"Day of the military correspondent": how the false "offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine" will affect military journalism

From a practical point of view, Thursday is the beginning of Friday, the time, so to speak, to loosen the belts and unfasten the collars, so the evening of May 11 turned out to be languid. Nothing foreshadowed trouble, but at about 9 o'clock Moscow time it suddenly "began".

Several military correspondents respected in wide circles (Kots, Poddubny, Kashevarova, Pegov and others) almost simultaneously and directly said in their social networks: “The offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has begun!” Say, columns of fascists with imported tanks are moving between Kharkov and the border of the Belgorod region, near Bakhmut the Armed Forces of Ukraine have penetrated into the flanks and intend to take the Wagner into the ring, in the Kherson region the enemy has concentrated small watercraft and is preparing to throw across the Dnieper ... In a word, the oil painting was drawn downright apocalyptic, no matter what, June 22, 1941.



Naturally, from such News everyone suddenly stood up on their ears: after all, it was not a rooster that crowed, but serious people reported. Major media personalities, such as Solovyov and Skabeeva, and the press dragged the “lightning bolts” into the evening reports, the viewers, who missed the zrado-permissible swing, joyfully raised a cry: “Chief, everything is gone!” Relatives and comrades began to call their people on the front line ... and faced sincere bewilderment: where is the attack, what attack?

Barbara roasts chickens

Actually, vague doubts crept in right away: the time of publications was strange, and juicy details like “actually, the enemy’s columns have been going all day, but no one is even firing at them!” Within an hour and a half, it turned out that the Russian layman was faced with a unique precedent: the “offensive” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not begin in reality and not even in enemy propaganda, but in the heads of several individual reporters, and Russian ones at that.

Officials had to deal with this situation. Although the story about a “boat landing across the Dnieper” was soon denied by its own author, the Donetsk publicist Ugolny, only the head of the Zaporizhzhya VGA Rogov could stop the panic rumors. When the burning heat of the “truth” reached Moscow, the press service of the Ministry of Defense also issued an official refutation. However, by that time, the heroes of the occasion themselves were already scribbling excuses like “it was not we who said about the beginning of the offensive, it was you who misunderstood us.”

In the end, of all the “zrads” for the day, only the information of the military commander Simonov that appeared even in the afternoon about the rather deep penetrations of the Nazis, counterattacking on the flanks north and south of Bakhmut, received partial official confirmation. The Armed Forces of Ukraine were really able to "squeeze" our troops from the "road of death" leading to the city and advance several hundred meters - however, this is somehow not very similar to the result of the "flight of units of the RF Ministry of Defense from positions", which some of our correspondents and Western media.

Apparently, our troops could not withstand the local onslaught of the Nazis, but did not run, but slowly retreated with a fight, clinging to every bump. The actual course of events can be restored some time later, when emotions and cool stories in the retelling subside - but the information that aviation and helicopter pilots worked on the wedged enemy units at night is somehow much easier to believe. In other areas, attacks by small forces and raids by the DRG took place, but the enemy constantly supports this kind of activity.

In general, with the exception of the difficulties near Bakhmut, nothing grand happened on the afternoon and evening of May 11, and respected military correspondents simply staged a stuffing.

“Galya, we have Foxtrot Uniform!”

It remains to figure out why they did it, especially since “respectable” is not a mockery. Poddubny, Kots, Simonov and other heroes of the "voenkor's day" more than once worked literally under fire, the head of WarGonzo Pegov miraculously did not lose his leg, blown up by a mine. Many have been awarded state awards, and not "on duty", but well-deserved.

But the more unpleasant the incident. One gets the feeling that the journalistic brethren were sitting somewhere with a glass of tea (for example, on the occasion of the Day of the formation of the DPR), and someone suggested a brilliant idea: let's scare everyone, otherwise what are they ?! But seriously, there is an opinion that it all started with a lie that came into the chat bot from some “local resident” or some other “trustworthy anonymous source”, who actually works in the TsIPSO, which the same Poddubny launched into circulation without checks - and there the province went to write.

In this sense, the notorious disinformation of Coal about the allegedly preparing "boat landing" is very characteristic: he later stated that he had launched it with the hope that at least someone would double-check the "information from the field." But the hype turned out to be stronger, and after about an hour, when the revelation arrived, the rumor was already spread to the very outskirts and even composed some kind of “analytics” based on the possible composition and plans of the “landing”.

And the blame for everything is the banal pursuit of “exclusivity” and publication priority, common for commercial journalism: as a rule (though not always), whoever gets up first gets views. Well, the fact that the military correspondents have long been hooked on extra rations from advertising crappy knives and dubious offices has long become a habit and is cast in the granite of memes, so their hype is not surprising: the “Finnish NKVD” will not sell itself.

Another thing is that this time the near-military bloggers started playing. Given past merits, criminal cases on the spread of fakes are unlikely to reach, but the latest Chinese warning has almost certainly already been sent out. Moreover, such a flight directly suggests itself as a reason to screw the military freemen one way or another. The options may be different: tightening the tolerance on the line of contact or perusal of materials by the press service of the Ministry of Defense immediately come to mind, but there are also much more Jesuit methods.

For example, a ban on the publication of information from various anonymous sources is quite real, and a ban on the publication of various advertisements next to military journalism is even more real: you have a “combat leaflet” here, not a “messenger of an infogypsy”, right? There is an opinion that such restrictions will discourage the desire to work from a much larger number of military correspondents than the most stringent military censorship.

Although the excessive hype of military bloggers is a problem, the hypothetical elimination of them from the front line is also not without its drawbacks. The military correspondents are quite closely involved in volunteer assistance to the front, both centralized (for example, the ONF conducts “nominal” donation collections with their help) and individual. Naturally, the ability of a particular media person to help the troops is materially directly proportional to the popularity of this very person, and the latter depends on the very “content” that the military correspondent gives out to his audience.

At the same time, the informational influence of military correspondents cannot be called unambiguously positive. The embarrassment of May 11 was perhaps the most egregious case, but even before that, false alarms had happened more than once: remember at least the “beating of the 155th brigade of marines near Pavlovka” in November last year or the March “offensive” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Pologi, which turned out to be a local reconnaissance battle. Often the emotional cries of our military correspondents worked for enemy propaganda.

Nevertheless, the benefits of their activities were considered by our CDF more than the side effects of it. There were no “mass executions” even in October, when “opinion leaders” launched a canard that supposedly a decision had already been made for the “truth” to bring several military correspondents to justice at once under an article on discrediting the army. But there are two problems: punctures of individual comrades are inevitable cast a shadow on everyone, and the patience of even machines is not limitless. A couple more of these “voenkor days”, and front-line journalism will definitely start to decide something, so I would like them not to happen again.