Kent knows something about both Russia and the media. He was Moscow bureau chief, international editor and later standards editor at the Associated Press, and went on to become president of Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty. He now teaches at Columbia and works on Russian affairs and propaganda. There is also a personal connection: Kent was international editor at the AP when I joined the company in 1990, and bears, as I noted on the podcast, a significant amount of the credit \u2014 or blame \u2014 for what has become of me since.<\/p>\n
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His argument is more complicated than the familiar observation that Russia lies. Of course Russia lies. The Kremlin operates a vast propaganda apparatus, suppresses independent information at home and devotes considerable resources to influencing opinion abroad. But Kent\u2019s point is that the information war is larger than Russian disinformation. Russians themselves must be persuaded that their country can win. Ukrainians must continue believing that they can defeat a much larger neighbor. Western publics must believe that supporting Ukraine is worthwhile and that it can succeed without their own soldiers being sent into battle. What people believe is therefore not merely commentary on the war but \u2014 as it affects policy \u2014 one of the things that will determine its outcome.<\/p>\n
Kent also has a criticism of Western journalism that I think deserves attention. He believes the media have repeatedly overinterpreted battlefield developments, treating each Ukrainian advance as evidence that victory may be near and each Russian advance as evidence that Ukraine may be doomed. This is fundamentally a war of attrition. Front lines can move painfully slowly, and the significance of a particular town, offensive or reversal may not become apparent for months.<\/p>\n
There is an obvious reason for the exaggeration: journalism is a business.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe front moved three kilometers and we have no idea what it means\u201d is not an especially enticing headline. \u201cUkraine Turning the Tide\u201d is considerably better for \u201cengagement.\u201d So is \u201cUkraine on the Brink.\u201d The incentives of the modern information economy push toward drama, certainty and instantaneous conclusions about events whose significance may be neither dramatic nor certain.<\/p>\n
Kent would like less obsession with the daily battlefield scorecard and more attention to the forces that may actually decide the war: the Russian and Ukrainian economies, military morale, Western assistance, Russia\u2019s ability to sustain its enormous losses, and what\u2019s actually happening inside Russia. And sometimes, he argued, a perfectly respectable conclusion to an analytical article is: we\u2019ll have to see.<\/p>\n
That last formulation may be sensible journalism, but it is catastrophically ill-suited to the internet.<\/p>\n
This led us to a larger problem that goes well beyond Ukraine. The world has become more complicated at precisely the moment when much of the audience has become less interested in complexity. International news has withered. Foreign bureaus have disappeared. Social media rewards certainty, outrage and brevity. Propaganda has become cheaper and technologically easier to manufacture, while artificial intelligence makes convincing fabrications available not merely to governments but to practically anyone.<\/p>\n
Claire worried that Russia\u2019s ability to exploit this environment is being underestimated. I tended to agree. Kent was somewhat more skeptical. Russia can influence elections and public opinion at the margins, he said, and in an election decided by one or two percentage points the margins can obviously decide everything. But Moscow is hardly alone in manufacturing falsehoods, and people are not simply passive vessels into which Vladimir Putin pours opinions. Propaganda tends to work best when it reinforces attitudes people already possess. That strikes me as both reassuring and alarming.<\/p>\n
The deeper problem is that democracies depend upon citizens maintaining at least some interest in a factual universe beyond their immediate lives. Kent noted that many people increasingly ask of foreign events: What does this mean to me? Why should I care about Ukraine rather than Sudan or Taiwan \u2014 or any of them at all?<\/p>\n
There are perfectly good answers to those questions. But they require more than 20 seconds, preferably without a backbeat. And it does leave me wondering: Is there any room any more for intellectual curiosity about the world? And what will be of journalism if the answer is basically no?<\/p>\n
We ended by forcing Kent to violate one of the commandments apparently drilled into generations of AP journalists (more from his era then, err, mine): don\u2019t predict the future. His prediction, suitably hedged, was that the Ukraine war may end through a deus ex machina \u2014 some development in Moscow, Washington, the Middle East or somewhere else that we cannot presently foresee. Long wars have a way of being transformed by events that looked peripheral until suddenly they weren\u2019t. That, in a way, reinforced the central point of our discussion.<\/p>\n
The world is complicated, uncertainty is real, and sometimes the most intelligent answer available is that we do not yet know. Which is precisely why propaganda has such an advantage: it always does.<\/p>\n
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