By Anna Romandash
Being a military journalist is challenging, but it is even harder to cover the war at home. The difficulties go beyond getting information and accessing the conflict zone, but also balancing the information and avoiding national bias. The biggest challenge, however, is remaining transparent despite misinformation and fake news propagandist media spreads.
“Information war does not concern journalists because our job is to inform. Information war means using all means to win, and this is something against journalism standards,” said Levko Stek, a journalist at “Radio Free Europe”, who covers the war in Donbas.
The war, with pro-Russian separatists occupying Ukraine’s East with the help of Russian army, has received much coverage – a lot of it controversial – due to various fakes in the media and different approaches to present the situation. Ukrainian and Western media maintain that the Russian army fights together with the separatists as well as funds them. Russian state-owned media, on the other hand, deny the involvement and maintain that Kremlin has nothing to do with the war.
“I may be very unhappy with the work of Russian media makers during the war, but it does not mean I will copy their actions and respond with lies to lies. This is a way to nowhere. We can fight propaganda only with objective information,” said Stek.
For him, covering the war is difficult since it takes place in his native land, and also because the separatists perceive him as an enemy. This prevents the reporter from going to the other side although he has done so undercover.
Get the message across
“We lose some truth because of lack of information, but I don’t know yet how to deal with this,” said Stek.
Lack of access affects international correspondents in war zones, too. Nolan Peterson, an American correspondent in Donbas, has also been prevented from going to the separatists’ side. “I write about Russian involvement and openly speak about Russian soldiers fighting in the war. If I went and got caught on the separatists’ side, I could be accused of espionage,” he explained.
One of the issues with covering a local war is also the difficulty to get the message across. The international conflicts often receive little coverage abroad, and the audience quickly gets tired of reading them, especially when the new crises come up.
“Double standards” of media coverage and the “selective solidarity” became very clear to the audience nowadays. The most recent examples are Brussels and Paris attacks. Although similar attacks happened in some Middle East/Asia countries around that time, no media outlet cared about them as much as they did with Paris/Brussels attacks,” said Ahmad Al-Bazz, a Palestinian photojournalist at Activstills, who covers the situation in the region.
“Some conflicts and wars receive much more recognition than others, and it is very difficult to convince your editor abroad why the conflict you are covering matters,” said Peterson. He agreed that the media often ignore events taking place in remote parts of the world, but adds that it’s correspondent’s job to make the news known.
“The main problem is having to work at home because it is very hard. I am lucky because I have no friends or relatives fighting in Donbas, but I have many colleagues who are related to soldiers,” said Stek. “It is very difficult to remain objective, but this is the main part of your job. When you cross this line, you become a propagandist,” he concluded.
