Part 1: Journalism Under Digital Siege!

THE theme for World Press Freedom Day 2022 is ‘Journalism Under Digital Siege’ – a most appropriate one that would have been chosen long before the war in Ukraine but the accuracy of which is most aptly portrayed in how the world views what’s already become but only not yet declared the Third World War.

The third world war to start in Europe is very different, being fought in air as much as on the ground in a battle for more minds than lives.

During World War I (1914-1918), news had to come by outside the theatres of conflict and the immediate European bloc and World War II (1939-1945) was slightly better, with the English-speaking Caribbean and world fed mainly by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

But even so, it took 24 hours for the BBC World News to be broadcast in the British West Indies (BWI), where radios were a luxury and people gathered outside homes with receivers to hear ‘The BBC News’.

Not so today with the third war of global proportions being played out in Europe and already affecting the rest of the entire world in ways no other has, by way of effects on availability and costs of food and fuel driven by a supply chain crisis in the midst of the continuing war in 2022 against COVID-19.

Today, no one can escape the Ukraine war, which is beamed 24/7 across all media platforms and through all digital devices.

In the age of The Internet of Things when media monopoly is more concentrated than ever imagined, business competition has given way to digital cooperation in ensuring similarity of messaging, with no distinguishing between BBC and CNN reports on what’s ‘Happening Now!’ in Ukraine, transmitted digitally by-the-minute.

RT (Russia Today) has been banned across Europe, as is Novosti and every other international Russian broadcaster, just as CNN, BBC and Cold War media entities like Radio Free Europe have been banned from Russia’s airwaves.

Indeed, the digital media war looks and sounds hotter than the battles in Eastern Ukraine and all is being done by one side to explain why the other’s wrong, the pro-Ukraine side heaping all the blame on Moscow and vice versa in a new propaganda offensive that’s more offensive to traditional notions of Press Freedom than ever.

The East and West political definitions of global warfare have returned by way of ‘Us and Them’, the pro-Ukraine sides justifying support for a proxy war by arguing that the world is in danger and therefore in need of saving by investing in keeping the war going while sobbing about loss of life.

With wars today more reflecting battles for minds than fights for freedom, traditional proponents and defenders of Press Freedom have redefined it to now mean freedom to take sides in reporting and blanking-out the other side, as is the case with the digital war over the Ukraine war.

Caribbean people, thousands of miles away across The Atlantic, have no choice but to see and hear one side and expected to believe only what they see and hear, as Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments come under pressure to take sides in a war they had nothing to do with but which is already affecting the region in more serious ways than the region’s press has been able or willing to address, far less report on.

The Ukraine war is unfolding before our very eyes, but only with and through the selected digital images transmitted faster than the speed of light to our screens and through the various devices that keep us informed online.

The region’s media has blinded itself to crystal-clear evidence of the Ukraine war having split the usually united CARICOM region down the middle in related votes at the United Nations (UN) while efforts continue at all levels to influence individual governments to abandon the traditional regional approach of ‘non-interference’ and force CARICOM to take a side on the basis of a majority vote instead of respecting the traditional policy of unanimity.

The numbers game is taking precedence over everything else as CARICOM member states find themselves torn between the preference for unanimity and membership of regional and international groupings more vulnerable to external political pressure than the CARICOM Secretariat, with one side in the battle over Ukraine openly canvassing CARICOM collectively and individually – and succeeding in sowing division from without and within.

Just like in Europe, some Caribbean digital media service providers have scrapped RT while embracing BBC and CNN wholeheartedly and wholesale, but fortunately, media houses have not started banning reports that challenge the prevailing narrative, if only because those who have doubts about the effects of today’s digital one-sided flows of propaganda through information continue to mark time for fear of censorship or being branded.

Propaganda wars have accompanied every war, big or small and that over Ukraine is no different, except that the one-sided narrative is so overwhelming that respected presenters on BBC and CNN have come to the point of repeatedly describing leaders as ‘liars’ and fanning the flames of war as briskly as they’ve promoted peace in the past.

Seasoned observers who’ve seen it all before (even in lesser terms) quietly or silently recall the roles of psychological warfare tactics before, during and after the Grenada Revolution or in the later actions in and against Nicaragua and Bolivia, and/or the continuing propaganda wars against Cuba and Venezuela and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the continuing propaganda offensive against Iran.

But today’s Caribbean media crop, being less interested in reporting on matters beyond borders, has opted to go with the flow, instead of assuming the responsibility for reading between the lines for those without tinted spectacles seeking clear views on the clouded issues wrapped-up in shiny digital media images, in the war for minds that characterises global reporting on the war in Ukraine.