During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman made the now famous statement, "War is Hell."
That has been proven time and again in places near and far. World War II started when Germany attacked Poland, causing surrounding nations to declare war. In the recent conflict, Russia has pretty much done the same thing by attacking Ukraine, causing the allies to be on high alert. This has created an economic and cyber war.
Yes, war is hell and the 21st century version of that is no different.
As a journalist, I have often struggled with the rightness or wrongness of writing about war and its aftermaths. Many people would prefer not to know graphic details, while others thrive on that type of thing with the existing 24-hour news cycle and the popularity of social media outlets. Photojournalists have an even stickier situation with which to deal.
These days, Russia denies claims that it is targeting civilians in its recent attack on Ukraine, yet that is exactly what is happening, just like in other conflicts, all in an effort to cause them to surrender.
On a recent Sunday, Lynsey Addario, a photojournalist at New York Times, witnessed Russian forces in Ukraine shell civilians in Irpin, near Kyiv. The mortars instantly killed a woman and her two children, and severely injured a friend who was traveling with the family. Addario captured a graphic photo of their bodies prone on a gray street in puffy coats, their luggage lying near them. Two Ukrainian soldiers knelt over the family friend, trying to save him. He died later.
The image was widely shared online, including at the top of the home page of New York Times the day following the event. The paper ran it prominently in print, across five columns above the fold on the front page. Media reporters discussed the ethics of confronting readers with the photo, with and without a disclaimer warning of "graphic content," as TV news reporters often state before showing such images to their viewers. They all weighed considerations of privacy, dignity and sensitivity against the imperative not to varnish the horrors of war. Rival news organizations treated the photo as a news story in its own right and Addario appeared on various TV news shows to discuss the photo. “I thought, it's disrespectful to take a photo, but I have to take a photo: this is a war crime,” she told Norah O'Donnell on CBS Evening News. It’s really brave of the New York Times to put that image on the front page. It’s a difficult image, but it is a historically important image.”
Nearly two years ago, the Times filled its entire front page with mini-obituaries remembering victims of COVID-19 as the confirmed United States death toll from the disease neared 100,000, a milestone that the paper described as an “incalculable loss.” Recently - with the confirmed United States death toll nearing 1,000,000 even as many Americans, including some journalists and their editors, seem to have become inured to it - Ed Yong, a science writer at The Atlantic, returned to that Times front page, asking, “What is 10 times incalculable?” More broadly, Yong explored why such large-scale COVID death no longer seems to be inspiring a “social reckoning” in the United States. One factor that he cited is a dearth of shocking imagery. “The threat - a virus - is invisible, and the damage it inflicts is hidden from public view,” he wrote. “With no lapping floodwaters or smoking buildings, the tragedy becomes contestable to a degree that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cannot be.”
Or a war. In the spring of 2020, the difficulty of visualizing the pandemic compared to other crises was much discussed in media circles. It is inaccurate to say that there were no shocking images - there were, of heavily intubated patients dying in hospitals, of funeral pyres, of mass graves. But they were often hard to obtain, not least due to hospital rules around patient privacy and the danger that journalists might bring in, or take home, the virus. And Yong is right, narrowly, to say that the virus itself is invisible. Russian shells are not - though, of course, getting close enough to photograph the damage brings its own grave dangers.
The debate over images is one of many points of contrast that I have been thinking about recently as intense coverage of a horrible war has followed intense coverage of a horrible pandemic in the news cycle. Both stories feel generation-defining and world-changing, but in very different ways. Another media debate that took hold in the spring of 2020 concerned a tendency, among journalists and world leaders alike, to compare the pandemic response to a war. Numerous commentators pointed out that the military metaphor was inappropriate, even dangerous, legitimizing political power grabs and anti-Asian racism; as The Atlantic’s Yasmeen Serhan put it at the time, war is “by its very nature divisive - which is not particularly helpful amid a crisis that requires global cooperation.” Ultimately, the coronavirus does not want to kill people, at least not with any sense of moral agency. Putin’s assault on Ukraine is a stark reminder that murderous politicians do.
Still, there are similarities, too, in the broad contours of the pandemic and war stories, despite their greatly different factual shape. Many of them boil down to uncertainty, a routine journalistic challenge that quickly became a defining condition of pandemic coverage. The news cycle in the runup to Putin’s invasion carried echoes (at least to my ear) of the contrasting assessments of urgency and risk that we heard as COVID started to accelerate around the world. Since the invasion, it has been challenging to work out exactly what is happening on the ground - a fog of war that in some ways recalls the persistent "fog of pandemic," As Yong notes, the COVID death toll, even now, is likely much higher than official statistics indicate; the same may already be said of the civilian death count in Ukraine. Both stories have their own complex systems of cause and effect, and their own logics of dangerously escalating consequences. And that is before we get into the exhaustion and trauma of following these momentous stories back-to-back. (When O’Donnell asked Addario how she is doing, Addario replied, “You can ask me that in a few months. Right now, I am trying to stay very focused and work.”)
Of course, “back-to-back” is not the best way of describing the pandemic and war stories - the former continues, and so is intertwined with the latter. When Russia invaded, Ukraine - only around a third of whose citizens are fully vaccinated - was just getting past a viral peak: the war has forced many people to cram together in tight spaces while others have fled across borders, some surely bringing COVID with them. (The country has also been trying to get a polio outbreak under control.) Hospitals have run low on critical supplies. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the war risks compounding the pandemic's global economic effects.
Then there are the more oblique connections, like the contention, among Western intelligence officials and analysts, that two years of strict COVID isolation may have warped Putin's mindset. Major outlets have contributed good articles on all of this, but they have often been drowned out amid the daily churn of war coverage and commentary. The media as a whole is often bad at focusing on more than one crisis at a time, even when they are linked.
If the war grinds on for a long time, and we are not vigilant, the normalization of its horrors could easily become another similarity with the pandemic story in the United States and elsewhere; as Yong wrote, when “tragedy becomes routine,” levels of suffering “that once felt like thunderclaps now resemble a metronome’s clicks - the background noise against which everyday life plays.” Of course, many Western journalists and news consumers have already normalized war - an omnipresent feature of global life that continued or even sparked anew during the pandemic, in Yemen, Ethiopia, and other countries whose suffering has not attracted the volume of coverage afforded to Ukraine. Such wars continue to generate awful images of their own. These can help readers to care. But they do not always.
And as history marches on, they never prove enough.
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