Brooke Gladstone and Fred Kaplan on the Media, War, and Ukraine

Fred Kaplan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for Slate, where he authors the “War Stories” column. Fred’s most recent book is The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (2020).

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“Why Is the Wartime Press Corps So Hawkish?” (Mark Hannah, Foreign Policy, March 30, 2022)

Archival:

Putin issues new threat to countries intervening in Ukraine (CNN, April 27, 2022)
Russian offensive drastically intensifies in eastern Ukraine (Al Jazeera English, May 1, 2022)
Putin, Lukashenko discuss Ukraine conflict, Western sanctions (TRT World, April 12, 2022)
Germany sends tanks to Ukraine as US says Russia "will be defeated" - BBC News (BBC News, April 26, 2022)
CNN, Coverage of Bosnia 1994 duPont Columbia Award Winner (Columbia Journalism School, December 3, 2019)
The Situation Room and Anderson Cooper on Hurricane Katrina (WeatherMatrix (Jesse Ferrell), August 25, 2015)
I-Team: Man Claims He Shot 38 Looters After Storm (WDSU News, July 14, 2009)
ARCHIVES: Hurricane Katrina 2005 News Media Coverage (105 Min.) (WeatherMatrix (Jesse Ferrell), January 10, 2013)

Transcript:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I think you have to just accept that there is bias, that we all are coming from someplace, and that journalists are not the tribe of passionless priests they have often tried to present themselves as.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm Mark Hannah. For today's episode, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're bringing you to a discussion about war and the media, which I hosted last week at the American Academy in Rome. The Academy is a century-old institution which supports independent scholarship in the fine arts and in the humanities.

But before we get into that panel, I'm going to bring you somewhere else. It's 1854. The Crimean War is in full swing. It's a fight which pitted Russia against the Ottoman Empire. But it's drawn in some European powers, France and England. London Times reporter William Howard Russell was on the front lines, covering everything he saw.

GLADSTONE: He wrote about it with a great deal of passion and immediacy. He said, “At 11:10, they swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendor of war. At 11:35, not a single British soldier except the dead and the dying were left in front of the Muscovite guns.” He writes about the soldiers being ill-fed, the ill-led, and left to die on the field.

HANNAH: That's Brooke Gladstone. You know her as the host of Public Radio's On the Media, a production of WNYC, which is heard in more than 400 media markets throughout the United States. She's in residence this spring at the Academy. Brooke says the pictorial press was brand new. And while what Russell was writing and photographing about the Light Brigade was all exemplary journalism, it was not necessarily the most flattering picture for England. His reporting turned public opinion against the government, and Prince Albert—his patron—was not happy.

GLADSTONE: Russell has been hailed as the “father of war reporting.” That's not how he put it, though. He said he was the miserable parent of a luckless tribe. And that's because he saw firsthand what speaking the truth in the face of government resistance would do. Since then, the press, as it has evolved, has not only the government to contend with, but their direct employers and public opinion itself.

HANNAH: The war ended in 1856 with the Treaty of Paris, and Russia did not come out on top.

Now, fast forward to today, and Russia is again at war. I asked Brooke's husband, Fred Kaplan—the author of Slate’s “War Stories” column and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author himself—whether he was surprised by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. After all, the former Soviet Union had been a sort of humbled power. They had been chastened and militarily disabled to some extent. So, while Russia is still a powerful country in many respects, it seemed to many that after its Cold War defeat, history had ended. But we now know that's not really the whole story.

FRED KAPLAN: I had written a column saying that Russia—they're not going to invade because they've never done anything like this before. They don't know how to do multipronged offensive invasions. Their logistics are terrible. Their supply lines will get cut off. Their junior officers aren't trying to take initiative. So, if something goes wrong, it'll really be messed up. So, that's why they're not going to do it. My analysis was correct, but they did it anyway. That was a surprising thing for me. The thing about this war and the media that makes things very confusing—and I think we all, including people who write about it every day, have strangely mixed feelings—is because, first of all, I think this is the only war—that I can think of anyway—that the United States and American media have paid a lot of attention to that we are not actually directly fighting in. I mean, it's our side, but we're not really—we're providing the weapons, but not anything else. That's new.

HANNAH: For anybody paying even a little bit of attention, it's clear Russia's invasion of Ukraine has attracted saturation coverage.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: But that doesn't mean we're getting the full picture. Between the Crimean War and the invasion of Ukraine now—nearly 200 years of history—war journalism has transformed significantly. But what these two eras have in common may be more interesting than what sets them apart, which is the media have a deeply complicated relationship with covering war stories.

