Ukrainian Heresies

I’ve seen several perspicacious queries about media coverage of the Ukrainian war, namely, why don’t we see very much battle footage—or very much front line footage for that matter? All we seem to get are some set-piece videos, practically b-roll at this point, of long-range artillery being fired. Are there no reporters embedded at or near the front lines? Back in the primitive days of Vietnam, when any film footage had to be developed and shipped back to the U.S., we still got a lot of front line footage from journalists like Dan Rather and Morley Safer. Why not in this case?

Another comparative question: back in the Vietnam War, the media was relentlessly hostile to the U.S.-aligned leaders of South Vietnam, especially President Thieu. We heard endless reports about his authoritarianism and corruption. But if anyone today raises the same issues with regard to Ukraine’s government of President Zelensky, you are immediately accused of being a pro-Putin apologist. Look, I think Zelensky is doing a good job leading the country (and especially playing to American media and thought leaders—you’d expect no less from someone with a TV entertainment background), but isn’t the media canonization of him more than a bit thick?

Moreover, does anyone have confidence in Biden Administration’s ability to manage the conflict? Seems to me they are making the exact same mistakes as the Democratic defense and foreign policy geniuses of the 1960s—the “best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s memorable phrase—did in thinking we could “calibrate” our involvement in Vietnam through their doctrine of “flexible response,” and thereby manage a favorable outcome. How’d that work out for us—and for Vietnam?

So it comes as something of a surprise to see Timothy Garton Ash, one of the leading analysts of Eastern Europe since the 1980s, depart slightly from the Ukraine Party Line recently in the New York Review of Books. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Ukraine is asking questions of the West, but there are also questions for Ukraine. Many Ukrainians are privately asking themselves these questions, as are many in the West. But when I suggested to a Ukrainian political analyst who was articulating a sharply skeptical view of President Zelensky that I should write about these concerns, his reaction was, “Oh no, Russian propaganda will pick that up!” Here’s an age-old trilemma for a political writer: how to stand with the oppressed, yet continue to speak the truth, yet not give comfort to the enemy. In the long term, no one is well served by propagating a myth of the immaculate victim. Our lodestar should be the George Orwell of Homage to Catalonia: fight for the right side but remain honestly critical of its shortcomings.

In 2021, Freedom House, the American NGO well known for its freedom index, classified Ukraine as only “partly free,” highlighting corruption and problems with the judiciary. On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine was the worst-scoring European country—unless you count Russia, which scored even lower. The country’s oligarchs still had far too much power. Ukraine is certainly fighting for democracy against tyranny today, but it would be wrong to pretend that yesterday it was a model liberal democracy. It had a heap of problems then and has a heap more now. If the high hopes of brave Ukrainians are not to be disappointed, these need to be identified and addressed. . .

Decentralization is one of the success stories of Ukraine’s pre-war reforms, but at the moment—understandably, since there’s a war on—the country is essentially being run by the presidential administration. A member of parliament from Zelensky’s own Servant of the People party told me that she and her colleagues are hardly consulted.

What is more, all the main TV channels run just one version of the news, 24/7. The United News telethon is watched by some nine out of ten of the estimated 36 percent of Ukrainians for whom television is their main source of news. Independent online publications and social media diversify the information flow for those who regularly access them, but such a television-news monopoly will be a major democratic deficit if it continues into the next presidential election, due in March 2024.

There is widespread admiration for Zelensky’s performance as a wartime communicator-in-chief, but a so-called list experiment—a political science technique that gets at people’s real rather than publicly professed views—carried out in July 2022 by Onuch and Hale found that while 88 percent of those asked expressed approval of his actions as president, the true figure is probably closer to 60 percent. The temptation for Zelensky to keep the television monopoly and use central state resources in a reelection campaign would be great.

Media running “just one version of the news”? Sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? Needless to say we’d be better served with some media skepticism about everything, but especially our grand strategy with regard to a conflict that could easily spin out of control.