The independent media has already won this war
What does it mean when a multitude of media micropreneurs, rather than a handful of legacy media behemoths, are setting the (geo)political agenda?
I’m old enough to remember not only the Iraq War but also the first Gulf War.
So, once I put my emotional reaction to the images appearing on my various screens to one side, what struck me about the Russia-Ukraine conflict was just how prominent a sense-making role was being played by independent media identities. Identities who had either never been part of the mainstream media or had been expunged from it.
In ye olden days, it was the big-city newspapers, major free-to-air TV networks and public broadcasters that people instinctively turned to whenever something of world-historical significance occurred. Comparing the 1990-1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq invasion to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict, a few things stuck out to this erstwhile journo.
First, TV networks and newspapers used to have both the financial capacity and inclination to put a lot more foreign correspondents, photographers and camera operators on the ground in war zones. Nowadays, they seem to mainly rely on mobile phone footage supplied by local civilians.
Second, war reporters could once expect to have long careers, provided they didn’t get shot. Peter Arnett’s career lasted half a century, much of which was spent in South-East Asia and the Middle East working for the likes of Associated Press and CNN. Arnett guaranteed his place in the history books when he got the following quote from US major serving in Viet Nam in 1968: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Over two decades later, he became a global star during the first Gulf War by staying in Baghdad and providing live coverage for CNN after the US started raining bombs down Iraq’s capital city.
Third, even if modern-day equivalents of Peter Arnett existed (they don’t, thanks to the collapse of the mainstream media’s business model), they wouldn’t be able to dominate the airwaves the way they did in a less fractured media environment.
The great disillusionment
By the time the Iraq war kicked off in 2003, the Internet was very much A Thing. But it wasn’t yet disrupting the print and broadcast media in any significant way. In 2003, there were no iPhones and no Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. When Americans wanted information about a significant event, they still turned to papers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS and, depending on their political affiliations, cable networks such as Fox and CNN.
People in other Western nations also still got all – or almost all – their news from a similarly small collection of venerable newspapers and TV networks, as well as public broadcasters such the ABC and BBC.
Given they’ve spent the last 15 years quietly crab-walking away from their earlier position, younger readers might not realise how vociferously almost all mainstream media organisations initially supported the Iraq War. Even supposedly leftist organs such as the ABC, BBC and the New York Times guzzled down the khaki Kool-Aid in ways that would make the editor of a Murdoch tabloid blush. In a move that would have set alarm bells clanging for old-school, fiercely independent journalists such as Arnett, hundreds of reporters were even “embedded” with military units during the Iraq War. This all but guaranteed they would provide the US military with favourable coverage.
Arnett wasn’t embedded. In fact, he was fired by NBC shortly after the war broke out for pointing out US and British troops weren’t being hailed as liberators and that, whatever issues they may have had with Saddam Hussein, Iraqis weren’t over the moon about having their country invaded. Other middle-aged journos, such as proto-Oprah talk show host Phil Donahue, were also shown the door after similar bouts of impolitic honesty.
It's everybody’s fault, but mainly that of journalists and politicians
As tempting as it is to sheet home all the blame for the fiascos of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the meedja and politicians, things aren’t quite that simple. For around five years after September 11, a majority of Americans, as well as plenty of people in other Western nations, desperately wanted to believe it was 1938, Hussein was Hitler, and weapons of mass destruction could be unleashed at any moment. (In the American neo-con imagination, it’s always 1938, any inconvenient foreign leader is always Hitler and Armageddon is always one cowardly decision away.)
Americans wanted to believe that, but they would have benefitted from being confronted with some cold, hard truths such as:
· If you want to wreak vengeance for September 11, the logical nation to invade is
Saudi Arabia. Attacking Iraq makes about as much sense as the US bombing Thailand as payback for Pearl Harbour
· The evidence Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction is, at best, scant
· There’s a distinct possibility the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars will drag on for many years, cost trillions, result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, grievously undermine America’s moral authority, and not achieve anything much
· If the US and its allies get bogged down in interminable wars of choice in the Middle East, they may find it difficult to intervene in future conflicts; conflicts that may be far more important to the long-term security of Western nations
The public backlash Michael Moore and the Dixie Chicks received for mentioning some of the inconvenient truths listed above suggests the US was in the grip of a deranging war fever after the September 11 attacks. A war fever that was less widespread but by no means absent in nations such as the UK and Australia. Bush, Blair and Howard kept winning elections after the invasion of Iraq, which seems to suggest there was electoral support for their actions. And many millions of Americans, Brits and Australians unquestioningly lapped up the comforting fictions provided by mainstream media outlets.
