Beyond the gestures, Ukraine marks an extraordinary moment for our media

Opinion

UK media organisations of all political persuasions have combined to cover the most extraordinary story of recent years.

It would be easy to ridicule the leading price comparison company CompareTheMarket for pulling some of its meerkat ads from some news channels for fear of causing offence over Ukraine.

After all, as the company pointed out, the famous Russian animated meerkat Aleksander Orlov is an entirely fictional character who has never been involved in Russian politics, least of all a brutal invasion of a sovereign nation. But Orlov and his equally fictional sidekick Sergei are no longer wholly welcome because of the current crisis.

The decision still managed to attract attention to the issue, although many will have merely paused to mock.

Likewise a social media campaign to rename chicken kievs as chicken kyivs in honour of the preferred Ukrainian spelling of their besieged capital city seems daft and will hardly bring President Putin to his knees.

Will kicking the Russian football team out of the World Cup, which would have first had to win a play-off contest against Poland anyway, have any impact beyond symbolism?

In the real world after all Russian armoured columns, stretching back an estimated 40 miles are heading remorselessly for the Ukraine capital while Russian rockets murder innocent civilians, almost certainly in breach of international law.

Social media could be crucial in coming days

It is easy to deride small, almost pointless gestures, and sensitivities, but that would miss the larger point.

In a thousand ways, through gestures small and much more serious, the Russia of Vladimir Putin is being turned into a pariah state and that, rather belatedly, the tables have been turned and the information war is now being won.

Everyone from hackers to social media and the brave reporting of traditional broadcasters and newspapers have combined to form a powerful information stream that has created an unexpected degree of unity across the Western world.

Public opinion is on the march and forcing politicians to take sterner action than was first intended.

Mockery of Prime Minister Johnson’s first attempt at sanctions – five banks few had heard of and only three oligarchs – has led to work on a more extensive, and grown up list.

The biting Morland cartoon in The Times on Home Office suggestions that Ukrainians could consider applying for seasonal, fruit-picking visas will surely help lead in the direction of greater generosity, though a long way from that of the European Union or countries such as Poland which have opened their borders to refugees from the East.

The hackers have been brilliant with reports that they have managed to infiltrate Russian television channels with Ukrainian songs and reports of what has been actually happening on the battlefields of the Ukraine.

Groups such as Anonymous and Cyber Partisans have also claimed cyber attacks on Russian banks and the Belarusian railway system.

One way round Russian media censorship has been to post information on Russian casualties, a taboo subject on Russian state media, on restaurant and company websites.

Russian control of television is still nearly total but in the days ahead social media could be crucial in the outcome of the information war within Russia itself.

According to Insider Intelligence no less than 64 million Russians use VK, the Russian social media site, and even larger numbers use WhatsApp and YouTube.

Putin may find such operations rather more difficult to control than Russian TV.

There have even been reports that citizens of the Ukraine have been using TikTok to access information on how to operate captured or abandoned Russian tanks.

Newsbrands show united front against war

It will be a while before we know how much of any social media effect is real, wishful thinking or fantasy.

What is certain is that UK media organisations of all political persuasions have combined to cover the most extraordinary story of recent years – the death and destruction heaped on a sovereign nation by its Russian neighbour happening under all our noses.

The front pages are united from the Daily Star to the Financial Times against the Russian regime.

The Sun front page was particularly powerful featuring the smiling face of a 10-year old girl shot dead by Russian troops.

“Her Name Was Polina” the paper reported from a Kyiv City councillor writing on Facebook.

“How many more children must die, Putin?” asked The Sun.

The Times condemned the “barbaric” strikes on Ukraine and highlighted ultimately unsuccessful medical attempts to save the life of an injured six-year-old girl.

Dozens of British journalists, from almost every major news organisation, are risking their lives to report the awful reality on the ground.

Some members of the public complain at what they see is the waste of shipping out presenters from London. In the main it works although there are occasional embarrassments like when Nick Robinson in Kyiv could not hear his interviewee in the London studio when we could hear him perfect well.

But then we have the likes of Clive Myrie anchoring the main BBC television news bulletins from the Ukraine capital calling on all his years of experience as a newsman.

As the air raid sirens go off again we have the expertise of the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and Orla Guerin, Sky’s Mark Austin, and Channel 4’s Matt Frei.

The importance of their work, and the risks that they and many others are taking, is to testify and verify in the face of the fake news and outright lies coming out of Russia.

The audiences are there even for such grim news.

The BBC News channel recently had its biggest day for more than a year with more than 20 million viewers and many main bulletins saw audience rises of between 20% and 30%.

Their coverage, and that of the camera crews that work with them, is important now but could be even more vital in future if, as seems likely, a war crimes case against Putin is drawn up by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Meanwhile it would be helpful if Prime Minister Johnson published the full report investigating Russian influence on the British political system.

It would also be good if CompareTheMarket were to show more courage and persuade Orlov the billionaire meerkat to join the trickle of Russian oligarchs distancing themselves from the dastardly deeds of President Putin rather than being removed from the ad breaks of news channels.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays.

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