Ukraine’s supporters are in a tizzy over an unusual occurrence — a factual and unbiased report from the New York Times.
It’s a platitude that war kills — not only people but truth. And as with all platitudes, the statement is true, boring, and misleading. It omits the real culprit: “War” does not kill truth — people kill truth. War merely tempts them to do so as few other things can. The converse of that reality is that it is, of course, absolutely possible to adhere to the truth — or at least make an honest effort to do so — and this is “true” in war as well.
As its title indicates, Heitmann’s article devotes much attention to the devastation and suffering wrought by the fighting.
But that effort is different from “getting it right.” Consider if you will, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, his unreservedly personal account of the Spanish Civil War. The work was never meant to be unbiased — he sided with and indeed fought for the underdog Trotskyists.
Historians and literary critics alike, as always, feel they know better about context and details – and that may be a valid premise. But Homage to Catalonia was an honest effort to find out and relate the truth about a war and, importantly, from and in the midst of a war. How do we know that? Most of all by reading it, of course. But apart from that, there is another test: the manner in which it was received when it came out, namely — poorly.
Making no concessions to what his audience might want to read, Orwell had trouble getting this work published. Moreover, he rightly suspected that it was due to its politics which antagonized virtually everyone: Orwell’s own audience, the Left, no less than the Right. In the end — with the work, in Orwell’s words, “boycotted by the British press” – barely a third of its modest first edition of 1,500 copies were sold. Today, of course, Homage to Catalonia is a modern classic. But when it hit the shelves in 1938 and until Orwell died in 1950, it was without an audience. And that’s because, in essence, it was too honest.
Without stretching the comparison any further, it is fair to say that recently we have witnessed the same principle at work, when the New York Times published an article by German photographer and reporter Nanna Heitmann.
Under the title “A Landscape of Death: What’s Left Where Ukraine Invaded Russia,” Heitmann’s sophisticated account is based on her own six-day visit to the Russian town of Sudzha, located in the Kursk Region. It was there that Kiev’s forces staged a large-scale incursion that brought great political and media fanfare along with great destruction and fierce fighting which ended in a fiasco for Ukraine.
As its title indicates, Heitmann’s article devotes much attention to the devastation and suffering wrought by the fighting. She also describes a surprise advance by Russia’s military through an empty gas pipeline. Throughout, she lets individuals with different experiences and points of view speak, civilians and soldiers, and is careful to record official statements from both sides, Ukraine and Russia.
It is obvious to any fair reader that no favors are extended to Russia. Heitmann, for instance, dwells on local criticism of Russian evacuation efforts and the adverse health effects suffered by some of the ethnically Chechen fighters who carried out the pipeline operation. She ends her story by reporting both a local man’s hope for reconstruction and the skepticism of a woman who cannot see a future for herself in the region, whether reconstructed or not.
The reactions to Heitmann’s article by high-ranking Ukrainian officials and media outlets (in and out of Ukraine) have been nothing short of hostile. Georgy Tikhy, spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, tagged the New York Times in an X post accusing Heitmann of reproducing “Russian propaganda” and engaging in “Duranty-level manipulation.”
Walter Duranty was an American journalist who is now infamous for spreading Stalinist deceptions. Heitmann has done nothing remotely comparable. Tikhy’s grossly unfair comparison reveals his malicious intent, namely to smear Heitmann as badly as he can before the public in general and her employer in particular. Ironically, though not surprisingly, it is not Heitmann but the Ukrainian government official who is conducting information warfare here, and in an especially reprehensible, personal way.
Tikhy and several media outlets are angry about the fact that Heitmann didn’t spend enough words on reiterating the Ukrainian and Western narrative about Russia invading Ukraine.
Every New York Times reader is certain to have had that narrative assault their consciousness for years, not only by that newspaper but every other Western mainstream news outlet. Heitmann, actually writing about a case in which Ukraine proudly invaded Russia, is faulted for not ritualistically regurgitating the Western narrative.
The Kiev regime believes it has a right to expect bias in its favor — mere honesty will not do. This is nothing less than an astonishingly arrogant and categorical demand for the Western media to be as submissive as Ukraine’s is. It is testimony to the sense of entitlement that the West has long fostered among its political and media proxies.
The objectionable reality criticized by Ukraine and the media about Heitmann’s article is that it is informative, well-written, and in no obvious way biased. What is intriguing about the backlash against her piece is not the work itself — which is simply good, conscientious reporting — but the response to it.
The high-level and widespread hostile reaction to Heitmann’s essay reveals only one thing, and it is not anything about Heitmann and her work: Western and Ukrainian authorities and disinformation “warriors” have had it far too easy for far too long. Pampered by years of easily feeding a biased narrative to the Western public (a form of manufactured consent), while dissent was repressed and marginalized, they react with allergic fury to even benign signs of unbiased, clear-eyed reporting breaking through into a mainstream outlet.
One can only wonder how poorly the media bias has served Ukraine’s and the West’s war efforts. It’s difficult to achieve victory when even setbacks are reported as wins.
Insecurity can be a terrible thing — especially in those with a sense of entitlement — the Western political elite and media proxies on both sides of the Atlantic reflect that malady.
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