Truthful reporting must not be a casualty of war

There are currently well over 30 “armed conflicts”, otherwise known as wars, taking place around the world. Two of them dominate coverage in the western media. The war in Ukraine began on 22 February 2022 with the all-out assault by Russia on its neighbour. The Israel-Hamas war was sparked by the terror attacks on 7 October 2023 in which 1400 Israelis were murdered and over 200 hostages taken, leading to the Israeli counter attack on Gaza in which it is reported more 14,000 people have been killed.

The dreadful suffering of war is common to both conflicts but they have posed very different challenges to mainstream news organisations. From an editorial point of view, Ukraine has been “easy”. There is general agreement that Putin is the bad guy and that the Ukrainians are the victims. News anchors were welcome to set up headquarters in Kiev and Lviv, cities on the receiving end of missile attacks, while war correspondents roamed behind Ukrainian lines.  

The conflict in the Middle East has posed more ethical and practical difficulties for reporters from major national news organisations. Not all journalists see Israel as the true victim, because of their interpretation of the history of the region and, most importantly, because of the far greater loss of life on the other side. 

Those presenting against backdrops of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are up against a fundamental problem for their reporting. They may see and hear rockets falling but they are not in Gaza and cannot witness themselves directly what is really going on. Deprived of the actuality, it is not surprising that broadcast journalists have sometimes ended up substituting emotion, strewn with emotive adjectives and adverbs, for factual reporting. This is especially prevalent on those networks, including the BBC, where the bosses seem to be encouraging their reporters to show some personality by creating space in bulletins for star correspondents to sermonise between the reports that the viewers have just been shown.

The international media are based in Israel to cover the conflict. Israeli authorities routinely provide spokespeople and facilitate access to cover the 7 October atrocities. Hamas does not. Foreign correspondents are unable to gain access into Gaza – even if their employers would let them go – except so far on brief sorties embedded with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). As a result the events in Gaza which have led news bulletins, seemingly on the “if it bleeds it leads” principle, have not been witnessed first-hand by those voicing the packages and presenting the news. The footage is mainly provided by locals, working under the duress of war in Hamas-controlled territory, or from iphone footage caught by people in the war zone. 

In contrast to the partial views being presented of the Israel-Hamas conflict 20 Days in Mariupol, a remarkable documentary film shot during the Ukraine war which was recently released, serves as a tonic against the drift to comment over reporting and a lesson into how great news journalism can be done. 

News agencies, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, are often the source of the raw material, the pictures and reports, from which news organisations build their news programmes. Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko were part of a local team working in Ukraine when the Russians attacked. Cameraman Chernov had been reporting on the war since he started his career for AP in 2014, days before filming the aftermath of Flight MH17, shot down by Russian-controlled forces in eastern Ukraine.

In February 2022, Chernov and colleagues headed to Mariupol because “I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of its location on the Sea of Azov.” They were in the city of some 400,000 people for some three weeks, as Russian forces surrounded it, bombarded it and then moved in.

The team saw their job as recording dispassionately what went on – and equally importantly getting their pictures out so that the rest of the world could see too. That was why they left after twenty days. Chernov says he “felt ashamed” to be leaving but local medical staff, soldiers and police encouraged them to go – in a Red Cross convoy through fifteen Russian checkpoints with their camera equipment hidden in their car. 

The film links together footage shot in sequence over those 20 days. It shows how locals responded to the state of siege, sometimes despairing and looting, more often in solidarity bringing victims of attacks to hospitals. On 9 March, the team saw bombs fall and rushed to film the immediate aftermath at what they found was Maternity Hospital No.3. They managed to get their images out because a local policeman located electricity and internet sources in the ravaged city. “This will change the course of the war”, he told Chernov. 

Their pictures, including of a severely wounded pregnant woman on a stretcher, led news bulletins around the world. The impact was so great that the Russian government and state-controlled media claimed it was “Fake News” involving actors. A few days later, Chernov realised his footage “must have been powerful enough to provoke a response from the Russian government” when AP asked the team to find the victims. The women had been evacuated to another hospital in the front line. One woman had lost her baby and her own life. As Z-marked tanks surrounded that second hospital, Ukrainian forces arrived ordering the AP team to escape from the city. 

Chernov’s rules for his work were simple. If there was no-one else present to help, they would help rather than film. They would not film anyone who didn’t want to be filmed, although in practice doctors and relatives of victims often encouraged them to take pictures to show the world. 

The mechanics of their reporting rightly form part of the film but it is not about them. There is no bravado or self-congratulatory heroism. Because the narrator is taking the pictures, he does not appear. They witnessed what happened in their homeland but, like his direction of the film, Chernov’s narration is unemotional, non-judgmental and factual. 

The siege of Mariupol lasted for 86 days. The city is still under Russian control. AP filmed the first 20 days. They were the only professional team in the city at that time, except for Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian filmmaker, who was killed by the Russians as he tried to escape in late March. The official civilian death toll then was 25,000, although Chernov puts it at 40,000 in reality. The film shows the first of the trenches on the outskirts of Mariupol being filled with unidentified bodies. In November this year, an unverified satellite image posted on social media appeared to show “just one slice of the kilometers of mass graves outside the city”. 

The makers of 20 Days in Mariupol are still covering the war in Ukraine but not in Mariupol because “we can no longer get there”. Chernov, who has also worked in the Middle East and other war zones, thinks that “they are all somehow connected” but goes no further than hoping accurate reporting can help bring wars to an end. The AP film, produced by Frontline and AP is available to watch now on screening platforms. It is gathering international awards at festivals. 

Passions are flaring on social media platforms. Tik-Tok, popular with younger users, leans pro-Palestinian, X/Twitter trends pro-Israel. Broadcasters who should know better are falling into propaganda traps, making “mistakes” and, perhaps inadvertently, feeding prejudices at the expense of information. It is difficult to get a clear picture. If you want clear – and, yes, unbiased – information about the nature of modern conflicts, and what journalism can do to report it, I urge you to watch 20 Days in Mariupol. 

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