This post was written by Amy Harris, DDI Lab Manager and PhD Candidate at the School of Communication.
This event was described as bringing together a “panel of international experts to discuss how media has played a role in shaping public opinion and narratives in different ways” and it was an involved, impassioned, and highly informative discussion. If you were unable to attend or would like to revisit, you can see the recording on Public Square’s YouTube channel here.
From the outset, Nicole Jackson’s (Associate Professor of International Studies at SFU) introduction set the scene in terms of the role of media in the conflict. For Canada, our country’s participation is not just limited to the military involvement, but also how we are contributing to the narrative being spun. She described the complexities of the media ecosystem involved, and how it can use and misuse traditional means of communicating, as well as utilizing opportunities through new high-tech means. For example, actors in the war on all sides try to shape what is happening, or understood to be happening, on the battlefield, while others attempt to help civilians by showing the reality of what is happening on the ground, while others try to hide or deny those same facts or disseminate lies, all of which serves to confuse local and global audiences. The effect is to thereby manipulating emotions and effectively terrorize, leading to influencing global support, and/or silencing some voices. All of these mechanisms undoubtedly have some impact on shaping the war, and the efforts for peace.
Our first invited speaker was Andreas Umland (an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS) at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs). As most of his work focuses on Germany, he focused his comments on the German/Western European behaviour towards the war. He described the response as attempting to balance empathy with security, clarifying that while the response is very empathetic against aggression, it also has to serve the national interests of Western European countries like Germany, and therefore how they have to turn to security primarily. The primary concern is therefore to limit the active response, despite the empathy and solidarity felt, because they don’t want to enter the war and escalate to WWIII and its consequent expense and costliness in terms of both people and resources. The second factor that Dr. Umland spoke to was the potential effect of the result of the conflict on the solidarity and security of nations. In the event that Russia is “successful,” because the European response to Russia’s aggression has been smaller than necessary, this undermines the faith people have in European and International treaties, and the solidarity of nations. This mostly pertains to the existence of nuclear weapons, and how Russia, currently allowed to have nuclear weapons under NATO and other treaties, and can therefore use them as threat against Ukraine. In turn, Ukraine cannot defend itself because it voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons stationed on its soil, following the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, when the Ukrainian nuclear disarmament became an exemplary case of nuclear non-proliferation. This discrepancy has led to Dr. Umland’s analysis that countries in close proximity therefore need to turn the focus somewhat away from the empathy and solidarity, and towards securing a non-proliferation regime, to protect against escalation.
Our second speaker was Vasyl Cherepanyn (Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kyiv), who started by underlining how important it is when referring to the war for it to include “Russia.” Much of the media’s narrative around the war only refers to it as the Ukraine War which evades Russia’s role, so including it directly in the reporting is important. Further, he hypothesized that without the media there wouldn’t be the response there has been, highlighting the role of media as the 4th estate and its vital role to influence the war. He suggested that the Western media might work much more effectively as an instrument to bring this war to an end by being able to put pressure on their respective governments, primarily because they had been effective as a deterrent before the launch of Russia’s all-out assault, but by normalizing the conflict in their coverage, this opportunity has been diminished. He then described the impact of this as the most documented war in human history, which has made it possible to display many of the war crimes and injustices being incurred and influence public opinion. However, there are converse problems with these sorts of portrayals – for example by only portraying Ukrainians as victims, or by concentrating only on milder stories that don’t accurately convey the atrocities being committed, people do get a reduced version of the truth. As a result, he described how he and other Ukrainians are now waiting for an even bigger catastrophe to come, as if what has already happened is not catastrophic enough, but only time will tell.
The third speaker, Kayla Hilstob (PhD Candidate in SFU’s School of Communication and Researcher at the Digital Democracies Institute) described a project she and others are working on looking at Canadian coverage of war as it relates to oil and gas industry. She elaborated on how the oil and gas sector can be seen to be fuelling Russia’s war budget, and, despite sanctions, it continues to do so. With Europe pivoting away from Russian oil and gas, the question then becomes who will supply Europe’s fossil fuels. This discussion has taken place in Canadian media as well. The Russia-Ukraine was has provided the opportunity for some outlets to highlight the role that Canada could providing more oil to the world as a liberal democracy rather than the world relying upon authoritarian regimes like Russia or Saudi Arabia. There have been a number of articles pushing the agenda of “Ethical oil” from the Conservative party – which stemmed from a far right ‘celebrity’ and co-founder of Rebel media – giving this term bandwidth and space for suggesting it as an alternative. However, what really happens with the petro-industry is that the physical location of oil does not denote ownership of control and much of the profits go to other countries. Given the already happening climate catastrophe, there is no such thing as ethical oil (!). For one, oil and gas extraction will always encompass Indigenous rights, and instead what we really need to be looking at is a plan for a ‘Just Transition.’ In the project she is working on, the term ‘Ethical oil’ was mentioned in 42 news articles this year from February to April, compared to just one last year in the same period. Kayla and colleagues Dalton Kamish, Matthew Canute and Svitlana Matviyenko are currently examining how this discussion is playing out on Twitter, though IPSOS polls already show that this narrative is compelling to many Canadians. She closed by describing how the narrative around petrocultures continues to be damaging for climate change, and perpetuates the notion of a particular Canadian national identity as being linked to petroculture. This ideally needs to change, and the war is giving the opportunity to highlight the alternatives available.
The final speaker, Svitlana Matviyenko (Assistant Professor of critical media analysis in SFU’s School of Communication and Assistant Director of the Digital Democracies Institute) insisted that the war can only be described as a capitalist fossil-fuel war. She explained how the war is reinstating a form of imperial power and the preservation of capitalist regimes through techniques linked to terror. She quoted Townshend: “The essence of terrorism, by contrast, is surely the negation of combat,” to demonstrate how in this extreme case of the artillery-missile-drone war where these methods have largely replaced combat, terror becomes a key weapon, instead of a regular use of disinformation. One specific feature of the media coverage of the war has been to watch the terror in real time, for example the attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. In the ways that terror is being produced also include the Russian state media reports that continue to dehumanize the Ukrainian population, denying the Russian genocidal war crimes or, at the same time, also calling for extermination of Ukrainians. In the conversation that followed, one feature of the Western media coverage of the war has been to contribute to the fetishization of the leader, President Zelensky, following a popular “hero narrative,” which eventuality overshadows the unprecedented massive mobilized resistance of the Ukrainian people – both military and civilian.
Overall, this was a vitally important commentary on the role that the media is playing in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It raised awareness of some of the factors that are seen as inevitable when it comes to the media’s portrayal of the war, where there are opportunities for it to redirect attention to more effective and positive aspects, and where a so-called ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ media is revealed to be very much not so. These themes are clearly important to continue talking about, and we look forward to hearing more as the situation progresses and this crucial research continues.