By Brigitte L. Nacos
Since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, every generation has utilized well-established and often brand-new communication technologies.
In the last fifty years or so, the breakthrough of live TV coverage over long distances resulted in news coverage of dramatic events that the whole world could watch. The horrific assault on members of Israel’s national team at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich was watched by an estimated audience of 500 million people around the world. The satellite coverage of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square catapulted CNN into a premier international all-news network. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Al Qaeda’s leadership boasted that the size of the global news audience had set a new record. Carefully orchestrated by the Pentagon, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was reported “live” by news teams embedded in military units.
And now, as Thomas L. Friedman writes in today’s column in the New York Times, people around the world watch “World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web.”
Friedman is right, individuals with smartphones capture the cruelty of war, upload images of horror and bravery on TikTok and other social media platforms, and make all of this available to people around the globe. The gatekeepers of traditional news organization or the censors of authoritarian regimes are being bypassed in the social media world.
But whereas the pure multitude of pictures and video clips captured by Ukrainians on their smartphones writes a new chapter in war reporting, the same platforms are available to professional propagandists. In the current conflict, Russian propagandists spin the news in both traditional and social media in carefully tailored narratives that counter the episodic images of smartphone photography. And the Ukrainian authorities may spin as well.
In sharp contrast, the uploaded images and sounds of smartphone owners present brutality and violence in multi millions of snippets in social media. It is a double-edged sword: raw and unfiltered images on the one hand and one the other hand a complete lack of contextual information that would allow assessments of the snippets on the screen.
I have been told in the last several days repeatedly that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a “media war” or was asked whether that is the case.
The conflict is a real war on real land and in real airspace. In spite of the attention to the compelling images on TikTok and other social media platforms, I prefer the war coverage by the well-trained journalists of the best traditional news organizations. They provide the context that TikTok and YouTube do not.
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