Die Zeit: It’s propaganda, stupid!

Mein Arbeitsalltag als ukrainischer Journalist ist ein brutales Informationsschlachtfeld.

An English-translation of Maxim Eristavi’s op-ed, published originally by Die Zeit in German on November 19, 2015.

My everyday professional life is a brutal informational battlefield. Back in Europe or the U.S. we’ve got used to extreme polarization and ‘balkanization’ of news in recent years. But with unprecedented propaganda war engulfing the region following the Russian-Ukrainian war, the consequences could change the way we think about journalism everywhere. By following reactionary strategies of tackling the rising misinformation we are setting ourselves for a huge failure.

Born and raised in Ukraine, most of my professional life I was building bridges between different worlds: explaining Eastern Europe to the English-speaking audience, explaining back the outside world to Eastern Europeans, or as the only openly-gay journalist in Ukraine, going after untold stories about struggles of different minorities which usually a majority would never know existed. I had also a very unique experience of working both for American and Russian state-run newsrooms (RFE/RL and Voice of Russia). So when the time came to create something of my own, I team up with people who would share the same fundamental sentiment I follow: when it comes to battling myths, misinformation, lies, the ‘fire with fire’ principle doesn’t work. When our team of European, Russian, American and Ukrainian journalists in 2014 laid a foundation for Hromadske International, a foreign broadcast service of the Hromadske network (a digital crowdsourced media of independent journalism that has revolutionized Ukrainian media landscape and become a to-go medium for young Ukrainians during the Euromaidan revolution), we all decided to reject any reflective strategy in fighting propaganda from both sides of the conflict. Instead we went for high-quality investigative and digital storytelling journalism to fill the vacuum of in-depth coverage of the region, without running after negativity-driven news-cycles and crazy breaking news culture.

So what kind of things have I learned from being in the epicenter of the most intense media warfare of our times? Here are five of them.

First, word fights matter more than actual battlefields.

Propaganda is far worse than any usual media polarization. It ruins families, endangers lives, and starts and ends wars. I remember one Hromadske story from the epicenter of one of the biggest battles in the Eastern Ukrainian war. Our reporter went to the city of Debaltseve hours before it was captured by Russian and rebel forces. The town was shelled heavily back then. But, all interviewed locals were sure that the Ukrainian army was responsible, despite acknowledging that to do this they would have to shell their own positions in the downtown as well. The Ukrainian TV and radio was cut off here months ago.

Secondly, Russian propaganda isn’t designed to convince people.

What it does instead is radicalizing the society, pushing it to extremes and destroying the middle ground for any debates. And then you have a perfectly fertile soil for political manipulations on a grand scale. Let’s be clear: neither Russia, nor Eastern Ukraine are internet black holes like North Korea or Iran. People have access to almost all internet resources possible. In Russia an impressive 77% of the population have a stable internet access, and before the war Eastern Ukraine also had the biggest and most dynamic rate of new internet users after Kyiv. People are able to hear the other side’s point, they just don’t want to.

Third, the longer the fight, the more you become like your enemy.

During my time in Russian newsrooms, I would witness propaganda creep among my Russian colleagues. The remarkable thing, however, was that it would usually start as self-censorship and personal initiative amid rising international pressure on the country, even before it became ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘treasonous’ to criticize the government and Vladimir Putin. Lately, I have watched with horror similar tendencies developing in many Ukrainian newsrooms after the war with Russia started.

Many Ukrainians would quickly adapt a paranoid skill of filtering out what they can or cannot afford to report. For example, many shied away from reporting the story of President Poroshenko granting honorary citizenship to a well-known neo-Nazi leader from Belarus, Sergey Korotkih, because Russian media could use it in strengthening the “Ukraine is a Nazi state” narrative. The same happened with stories about rising LGBT violence and war crimes by Ukrainian self-formed paramilitaries. The Ukrainian government is increasingly deploying the same kind of Russian-style tools in its ongoing media war: banning critical foreign journalists from the country, using the black-and-white rhetoric when talking about the war, and backing the creation of ridiculous Ministry of Information, which many quickly dubbed as Ministry of Truth referencing to the Orwell’s ‘1984’.

Although you can’t possible equal Russian and Ukrainian propaganda. Just think of these two numbers: 247 million dollars — it is the 2015 budget for state-run Russia Today, which is a fraction of much bigger multi-language propaganda machine. Do you know how much Ukraine allocated for its Ministry of Information this year? 184 thousand dollars.

Fourth, the Internet makes us free.

When the Maidan revolution happened, many would use Twitter as the main communication tool. The Yanukovich government didn’t even understand what Twitter was about, so they never managed to interfere.

Livestream platforms, like Youtube, Ustream and others made another profound impact on the revolution. Hromadske actually started as a Youtube livestream news-network. With the tight control of censorship-loving oligarchs over mainstream media and the state over broadcast licenses, many news outlets weren’t able to satisfy the public’s demand in showing what was happening on main squares all around the country. Our reporters would pick up a photo camera or smartphone, with portable broadband, and go inside the crowd livestreaming and reporting, as simple as that. In a matter of days since the launch, our audience would explode to millions, something nobody would expect from a country where the level of internet connection is still quite low and only 55% of people are connected.

Hromadske experiences a lot of web-sites attacks regularly, some of them taking the website down. We’ve also found the solution is embracing as many digital platforms as possible to distribute the content: on top of Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, we use Medium for publishing longread multimedia stories, Periscope for live streaming (sometimes we even live-stream our editorial meetings), Snapchat, and Slack for internal and even external communication when we invite guest editors or some viewers for a limited sneak-peak of our newsroom processes. We plan to launch a Whatsapp notification system for the audience. With constant digital experimenting, it is just not possible to silence someone. If you shut down one platform, we will pop up on another.

Fifth, the truth is never in between what Russian media and Western media report.

When one side lies, fabricates stories based on nothing, stages events, pays actors for playing in orchestrated interviews and then sells it as news, you can’t possible treat is as a credible source of information. The Western newsrooms are also guilty in faulty coverage of the war. But sensationalism, blood-driven coverage, generalization, lack of expertise or political bias are not the same as outright lies and staged theatrics.

Any educated person in the West knows that truth is always somewhere in the middle between two biases. So you would usually consume something from Russian media and then Western media and settle for the middle. This is well-understood by the Kremlin and they manage to use it perfectly by positioning their media as ‘an alternative voice’. So, by creating ridiculous parallel reality of lies and theatrics, they don’t expect you to believe in it. They instead create so much confusion that it shifts the middle further towards them.

The truth is always in between two biases, but never in between bias and pure lies.

Maxim Eristavi is a co-founder Hromadske International, the biggest new media platform in the region explaining Eastern and Central Europe in English and Russian. He is also a 2015 Poynter Fellow at Yale University.