News media stoops to conquer: when being wrong is nowhere near as bad as staying silent

Into my WhatsApp over the weekend popped a short video of my friends’ four-year-old son Taras in his Kyiv apartment packing his most valued toys into his backpack to carry them to safety in the city’s bomb shelter. He looks up to listen to his father, zips the bag closed, stands up straight, tests the bag’s weight. He’s ready to go.

Last thing, he turns around to his room to say goodbye to the toys he has to leave behind.

The video was shared by Taras’ parents, two Ukrainian friends in Kyiv who I think about every day of this war. (Even now that they’re a bit safer in western Ukraine.)

So forgive me if I’m neither as cool — as cynically savvy — as modern media practice dictates you should be, nor so eager to embrace the catastrophist predictions about the future that is increasingly standing in for reporting what’s happening right now.

I #standwithUkraine because, right now, that’s where the front line runs between a lawless authoritarian populism and our continually constructing global edifice of peace, democracy and human rights.

In Australia, the cynicism is playing out with an uncomfortably distanced pose. Sure, our commentariat says, the invasion is the big moment of our time — but what about us? What does it mean for our forthcoming election? Morrison’s national security scare might make it irresistible. Hopefully today’s Newspoll will let us move on.

Like too much of journalism and talking heads commentary right now, it fails to meet the needs of this moment. The core of the problem? News is everywhere. Media have figured out that there’s no point reporting what is happening when social media has long beaten us to the public.

Look at Ukraine. We turn to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok — even Wikipedia and Google Maps. In Australia, only the ABC has the resources, experience and reach to feed the continued demand for updates.

The best of journalism is being churned out through the social channels by local digital journalists, on the ground giving their communities the information they need and bringing it to the world, like the work of the courageous team at the English-language, journalist-run Kyiv Independent, which has become essential reading and now has almost a million Twitter followers.

When traditional media are no longer central to the present moment, value must come from trying to predict what happens next. Pump up your experts. Pump out their op-eds. Problem is, as the saying goes, it’s hard to make predictions.

No worries: traditional media and the commentariat have constructed a workaround: you don’t have to be right, you just have to be catastrophic enough to pull the eyeballs. If you’re wrong, don’t worry — just as long as you’re wrong at the right time, like everyone else.

It’s clickbait meets commentary.

A little over a week ago, the consensus was: “Invasion? You’ve got to be kidding!” In the AFR, Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer, found not one but four reasons to suggest Putin wouldn’t invade.

Come Thursday, come the invasion, the prediction shifted to a blitzkrieg overrunning Ukraine. On Friday morning, Australia’s last foreign minister but one, Julie Bishop, was on ABC Radio predicting the quick end of the conflict with Russia’s occupation of Ukraine.

Shrug. Who really knows? It’s not so much the predictions that are (or may be) wrong; it’s the genre that is worthless. Tells nothing. Takes understanding nowhere. Denigrates the agency of people on the ground to change what happens.

Meanwhile, the hot war has eliminated the most noxious of the pre-war commentary from those right-wing, pro-authoritarian-apologist, cos-playing journalists on Murdoch-owned Fox News. Now, they’ve pivoted from Biden doing too much on Putin, to doing far too little to support Ukraine.

On Wednesday, for the network’s star commentator Tucker Carlson, Ukraine was a client state of the US State Department. By Friday, Putin was to blame for the war.

It has also largely silenced the fringe left eagerness to pin the war on a US-driven expansion of NATO as though the Ukrainian people would be somehow safer if Eastern Europe had been compelled to be less safe.

Me, I’ve always thought solidarity made the world safer for all of us.