The Media's War in Ukraine
War reporting continues to have issues / Russian and Ukrainian fascistic symbology is concerning / Tucker Carlson deflects from his past comments
The war in Ukraine is more than a military conflict, it’s also an information war—and in a digital age, that means not everything you hear is going to be true.
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Propaganda push
Propaganda from both sides of the conflict has become ubiquitous in media coverage, which itself can seem more like cheerleading at times than objective reporting. That’s led to problems of its own; a sloppy approach to checking the content of photos and videos of Ukrainian forces by Western media has resulted in shots of soldiers with openly fascistic symbols on their uniforms being shared uncritically by companies like Getty Images.
Meanwhile, Russia has clamped down on speech and media, barring outlets from referring to the conflict as a war and demanding they continue to refer to the invasion as a peacekeeping mission. And a mysterious “Z” sign has popped up on Russian military equipment in Ukraine and Syria and appears to be fast becoming a fascistic symbol of its own.
Meanwhile, in the West, English-language Russian state media like RT and Sputnik have lost their platforms, and there’s a very real possibility that the brutal economic sanctions against Russia could have trickle-down effects to certain news outlets in the US and Europe.
I talked about the ongoing media battle over Ukraine for Al Jazeera English’s Listening Post last weekend. You can find my segments, covering the barring of the Russian channels and the context for the war, in the first half of the show.
Tuck ever deflecting
US right-wing media has struggled with how to cover the war. For Fox News in particular, which has been more sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years than CNN or MSNBC have (not hard to do, in fairness), the invasion of Ukraine has upended their editorial approach to the country.
Few hosts on the network have had a harder time with the change than superstar Tucker Carlson. Media Matters for America Associate Research Director Nikki McCann Ramirez joined me on my podcast last week to discuss how Carlson and others are scrambling to reset the narrative.
“Tucker for a long time insisted that the United States should just stay out of it, that we shouldn't do anything against Russia, we shouldn't help Ukraine—anything that would piss off the Russians was something that we shouldn't do,” Ramirez said.
The threat of a nuclear conflict alone is enough to make getting involved in the war a worthless endeavor that could mean disaster. But rather than make that realist argument, Carlson is deflecting blame and pointing his viewers toward more traditional targets.
“Now that narrative is flipped, Tucker says that the Biden administration didn't do enough to prevent the conflict, that we should have intervened sooner—while at the same time criticizing sanctions, criticizing attempts to isolate Putin on the world stage, and questioning if an effort to actually remove Putin from office would be detrimental down the line,” Ramirez said. “It's really an incoherent narrative that doesn't do anything for his viewers other than redirect that ire toward targets that he sees as convenient.”
Listen to the full episode at the link.
In other news
Two articles out this week.
At Bolts, I looked at how the new Suffolk County, Massachusetts DA Kevin Hayden appears less than enthusiastic about his predecessor Rachael Rollins’s reforms. At issue primarily is Rollins’s Do Not Prosecute list; Hayden appears disinclined to continue the program should he win the office outright in November.
Within a month of taking office, Hayden pumped the brakes on his predecessor’s most emblematic policy—a public list of lower-level arrests that the DA’s office would decline to prosecute—sparking concern among local progressives who want to decrease people’s ensnarement in the criminal legal system. Among Hayden’s critics is a prominent Rollins-era staffer who monitored reforms in her office but says he was pushed out of his job within days of Hayden’s arrival this year.
And I profiled the Carolina Federation for Blue Tent, looking at how the group is working for long lasting, grassroots change.
Carolina Federation Co-Director Theo Luebke told Blue Tent that the group draws heavily from the labor organizing world. That grounding allows the organization to approach tough organizing challenges with a patient focus on building deep relationships, as the organizing guru Jane McAlevey advocates.
“One of the things that we bring to our work is this notion that building power for our folks, there are no shortcuts to it,” Luebke said. “You have to put in the work and you have to have a strategy and you have to have a long-term game.”
Thanks for reading and listening! More to come.
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