War correspondence had its beginning in the Crimean War (1853–56), resulting in “the first war in history in which public opinion played so crucial a role,” as Orland Figes rightly concluded in his magisterial book, The Crimean War: A History (2010, 304). The relationship between public opinion and media coverage of today’s Russia-Ukraine war is infinitely more complex, and scholars are engaged in varied assessment of its media coverage, perceptions of journalism’s contributions to understanding the conflict, and responses to rumors, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation that invariably accompanies warfare in the twenty-first century. The ten chapters in the edited collection, Media, Dissidence and the War in Ukraine, are an uneven contribution to the growing number of studies on media and information focused on Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Editors Tabe Bergman and Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman’s eclectic offerings range from chapters with well-defined theoretical and methodological approaches to studying aspects of the traditional and non-traditional media’s Russia-Ukraine war coverage in such disparate countries as Israel, Ghana, China, and Czechia in order to evaluative ones that deal with issues of attempted censorship of dissident voices, media coverage of the controversies surrounding Russia’s aggression, and other connected media topics.
The editors promise their collection contributes to “constructive debates” by providing assessment “of different and varied views, facts and values” (11). All well and good until some chapters edge close to confusing verifiable facts with questionably factual and ideological “perspectives.” As interesting as they may be, they contribute to debates but less so to their “constructive” aspects. At least a couple of chapters are based on dubiously defined scholarly methodologies.
One example of the former is Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson’s “Silencing the Scholar” (Ch. 7), a thought-provoking examination of the pressures that are brought to bear on scholars who challenge official wartime narratives. An otherwise solidly described and argued topic, a more judicious selection of examples would have avoided reaching a tenuous stage in the chapter’s promise to contribute to the promised “constructive debates” on the subject. Injecting arguments from one of John Mearsheimer’s works as exemplars of unjustifiably challenged contribution and contributors defeats the argument that all such challenges are unwarranted pressures on scholars. However much constructive debates benefit from different perspectives they gain little if these perspectives are based, as is the case in Mearsheimer’s work on the war, on weak empirical evidence and unreliable theories, or “offensive realism.”
Hearns-Branaman’s exploration of how “Big Tech platforms” like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter “have stepped into the role formally held by government censors” (168) and have made a “casualty” of Russia’s RT (Russia Today), a Kremlin disinformation hub, misses a pivotal point that renders it a questionable contribution to constructive debates. Whereas the chapter’s author rightly defends the “free, uninterrupted flow of information,” he appears to resist the reality that RT is not simply “a counter-narrative to mainstream media” (183) but a weapon in Russia’s information war and, thus, worthy of “interrupting.” Censorship should always be condemned but never confused with justifiable defense against non-journalistic, non-informative fare whose purposes are intrinsic to the machinery of war and not a counter-narrative to an argument.
An example of a methodological shortcoming is at the core of “Who Blew Up the North Stream” (Ch. 8) in which the author, Bergman, describes his study as being based on “findings of a close reading of the reporting and commentary” in a Dutch newspaper (137). The reader is not certain what “close reading” means in scholarly terms. Inarguably, the availability of qualitative methodologies for studying contents and their meanings in journalism, commentaries, and other writings allow for authoritative research designs, increasing both the reliability and validity of the findings.
There are stand-out chapters that are conceptually and methodologically sound, well-argued and presented. Among them are Jian Shi and Dechun Zhang’s Ch. 4, “Unravelling Diverse Chinese Discourses on the Russo-Ukrainian War…,” which achieves its aim by offering a comparative analysis of official and individual Weibo accounts. Another worthy contribution focusing on the increasing relevancy of social media in the dissemination of communication and information is Jessica Yarin Robinson’s, “The Moderated War in Ukraine: Twitter, Elon Musk, and the Role of Private Platforms in War Coverage” (Ch 5). Robinson points out not only that Musk’s stewardship of Twitter/X challenges “traditional models of media ownership and control” but also that owners like him are not affected by the traditional media’s “layers of editorial processes and journalistic standards” (91). Thus, social media companies have more authority, without professional ethical restraints, over contents than corporations that own traditional media.
From a comparative analysis of the Israeli media’s evidential standards in their coverage of Ukraine and Gaza (Ch. 1), to Czech television’s coverage and their audiences’ responses to its Russia-Ukraine war coverage (Ch. 2), and the standard use of secondary sources by the Ghanaian media’s reporting on the war (Ch. 3), the collection adds pieces to the intricate and oversized puzzle that media coverage of the war represents.
Lastly, different in focus from the other chapters in the collection, John Hondros’s “Representing Diverse Perspective on Complex Issues” (Ch. 9) uses the documentary, “Diverse Voices: The Ukraine Crisis and Media,” to investigate the nature, viability, and contributions of interactive documentaries to represent diverse media coverage of war. It is an informative and well thought out theoretical exploration.
The collection is a timely addition to the array of works focused on media and information issues related to the Russian-Ukraine war. The only caveat is that some chapters should be read with one or more grains of salt.
