Mainstream media dropped the ball on August War

Frontline’s Daniel Bennett discussed in his blog yesterday research showing that “a cocktail of fear, censorship, jingoism, cyberwar, PR, and threats to journalists led to chronic misinformation” during the brief conflict between Georgia and Russia last August.

The local media of each side in the conflict, largely toting the official line, were essentially reporting on “two separate simultaneous conflicts” with Georgia viewing it as an open invasion by Russian forces, and Russian media purporting that the Russian army was intervening to halt a genocide in South Ossetia.

Journalists did not report the other side of the conflict and there was a “slide of journalism into propaganda”.  Censorship, political pressures, and patriotism all contributed to journalists’ failure to represent different points of view on the conflict. Misinformation abounded in a climate of unchallenged facts and figures.

This was not the case only in the local media, the report found. While researcher Margarita Akhvlediani examined only BBC’s reporting as an international mainstream source that “made its contribution to the confusion” it was by no means the only international media organization presenting skewed coverage.

I actually felt that BBC was one of the most credible sources I could find. In this blog I deplored CNN’s coverage multiple times as they maintained their banner as “Russia invades Georgia” for several days and balanced several 15-minute-long interviews with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili with occasional 30-second-to-one-minute-long comments by Russian officials. The research seems to agree.

Interestingly, Akhvlediani claims that “with no real differences in public alternative information, Internet blogs became a crucial way of checking what really happened”. Although blogs are “a very new social phenomenon in the Caucasus” they are becoming increasingly influential. New blogs and forum topics were started to discuss the war.

I admit, I was far from getting everything right here in Three Kings, but I am still proud of what I was able to decipher while American media organizations seemed to be covering the conflict by simply handing the microphone to U.S. and Georgian officials (for a look back, here are the Three Kings archives, starting at the outset of the war).

While the most Western governments, the United States included, continue to maintain the view that Russia was mostly responsible for the conflict, every international humanitarian, monitoring and peacekeeping organization with direct view of the events as they unfolded on the ground have agreed that the conflict was provoked by the overnight bombardment of Tskhinval, the de facto capital of South Ossetia, and subsequent ground incursion by Georgian forces. It is still unclear when, but at some point, Russian peacekeepers serving under a U.N. mandate were hit in their base near Tskhinval and suffered casualties.

Today, I think perhaps the best barometer for what happened is what the Georgian people now thinks. I have yet to meet a Georgian that believes what their president still claims — that Russia decided to up and invade them one day. This is not to say that the Georgians I have talked to are in any way fans of the Russian government and its political ambitions in the region, but the protests aimed at unseating Saakashvili should make the point pretty clear.

Regardless of what the U.S. State Department says, the Georgians hold their president responsible for starting a war and losing it. The war cost them hundreds of lives, an estimated $1 billion in damage and end to any hopes that Georgia will be able to reintegrate its two break-away republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which constituted 20 percent of Georgia’s original territory.