When it comes to the war in Ukraine, there are two main fronts.
The actual physical war is costing people their lives, destroying their livelihoods and forcing them to flee their homes.
Then there is the information war.
Russian media has been twisting information about the war in Ukraine to distort and create distrust in the narrative of what is happening.
Russian state media has recast atrocities such as the killings of civilians in Bucha and the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol as pranks and staged acts being perpetrated by the West.
When we think of providing relief and aid to Ukraine, our first impulses are often to donate to causes like the . And we should — they provide critical care for people in desperate need of it.
However, we should also consider supporting the information networks that allow us to keep track of what’s happening in Ukraine.
Without good independent media on the ground, we wouldn’t know about these killings, or worse — we’d believe that they were hoaxes.
The goal of a continuous disinformation campaign is to, at the very least, make people lose their ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.
One dramatic example was in March. reported that at the earlier stages of the fighting, Ukrainians found that some of their relatives back in Russia didn’t even believe that a war was going on.
In the midst of all this, Ukrainian media needs help. With much of the country’s economy being literally bombed into oblivion, news media in Ukraine has lost its sources of revenue.
Despite this, there are efforts ongoing to desperately prop up its journalists.
The Reuters Institute reports that have sprung up to help Ukrainian journalists keep doing their jobs.
One crowdfunding campaign, for the Kyiv Independent, seeks to help out former journalists of the Kyiv Post, the country’s main English paper. Its reporters were suddenly fired, and the paper was closed amidst a dispute between themselves and the owner over the editorial independence of the news outlet back in November.
Undaunted, they struck out on their own and started up the online Kyiv Independent. But then the war arrived.
Another broader n media that has been struggling to keep the lights on since the war began. This, too, is an extremely important cause.
I’m sure all of you have heard by now. It is inspired by the
“First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that.”