KAPLAN: We have some reporters there. There's almost no American reporters in Donbas, the eastern region, where the major fighting is going on now. So, we're relying a lot on information from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which has undoubtedly a certain propagandistic value. Nobody's even paying attention to what the Russian Ministry of Defense is saying. And some scattered other intelligence that manages to be leaked and provided in Pentagon briefings and that sort of thing. And so, you don't really quite—for example, the Ukrainian defense ministry says they've killed 25,000 Russian soldiers. I have no idea if that's true. U.S. intelligence is estimating about 15,000, which itself is remarkable for a war that's been going on for a couple of months. That's about as many as they lost in Afghanistan in ten years.

HANNAH: So, what do we believe? How do we know? And what are the forces at work shaping the story you hear? As news consumers were confronted with those questions any time we read an article or watch the nightly news. We're not alone in that. The media institutions which share the news and distribute the news and report the news are grappling with the exact same questions. And as Brooke and Fred explain, there are no simple answers.

GLADSTONE: I think the entire press corps is coping with a lot of new things in the post-Trump era. The consensus has broken down. There is a deep understanding, or at least a lingering suspicion, that the system doesn't work, that objectivity is a mirage. And then you have to start story selection and coverage according to a set of values you have to acknowledge and choose. Otherwise, there's no way to triage. You can't just do it as a group anymore. It still happens, of course, everywhere, all the time. And in media outlets, whether they're legacy outlets or crazy wingnut outlets on the fringe, it's going to be the same. There'll be consensus of opinion among political groups, which was something there certainly was at the dawn of American newspapering. It's just that people took lots of newspapers at one time, and now they really only consume a few news outlets. So, I think this has really put people in a quandary.

William Butler Yates once said, “I hate journalists. They're the most shallow people on the planet. They embrace the great refusal,” which is the circle of hell Dante reserved for people who refused to take a stand. But I bring him up because to me, this characterizes very much the public's ambivalence with media, because on the other hand, a very important poem penned in the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, he took very strongly another position that deeply held conviction actually leads to mayhem. Maybe you've heard this poem:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Also William Butler Yeats. I mean, goddamn it, pick a side. And the thing is, he's sort of in those juxtapositions of those two quotes. He sums up most media consumers’ relationship with the press, which is that objectivity is wherever you happen to stand at the moment. Where one person sees moral courage, another person seems sees palpable bias. Bias is a big part of the discussion of the media always.

HANNAH: Well, let's get into that then. For people who haven't already picked up Brooke’s book, there's a chapter in it about war, and in that chapter, you mention that the bias/biases that plague media and journalism and reporting and people's consumption of that are—the whole panoply of that are present in war reporting in spades.

GLADSTONE: Yeah, but they’re not political. The ones that matter are really not the political ones, not traditionally.

HANNAH: Right, there’s a tendency toward negativity, tendency toward sensational. So, talk which biases are so prevalent, and how do they distort our perception of war and what is to be done about it?

GLADSTONE: Yeah. There's commercial bias. It has to be new. That's why there are so few stories that go back to re-cover what happened after the event is over. We see that with almost every natural disaster and lots of unnatural disasters as well. Huge headline stories. They don't ever go back. They figure the public is no longer interested. That's commercial bias.

There's bad news bias. We are always, always focused on the thing that presents a threat. We're wired that way. Crime is over-covered. As a result, we think the world is far more dangerous than it actually is. Even now, the crime statistics are up. It's alarming. It's still way less than most of us have lived through during earlier times in our life.

There’s status quo bias. Shall I just rush through them?

HANNAH: I just want to say there is an academic theory called “mean world syndrome” that I have to cite simply because my advisor was one of the people who were part of that back in the ‘60s. But meanwhile, yeah, this idea that the world is an angrier, more violent place because news privileges information that is extraordinary or exceptionally negative.

GLADSTONE: It makes you care. They want you to care.

Status quo bias. That implies a belief that the system works. This is how it is most often expressed. And as a result, people don't want to change things unless the benefits are huge. Otherwise, the risks are too great. And that is absolutely fundamental.

