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Two weeks ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. It was preceded by weeks of build-up, nowhere more so than in the media, which displayed its best and worst impulses in rapid succession. Some reporters asked good and difficult questions of the Biden administration; others reverted to parsing obscure clues about Vladimir Putin’s intentions and repeating his euphemistic language. The overall effect, our newsletter writer Jon Allsop argued, was whiplash.
When the invasion did arrive, the early hours of news coverage in the West focused on Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal to Russians to remember the common humanity between the two nations, as it scrambled to, as Allsop put it, “build a clearer picture of Russia’s attack through a dense fog of war.” In those first few days, CJR editor and publisher, Kyle Pope, argued, “some of the world’s biggest news outlets were able to shed the baggage of the past decade and take up sober, brave, important reporting.”
As Ukraine has sought to defend itself from Russian invasion, the country's media has also been engaged in an existential fight. “I would say our priority is not letting the independent, ethical Ukrainian media landscape die because rebuilding it would be very difficult,” Jakub Parusinski, a former journalist at the Kyiv Post, told CJR. Meanwhile, in Russia, Putin has obliterated the remnants of the country’s free press and blocked certain platforms, while the rest of the world has cut off Russian access to many parts of the internet.
The stories arising from the invasion are complex and gruesome. It’s not the first time in recent memory the news media has had to take up such a challenge. “If the war grinds on for a long time, and we aren’t vigilant,” Allsop wrote, “the normalization of its horrors could easily become another similarity with the pandemic story in the US and elsewhere.” ––Savannah Jacobson, story editor
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