In times of war, the truth is so precious that it should be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”
This phrase of Churchill has provoked eternal debates about its real meaning. In any case, if Sir Winston knew anything, it was wars. And that information in such dire times is one more battlefield.
We are verifying this almost 80 years later, when we witness a war that seems like an act of nostalgia for the last century. Criminal nostalgia, that is.
The media chapter of this war has touched our shores with two episodes. One, Antel’s decision to remove the Russian signal RT from its grid. And the second, the decision of the social network Twitter, to identify those who work for the Sputnik agency, whose regional base is in Uruguay.
The first episode has generated striking reactions. MPP leader Daniel Caggiani accused Antel of “censorship.” Senator Manini said that “not even during the Cold War did something like this happen.” And even President Lacalle Pou was uncomfortable with the issue.
In general, except in the case of Caggiani, there seems to be a lack of information. Antel’s decision does not imply that no one is prohibited from being intoxicated by the Russian signal. He suffices that instead of typing “Vera Tv” into the browser, type Russia Today, and he’ll have immediate access to hours and hours of Uncle Vlad fishing shirtless, riding spirited steeds, or rehearsing his judo techniques.
Now, for a Uruguayan state agency to promote with public resources a signal whose chief editor, Margarita Simonyan, has admitted a thousand times that she is not a journalist, she does not care about journalism, and that her role is to counteract Western “propaganda”, it seems absurd .
We left Caggiani out, because a legislator who insists that Venezuela or Cuba are positive political models speaks of censorship for this… strange.
Sputnik is a bit more complex. At the time, a good link was generated, and we even recommended some journalists for its beginnings. Subsequent comments from some were unedifying. Especially when dealing with issues like Cuba or Venezuela (not to mention Russia), all pretense of professionalism had to be thrown out the window.
Does Twitter have the right to “mark” journalists for working in a medium? It’s ugly. No one is where you work. But it is also true that when a media outlet directly engages in propaganda in favor of a country that is illegally destroying a neighbor, it does not seem unreasonable that people are warned in some way.
Now the usual “moplos” will come to talk about Iraq and CNN. The American networks showed each and every one of the abuses of their own government in that unjust war.
Now, our village discussion on these issues puts on the table the delirious moment that is being experienced today with the media. And the “vintage” reflections that many people continue to have with these songs, as if we were in 1945.
We live in an era of absolute postmodernism in terms of information, and the most effective disinformation strategies today do not involve restricting access to news, but rather saturating the ecosystem with data and lies, so that no one knows who to believe.
It is striking that a government like the Russian, which has sold itself as the great expert on these issues today, falls into the stupidity of blocking platforms or expelling the main international media from its country. As if that were going to stop the flow of information about the crimes they are committing in the Ukraine.
Less striking is that there are people who insist that all the Western media would have a kind of collusion agreement to justify an attack on Russia, which deep down would only want to defend itself from the permanent subjugation of Western culture. Don’t laugh, this was told to this author by a cultured and educated cousin who lives in Spain. These conspiracy theories serve the role of somehow reassuring us that there is some kind of higher order, and that life is not the unpredictable chaos that it actually is.
What is the role then of the press in a war? The best example is perhaps that of Walter Cronkite, historical presenter of the CBS network. In the midst of the Vietnam War, Cronkite went to see reality on the battlefield, and on his return he wrote a historic editorial, where he assured that this conflict was not going to be won, and that the best thing was to sign an honorable peace. “If I lost Walter Cronkite, I lost the country,” Richard Nixon would have said, and that was the beginning of the end of the war.
Cronkite used to close his program saying the phrase: “And that’s the way it is.” If he said it today, a thousand enlightened voices would come out to accuse him of being an operator, facho, communist, or worse… “lukewarm.”