Access bias is a huge one. You really want to keep the lines of communication open with your sources in Washington. This is very much a Washington thing, obviously. But Izzy Stone just read documents—Izzy Stone being the great investigative reporter who almost never did interviews with sources. He just did close reading of the documents. That's very rare today, and it's almost worthless because you almost never get anything useful. But access bias keeps people within the straight and narrow. If you piss off your sources, you won't get them to talk to you.

HANNAH: And in wartime, that access is typically given by officials and military. And if you present that official position and then a dissenting opinion from civil society, you're not going to get that access.

GLADSTONE: And in war, it's much more intense than that. It can it can mean your life. When you are embedded with a troop, you will fall in love with them because they're lovely young people. But also they are protecting you, and you see the risks they face. This is what they call war through a soda straw. It was a brilliant innovation. But that is the most extreme form of access bias.

There's visual bias. Obviously, war provides amazing pictures. And it really sacrifices context for constant action, whether it's the latest bombing, or in previous conflicts, the latest beheading or the IED or the crying children. Abu Ghraib was known about and was covered by not an obscure publication—I think Newsweek and the Washington Post—a year-and-a-half before it became a story. You needed the person standing on the box with the hood on the head. Then it became a story. And that's not a small thing.

There's narrative bias.

HANNAH: Real quick, while we're talking about visual bias, talk about Vietnam actually being the first televised war, and that was evocative and probably created some public pressure in a way that still photographs didn't.

GLADSTONE: It did create public pressure. The media, however, I do not believe is what ended the Vietnam War, although many in the Pentagon still believe it did.

I'll just say about narrative bias—this war is perfect for it because it's about stories. It's about narratives. It's about characters. What isn't good for narrative storytelling? Science. Science is horrible.

HANNAH: And also moral relativity—or relativism, rather—and the idea that a narrative requires victims and villains and heroes and sort of presents the world in this Manichean black and white way when the bad guys’ grievances aren't going to be really grappled with in the American media, whether that's the Taliban or Russia.

GLADSTONE: It is very difficult. And right now, we don't have anyone reporting from the Russian side. You don't have to love the Russians to be interested in what's going on over there. So, there's definitely narrative bias.

There's one other one, which is the only one that isn't emphasized and engaged in thoroughly in war. And this is something that is unique to the American media, which at least the Nixon administration has accused of being right wing. Although it turns out even though they lean politically left—journalists do—their story selection is no different from conservative story selection. And that is where bias first rears its head. It's the most important thing. And they also interview, by and large, far more right wing or conservative people on television and even in the press than they do middle and left wing ones. And this is part of the bending over backwards in in order to be fair—fairness bias really distorts coverage in general. And it is, however, pretty much disengaged when it comes to war.

KAPLAN: I would add one more bias. I’m not sure why this—well, I have a theory on why this is the case. But if you ever watch cable news, whatever is going on, you might notice they're incapable of covering more than, like, two stories in the course of a day. And now it's even one story. And I think the reason is that people are glued to the TV because they're interested in the major news of the day, and then if they're watching CNN and they say, “Okay, now let's go over and see what's going on in Los Angeles for this fire,” then people will flick the dial. And so, instead they just present one panel. They don't have anybody reporting news. They've cut back on that budget over the years. They just have one panel after another talking about the same damn thing—just five different people. And I think if you see the same thing on TV all day long, no matter when you turn it on, you might get an exaggerated sense of that story's importance. I think without cable news, would we really be thinking that the war in Ukraine is as important as we do now? I'm not sure.

HANNAH: And this is why I wanted to ask you a follow up question before. It wasn't about why America is not involved in Ukraine. But why does America care about Ukraine when there are other conflicts going on in the world? But I think you're hitting on something important, which is the sort of sense that the access and the visibility of this war and the fact that there are Western cameras there, and there is great fodder for these cable news panel discussions brings it to the foreground, sells copies of the New York Times, and in this kind of attention economy you were talking about earlier, Brooke, captures our attention.

There was, famously, the idea of the CNN effect in Bosnia, and in media theory, that's the idea that Bill Clinton didn't want to go intervene in Bosnia, didn't want NATO to intervene, and didn't for a very long time. But only when CNN continued to cover this so incessantly and only when the images of human suffering—humans that looked like a lot of Americans, and we can talk about that if we want—that there was political pressure applied to Clinton to alleviate that suffering and to get involved.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: And whether or not that was successful—it certainly stopped Milosevic, but today, looking back, Bosnia is almost a failed state again. Whether that intervention was merited or not really wasn't a clear-eyed appraisal of American interests. It became that there was a humanitarian imperative to fight in such a visual and persistent media culture. You want to talk about that, Brooke? And whether that applies to Ukraine?

