In a war situation, they say, the first casualty is the truth. Yet, the truth is a casualty even when there is no war. Unless, of course, we agree that life as we experience it is an unending war of a special kind.
As Russia needlessly demolishes Ukraine, whose truth must we believe? Whose news reports are more believable or, in truth, closer to reality than others? Or should we look to Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s famous quote, often misattributed to Voltaire, for guidance? “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
If those with the power to sanction others ensure that we don’t even have access to RT, previously known as Russia Today, how then must we treat their version of the truth? Is it the only truth? Or is it the truth until we get RT, if ever?
It is with this in mind that the bombing of media houses in Ukraine and the shutting off of RT from MultiChoice’s DStv must not only be mourned by media freedom activists and those of us in the SA National Editors Forum.
I had just started paying closer attention to RT when it was suddenly switched off. Some donkey’s years ago, when some prominent local journalists joined, I started watching but wasn’t sufficiently hooked.
A mention of nuclear power also conjures up the biggest lie of the century: that some countries can be trusted to have nuclear weapons while others shouldn’t be.
As the build-up to the war intensified, I started retracing my steps back to this channel. My motivation was simple: I just can’t trust CNN and Sky types to give me a complete picture. Those who are unforgiving will add that it is these who unquestioningly broadcast the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Critics were, correctly, unforgiving: “Bush lied. People died.” If we allow lies to go unquestioned, and if we allow alternative but inconvenient voices to be shut down, people die.
After the killing and displacement of thousands, and the destruction of property in Iraq under George W Bush, a “Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the US Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction” led by co-chairs Charles Robb and Laurence Silberman found: “Finally, it was a failure to communicate effectively with policymakers; the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had — or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence.” And therein lies the reason why millions of lives changed forever, thousands ended. Very tragic.
Now, as the war between Russia and Ukraine gets under way, media houses are bombed and RT is switched off. In 2022, we simply can’t make the same mistakes others made in the 1990s. We should not allow inadequate explanations or “assessments driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence” about anything that affects how we understand what is going on between Russia and Ukraine.
Is Ukraine simply an innocent victim of Russia’s proclivity to violence, as it’s made to appear? Or is Ukraine’s conduct worthy of scrutiny? How is Russia explaining its war, the imminent collapse of its financial system and many other challenges, to its citizens? Do we perhaps just sink our heads in the sand and rely on CNN?
Some have said that RT has spread disinformation about the war and ought to be switched off. But even if it’s a government television station, I’d rather watch it and watch its private counterpart and only thereafter make up my mind. Just to be clear, disinformation, from either side, must be exposed and rejected the same way the lies about Iraq’s nuclear programme were, even though this came after the damage was done.
A mention of nuclear power also conjures up the biggest lie of the century: that some countries can be trusted to have nuclear weapons while others shouldn’t be. Look at how impotent US President Joe Biden looks today in the face of an unruly Vladimir Putin. On what basis did the unfairly structured organ of the UN, the Security Council, decide that Russia, the US and others can be trusted with nuclear weapons while Iran and Zimbabwe, to be flippant, can’t be? The logic is just not there. The US, for example, just had Donald Trump for president and he was not any worse than Emmerson Mnangagwa. In SA, would the country be considered safe to possess nuclear power under Cyril Ramaphosa but not Jacob Zuma? And what is the rubric for such decision making?
It is, at a global level, an indication of the precarious space we are in. It shows how important decisions about global peace are taken without any justification. Anyone who disagrees — take Iran — is subjected to sanctions and, if you’re Iraq, a series of bombs that render your country unable to rise from the rubble and shrapnel for decades. If you consider that most powerful countries are not guided by such nebulous yet crucial notions as ethics and morality but are actively pursuing their national interests, even if these cause death and mayhem, then the picture is even more grim.
In a world as unfair as this, I believe we should agree that a third party taking RT off air isn’t unaffected by global politics. The idea is to silence Russia’s voice and make the justifications for whatever response to Russia find a captured audience without access to Russia’s own unmediated response. So the war being fought right now isn’t merely about the siege of Kharkiv or the devastation of Sevastopol.
It’s about information and news. It’s control of the narrative. It’s about making sure that even if, to revert to Robb-Silverman commission finding, policymakers rely on “little good intelligence” and “assessments driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence”, we have no RT to check them against. Certainly, between American and British propaganda on the one hand, and Russian propaganda on the other, the truth must surely lurk somewhere.
We must make a slogan of “Bush lied. People died”.
And so it may be correct that the luminaries at MultiChoice are, like RT, victims of sanctions imposed by the European Union. It’s a hardly believable story especially given a campaign to switch off RT in Europe. The sanctions seem a convenient excuse for a political agenda. In the bigger scheme of things, it simply means the European political establishment has ensured the globe is force-fed a one-sided narrative as we saw when “Bush lied and people died”. This one-sided narrative and the killing of alternative but inconvenient voices will ensure that the truth, indeed, is the first casualty of this war too.
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