Now You See It, Now You Don’t : Rewriting The Ukraine Crisis
▻http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-russia-rewriting-crisis/25470202.html
Knowing how and when to make a screen grab has suddenly become one of the basic skills of journalism.
On the afternoon of July 23, a Russian soldier named Vadim Grigoriyev posted on the Russian social-networking site VKontakte that he’d “been shelling Ukraine all night.” He added a couple of photos of artillery pieces and spent shells.
But people looking for the post just a few hours later had to content themselves with screen grabs. The originals were gone as if they had never been.
Untangling the countless he said/she said disputes in the Ukraine crisis under conditions of an intense and coordinated disinformation campaign is hard enough. But it is even harder in the Internet age when information appears and disappears and reappears with the frustrating randomness of whack-a-mole.
And it isn’t just individual accounts or posts that vanish into the ether.
Pro-Russian bloggers and the Kremlin news organ RT noticed that the BBC’s Russian service had deleted a report from the site of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash. RT speculated the report might have been “censored” by executives in London, while the BBC issued an explanation saying it was pulled because it did not meet BBC editorial standards.
“Therefore we are currently reworking the material so that it will fully meet the editorial standards of the BBC,” the statement said. “We, of course, will make an announcement when the report is published again.”
In the BBC report, which has been preserved on YouTube, several local residents tell the correspondent that they saw military aircraft flying around the ill-fated passenger jet just moments before it exploded. The Ukrainian government has denied there were any military planes in the area.
Ah, la conformité aux critères éditoriaux !