IEEE Spectrum responds with words but no actions on the issue of furthering Russian propaganda

On April 6th, the IEEE Spectrum published A Note From the Editors, where they formally addressed the incident covered in our Open Letter. This response is rather disappointing to us.

On the one hand, the note contains an apology and acknowledgement of the issue (“We apologize for not providing adequate context at the time of publication.”), seems to promise more stories from Ukraine, which we very much welcome (“We encourage our readers to continue to follow our coverage of events in Ukraine”) and states that the editors are “committed to continuing to improve the way we report these stories by providing context and background”, suggesting that some future improvement can be expected.

On the other hand, the editors are using strawman arguments, seemingly addressing the somewhat unfair criticism from the readers. They suggest that “many readers were not aware of the Porieva’s and Pyliavskyi’s stories”. We obviously were, as evident from our letter, where we thanked them for covering these stories. We were also aware that the disclaimer was added on March 21st (4 days after the original publication); we have written and published our letter after that. Obviously, we do not think that the disclaimer alone serves as sufficient context. In fact, the editors’ note does not address the actual critique in our letter regarding the questionable editorial choices made in the opinion piece. Note, that our letter was now signed by nearly 600 engineers, researchers and scientists worldwide. Instead the editors present their critics as somewhat uninformed or unfair. Regarding “Several wrote to say that they interpreted our decision to publish as tacit support for the views expressed or willful propagation of misinformation.”: If the IEEE Spectrum supports having an open conversation and sharing opinions, publishing some of these letters would have been great.

Moreover, the apology itself has a hint of “we are sorry that you have misunderstood us”. Stating that the piece meant “to give readers insight into the thinking of a professional engineer living under a regime that controls its population through propaganda, disinformation, and coercion” indeed would have been a useful context the editors should have added (along with other suggestions we made), but even now they have not revised the original piece. Even this very editors’ note is not linked from there.

Bottomline: The best way to address the issue of “not providing adequate context at the time of publication” would be to add the missing context and link the note from the editors in the original piece!

We hope that the editors, while already on the right path of correcting this issue, can follow a few steps further.

Respectfully,
Anna Rohrbach and Olena Chubach, the initiators of the Open Letter.