, suffering, and destruction elsewhere. The media is an integral part of all this, it being one huge indoctrination machine that only serves the right version (the one with electrolytes). However, this is no longer just about Ukraine. It is also about the truly messed up state of things in your own country, and there is simply no excuse not to care about that.

Captain Fifteen blogs at http://captainfifteen.blogspot.com/

This article was published at TheSaker.is and is reprinted with permission.