But when public opinion turned decisively against the Iraq war in the US and elsewhere, the general public wasn’t inclined to consider its complicity. People decided, not entirely inaccurately, that they had been lied into the war by cynical politicians and craven journalists. Politicians and journalists who they would never trust again.
We won’t get fooled again
Once Xi Jinping’s Winter Olympics jamboree wrapped up and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, my first instinct was to see what podcasters with Russian and/or Ukrainian heritage had to say.
Rather than going to the New York Times or Sydney Morning Herald or BBC website, I went to YouTube and searched for recent podcasts by Konstantin Kisin, Michael Malice and Lex Fridman.
All three are self-employed and, I presume, none would consider themselves journalists, at least in the normal sense of the word. (Kisin is a stand-up comedian. Malice is a professional edgelord. Fridman is a computer scientist.) Interestingly, Ukraine’s president has much more in common with the likes of Kisin and Malice than a conventional politician. Like many politicians, Zelenskyy has a law degree. But he never used it, instead pursuing a career as an actor before winning over the Ukrainian electorate via a campaign based on stand-up comedy routines, YouTube clips and social media posts in early 2019.
After checking out what Kisin, Malice and Fridman had to say, the next stop was the Substack of Matt Taibbi, who spent over a decade living in Russia. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Taibbi, along with self-employed political pundit Saagar Enjeti, had insisted that Putin was only sabre-rattling. Admirably, once Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border, both Taibbi and Enjeti immediately issued full-throated mea culpas for their reflexive mistrust of America’s intelligence services and overestimation of Putin’s commitment to being a rational actor.
(Sidenote: Ask yourself how many prominent media figures have ever issued a mea culpa for maniacally beating the drums of war between 2001-2003. Indeed, ask yourself if you’ve ever seen a prominent mainstream media figure ever apologise for getting anything wrong. Now ask yourself if Taibbi and Enjeti would have had a free hand to acknowledge their mistake if they were still working in the mainstream media rather than running their own shows.)
After seeing what the Russians, and long-time Russian residents, had to say, I next turned to some of my favourite podcasts and/or Substacks: Honestly with Bari Weiss (famously, Weiss exited the New York Times after falling foul of younger woke colleagues), The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (famously Sullivan exited New York Magazine after falling foul of younger woke colleagues, The Megyn Kelly Show (famously, Kelly exited NBC after… well, you get the idea), Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps, Making Sense with Sam Harris, Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Nonzero Newsletter, and The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
I did this not because I necessarily share the same worldview of any of these podcasters/Substackers or their guests. I did it because rather than getting spoonfed some Manichean good vs evil fairytale, à la the Iraq War, I’d wanted to hear the views of right-wingers, left-wingers, centrists, Russophiles, Russophobes, foreign policy idealists, foreign policy realists, isolationists, neo-liberals, Kremlinologists, historians and economists then come to my own conclusions.
It was only after spending many hours consuming independent media that I even bothered checking out what the big beasts of the mainstream Australian media had to say. It may turn out to be the case that their observations are proven incisive and correct. But given Australia’s pre-eminent foreign affairs journalist Greg Sheridan never appears to have expressed any remorse for 2003 hot takes such as “No serious figure in the debate anywhere believes Iraq does not have [weapons of mass destruction]” nor any embarrassment over purple prose such as, “The eagle is soaring. The bald eagle of American power is aloft, high above the humble earth and everything it sees is splendid. For as it soars and sweeps it sees victory, power, and opportunity,” I’m inclined to discount what he has to say about Ukraine.
(I suspect American and British readers won’t have to Google too hard to find similarly confident proclamations from Murdoch employees in their neck of the woods about the war being over by Christmas, Iraq transforming into Denmark overnight and the imminent comeuppance of cheese-eating surrender monkey sceptics.)
A 21st century Tower of Babel
Back in the old days, politicians could declare war and be confident the media – owned by a small group of magnates with little incentive to tell their audiences anything they didn’t want to hear or to antagonise a wartime government – would fall into line as reliable cheerleaders. It was even possible for the more megalomaniac media barons to gin up a small war then rely on biddable politicians to take care of the formalities once the general public was worked into a state of bloodlust by the yellow press.
Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. That’s not necessarily because the Konstantin Kisins and Matt Taibbis of the world are morally superior to the Rupert Murdochs and Greg Sheridans of the world, though that’s doubtless true in many instances.
It’s because (a) Post-Iraq War, the general public are rightly suspicious of any narrative the mainstream media propogates and (b) people, especially those under the age of 50, are increasingly likely to form their opinions based on content provided by a variegated mob of Substackers, podcasters, bloggers, TikTokers, YouTubers, Patreon creators and comedians, rather than being dictated to by the owners and compliant employees of a few newspapers and TV stations.