GLADSTONE: Sure. In Ukraine, there is something truly unique—I know that's not grammatical—something unique, which is Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a performer of consummate skill with a staff of producers and writers and comics and people who know how to tell stories and move the public all providing daily—this is this is different from, “Watch the videos of the smart bombs in the first Gulf War,” which was amazing to see and gave us many misimpressions of how accurate our armaments actually were. But in this case, you have an utterly telegenic hero who even dances the tango in spangled red outfits. Nevertheless, he is sort of recognizably a person that is embraceable, and he is telling his story. It is very rare that the West has been open to—I can't think of another case. I mean, de Gaulle or maybe Winston Churchill? I don't know. I cannot think of another case of a foreign leader captivating the American media and the American public and governments around the world with his little Zoom visits the way he has. Also, obviously, let us not overlook the racial element of this. It has often been pointed out that there have been horrible things happening all around the world, and it is this one we focused on. And it is true that in some in some narratives, this could change the world order and challenge the status quo. That is a very big deal, unconsciously and consciously. But I do think this is the most potent information war we've ever had.

HANNAH: Halfway through the discussion, Brooke and Fred fielded questions from the audience, and here are a few that stood out to us.

First, listeners wanted to know about this status quo bias. That is, one's preference for things to stay the same. How do journalists deal with status quo bias? Are they rewarded or punished for criticizing the government's decisions, for example?

GLADSTONE: In terms of status quo bias, that's what makes us patriots during a time of war. That's what makes us inclined to believe our government. And that's what often puts the media in the doghouse—the responsible media—with the public. There have been very few all-out wars we've been involved with that haven't begun, at least in part, with a lie. The sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania. The Gulf of Tonkin. Weapons of mass destruction. These have always been the way in. And if the press raises an eyebrow, they come in for tremendous opprobrium. And they shouldn't want to be loved. That's something Helen Thomas always said: “I don't want to be loved.” And it is true, although if you poll the press, the public will say, “What I care most about is fairness and accuracy.” But if you look at the popularity of the press at various periods, you'll see that sometimes where fairness and accuracy were at quite a low ebb—for instance, during Katrina—the emotional support for the press still went sky high because of the tremendous umbrage expressed by Anderson Cooper and all those cable TV hosts laying into very irresponsible officials on the federal level and on the local level.

Interlude featuring archival audio

GLADSTONE: It's not that they weren't doing a good job in expressing our feelings and trying to get answers. But they certainly were happy to report on children being raped in public places and sniping going on in places where they hadn't gone on—a lot of real racist garbage that went unchallenged all through that.

Interlude featuring archival audio

GLADSTONE: It was a disgraceful time for the reporting of the American media, really. And it was at a really high ebb. The status quo bias, I think, has been chipped away by the Trump administration, at least in certain quarters of the American public. I do think the shakeup has moved the so-called Overton Window to a degree that it had been yanked all the way to the right. The Overton Window is what is basically in the mainstream of debate. And there was a time when questioning some of the tenets of capitalism and supporting vast public projects were outside the Overton Window. It has slipped a little bit to the left, so those things can now be considered seriously. And that has been a big change. Lately the Overton Window has been on a on a slider.

HANNAH: Is that Trump? Is that Bernie Sanders?

GLADSTONE: Initially my feeling is it’s just Trump making us understand fundamentally that our status quo bias—a belief that our institutions will save us and that the system worked—was hugely shaken. And that gave an opportunity for people like Bernie Sanders and many others to be heard. It's not like Bernie Sanders tremendously changed his message. He's been saying the exact same thing for a quarter of a century. Why is he being heard now? Well, it's generational, but it isn't just generational. A lot of these programs, like the ones that were passed during the pandemic, also changed the status quo. These are things that happen, I think, because our country has been shaken by a lack of confidence in what we believed to be true.

HANNAH: One attendee, who works as a magazine photo editor, asked about the bias which is created by the dissemination of photojournalism in the context of war. Is there a responsible way for the news media to disseminate photography, given the immense weight these visual images carry in wartime?

