Ukraine: Oh what a lovely war!

By Richard North - March 31, 2022

If there are any beneficiaries of this ghastly war, it is the media who, according to the Press Gazette, have never had it so good.

For the Guardian, last February was its fifth-biggest ever month for page views. Its daily Ukraine live blog consistently saw two million views per day and a comment piece about why Putin had “already lost this war” by historian Yuval Noah Harari four days after the invasion began became its most-read opinion article ever.

The Sun said it had seen 70 million page views on its websites for Ukraine-related stories in the month since the start of the invasion, 40 percent of which was from direct traffic.

The Telegraph boasts that its Ukraine coverage has seen “unprecedented” interest from readers. Its video content in particular has been seeing engagement at 300 percent of the normal rate, while a new podcast on the conflict in Ukraine averaged more than 50,000 listeners a day in its first week.

Head of digital for The Times, Edward Roussel, saw his paper gain 1,000 new subscribers a day during the first two weeks of the invasion, one of its highest ever growth rates.

And more than 280 million people are estimated to have used the BBC’s online news output in the week the war started. The BBC News live page about Ukraine recorded 396 million page views between 24 February and 13 March.

But one month after the start of the war, the British are beginning to lose interest in the war – as measured by Google. Its trends data have shown a dip in searches related to the war. On 21 March, key terms like “Ukraine”, “Putin”, “Zelensky” and “Russia” were at 10, 10, 11 and 6 percent respectively of the number of searches seen on their 24 February peak.

This is reflected in the experience of many news outlets who are now reporting drops in page views, while the BBC reports that: “The level of audience engagement that we saw at the start of the war was very high. Record-breaking on some occasions. That level of engagement is not as high now; it is returning to something that you would consider more of a normal level”.

One of the reasons for the waning of interest, Adrian Chiles avers is because, “when the same awful thing happens often enough, it ceases to be newsworthy”. Chiles is a broadcaster, who presents a programme on BBC Radio 5, a writer and a Guardian columnist, so he has some interest in the issue.

The less new a story is, he says, the less it counts as news. The clue, after all, is in the word itself. If you are in a cellar in Mariupol, you can’t move on; you can probably never move on. But the media have to move on; the “new” in news demands it. This, he adds, is a real problem.

Chiles relies on dictionary definitions of “news”, which imply that news should consist of what is worthy of mention, not merely what happens to be topical. Modern definitions, he says, tend to refer to them being about what is “interesting” to people, rather than what is “important”.

But, he laments, there is a difference: the former generates more engagement, and therefore sales and clicks, than the latter. And he claims that many news organisations do everything they can to mitigate this, but “the fight against human nature and our dwindling attention spans is a tough one”.

He may be partially right, although experience might suggest that the media, in the main, is more interested in clickbait than it is in providing information. The possible exception is the BBC, whose interest is in imposing its own world view on its followers, entirely divorced from the issues at hand, which are merely platforms for spreading that view.

Nevertheless, as a certain “sameness” begins to dominate the Ukraine coverage, we are seeing it slip down the news agenda as other events and interests claim attention. And if, as is expected, the war migrates to the east where it becomes less visible, I have already predicted that interest will decline even further.

The perverse thing, though, is only just now are we beginning to realise how much the role of information – or misinformation – has played in this war. The Telegraph has a report retailing claims from Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, that Putin “overestimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory”.

This, according to US intelligence is likely because Putin has been misinformed by his advisers about his military’s poor performance in Ukraine, and on key issues relating to troop deployments. The intelligence community, for instance, has concluded that Putin was unaware that his military had been using and losing conscripts in Ukraine.

But this lack of awareness applies not only to the military situation. Putin, it is claimed, is also unaware of how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisers are too afraid to tell him the truth.

Secretary of state Blinken endorsed this claim, affirming that a dynamic within the Kremlin exists where advisers are unwilling to speak to Putin with candour. “One of the Achilles’ heels of autocracies”, he says, “is that you don’t have people in those systems that speak truth to power or have the ability to speak truth to power, and I think that’s what we’re seeing in Russia”.

However, GCHQ’s Fleming now reckons that, despite the lack of candour from his aides, “what’s going on”, and the extent of the misjudgements, “must be crystal clear to the regime”, but this is over four weeks down the line when the lack of success must be increasingly hard to conceal.

US intelligence supports Fleming’s observation, indicating that Putin is aware of the situation on information coming to him. There is now “persistent tension” between him and senior Russian military officials.

Blinken and others, though, should not labour under the impression that only senior politicians in autocracies are cut off from a flow of accurate information. Our own politicians are often just as divorced from reality, not least because they too have officials who will often seek to filter the information that reaches them.

The difference, one might assume, is that in supposed democracies, we have what is, in theory at least, a free press which ensures a freer flow of information. Nevertheless, I think many people would be quite surprised (and even alarmed) at the extent to which politicians – and even senior ministers – rely on the media for their information.

The problem here is that, for reasons of their own, the media are quite prone to misinforming themselves. And since journalists tend to hunt as a pack, feeding off the same sources of [mis]information, they all tend to get it wrong at the same time, while the unanimity can lend a spurious credibility to the stories published.

Even then, with or without media intervention, the military can get it wrong. European command chief Gen. Tod Wolters, the top US general in Europe, admitted to a Congressional committee on Tuesday that there “could be” a gap in US intelligence gathering that caused the US to overestimate Russia’s capability and underestimate Ukraine’s defensive abilities before the invasion. US intelligence had assessed that the country-wide assault could lead to Kiev falling into Russian hands within days.

Inevitably, there is always going to be confusion when the situation is fast-moving, and some delay before details are settled. To take a recent example, much of the media have taken deputy defence minister Fomin’s comments about pulling back troops from Kiev at face value, taking this to be a de-escalation rather than a redeployment of forces.

Thus, there was almost an air or outrage when Russian shelling in the Chernihiv region and elsewhere intensified, and continued fighting was reported. Later, we saw complaints that the Russians were concentrating in the Chernobyl area.

Only later did it transpire that this was a prelude to a general withdrawal from that area as well. US officials have confirmed that troops are walking away from the Chernobyl facility and moving into Belarus.

Even then, although there is evidence that Russia is moving separate units from the Kiev and Chernihiv areas, according to the Ukrainian defence ministry it has not completely abandoned its attempts to capture or besiege these cities.

Despite the high hopes that there was a move towards peace, therefore, the Ukrainians are now concluding that the talks with Russia are not real.

Increasingly, the Russians are seen as using them as a “smokescreen” for their forces to regroup, mainly to the Donbass region. Even though the talks are set to resume on Friday, Zelensky believes the negotiations are “only words”, telling Biden, during a 55-minute telephone call, that peace “will be achieved only when we have a strong position on the battlefield”.

Here is a hint, therefore, that Zelensky – the media’s “poster boy” – is just as keen on pursuing the war as is Putin – both seeking to achieve a military resolution. That Ukraine is still the passive “victim” may yet be the most pernicious misinformation yet perpetrated.