GLADSTONE: I'll just say quickly that I feel for you because I know how painful and difficult this is. There are laws against showing pictures of people when families haven't been notified, but beyond that, there are cultural mores here that are tremendously different from other places in the world. And I will not say that those places that show the grisly pictures somehow have less delicate feelings than we do or so forth. I just think we think it's really icky. There were rules against showing flag-draped coffins coming back from Iraq. So, it's not like, “Oh my god, a family is going to be in pain.” It was simply images of death. And I do think that was why, for a while, the New York Times and other outlets were just listing names and so forth. It's an agonizing, moving target for someone like you who has to do that. I think that's another example where your gut rules, to the extent that you're allowed to let it rule, given that your employer's going to have a say in this, too.

KAPLAN: I would say if it's combined with reporting about whether this picture, which might be sensational, also in some sense truly captures what's going on in the world. For example, Lynsey Addario’s picture in the Times of the mother and daughter lying dead on the road—Ukrainian. On the one hand, you could say, “Well, people die in every war.” But this was a war where there are no Russian civilian casualties and where Russia was actually deliberately bombing and shelling civilian targets, targets with no military significance whatsoever. So, that picture, I think, did truly capture vividly one aspect, and in terms of whether to get involved in it, maybe a central aspect of the war. So, in that sense I think that was properly put in the New York Times.

GLADSTONE: I think of some of the iconic pictures from Vietnam—the little girl running from napalm, the soldier being executed right in the spot. These pictures are seared in the mind, and they need to be seen.

HANNAH: The audience was also curious about the bias of commentators in the news media—this kind of access bias. It's been interesting, to say the least, that a lot of generals and government officials who are responsible, to a large degree, for these inconclusive and unsuccessful military adventures in the Middle East are now the people bookers are looking to and putting back on air to suss out what's going on and what should be done in Ukraine.

KAPLAN: It is really unclear to me why such a high percentage of the commentators on all the cable news networks are people are A) three and four star generals, or sometimes less than that, but still generals, and B) people who really have guided us wrongly in previous wars.

GLADSTONE: Can I just add to that very quickly? Something that is also appalling about the armchair generals is there's often, in fact always, no disclosure of their ties to defense industries. And almost all of them have those ties after leaving the service.

KAPLAN: In this war, I do notice they have had on some people who just know a lot about Russia or a lot about Ukraine, and particularly Ukraine, because there aren't that many people who have been following Ukraine closely for many years. So, they have done a bit of that. But still, when you get into the, “Well, let's talk about what kinds of bombs are used,” or something like that, there's this heavy orientation toward hardware and toward battlefield results, some of which are ambiguous or completely unknown. But people speculate anyway. I don't know. It distorts and—

GLADSTONE: —And distracts.

KAPLAN: Yes, and distracts from the main question.

GLADSTONE: You've turned it into a video game. It is the narrowing of the focus to something that is pure action, devoid of any context. The long panel tables of people who aren't really connected with that can speculate, but it still seems—just like our campaigns—everything is a sports enterprise now. And it is absolutely frustrating because certainly every election season, people promise to do differently, and they never do.

I think you have to just accept that there is bias, that we all are coming from someplace, and that journalists are not the tribe of passionless priests they have often tried to present themselves as. I think we have to begin with the understanding that we don't live without context, that we all use horrific heuristics and shortcuts to try and understand the world. If we accept that's the case, then how do we make it more just and fair and truthful? I do think there is such a thing as simply being truthful, in doubting yourself in a creative, productive way, and to understand that your choices are not immutable, that you might make a different choice another time.

HANNAH: We hope you enjoyed listening to this conversation as much as we enjoyed hosting it. For me personally, as somebody who's gotten his doctorate in a journalism school, who's been a long time listener and fan of Brooke’s, listening to On the Media for the past twenty years, this conversation was a special treat. Whatever you think about the media and the way it has become fragmented and transformed by new technologies, commercial pressures, and political affinities, one thing is certain—that as we decide as a country what's to be done and not to be done about Ukraine, and as we try to ascertain the ground truth in far-flung places, journalists, producers, and editors play a critical role in informing these decisions and in setting a public agenda. And if nothing else, this episode has helped you be a more critical consumer of and producer of news, then our work here is done.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. I want to thank our guests, Brooke Gladstone and Fred Kaplan, and to everybody at the American Academy in Rome, especially Elizabeth Rodini and Marla Stone, who made this episode possible. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team. Thanks to our producer Caroline Gray and our associate producer and editor, Sarah Allison. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please do subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

(END.)

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