Brian Howey: War and the press

By Brian Howey
For The Republic

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has once more brought journalists to the front lines, in Kyiv, Odesa, and even Moscow. Freelancer Brent Renaud, Fox News videographer Pierre Zakrzewski and consultant Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova were killed by snipers and shells, while Fox correspondent Benjamin Hall was injured.

And in the belly of the beast, a television producer named Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto a live broadcast Monday on the Kremlin’s Channel 1, holding a sign reading “Stop the war! They’re lying to you here.” It was witnessed by millions of Russian viewers. She was quickly arrested, fined about $300 after a court appearance last week, but could face 15 years in prison for this act of civil disobedience.

I got a lesson in the difference between American and Russian journalists on my 2007 trip to Moscow with then-Sen. Richard Lugar. He and Sam Nunn went to the Foreign Ministry Building to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. We entered huge, heavy metal doors adorned with the Soviet-era hammer and sickle emblem and went up to the fifth floor. Down the hallway were framed portraits of Soviet era ministers – Trotsky, Molotov, Gromyko. I was warned by a U.S. State Department official not to take any photos in the hallway. Valuing my Nikon, I obeyed.

American and Russian press gathered around a large conference table where Lugar and Nunn sat face to face with Lavrov for a photo spray. After a few minutes, Lavrov clicked his thumb and fingers, and our Russian media counterparts suddenly packed up and left on the cue. The American journalists stood in place. That moment crystallized for me the vast differences between free America and this autocratic regime that has reimposed a new Iron Curtain.

Preparing for this trip, I read Anna Politkovskaya’s book, “Putin’s Russia,” published in 2004, with much of the focus on Russia’s “dirty war” in Chechnya. We didn’t understand at the time that Putin’s decimation of Grozny was a preview to the destruction of cosmopolitan Kyiv and other cities we are witnessing today. Politkovskaya was murdered by Putin’s henchmen two years later, one of dozens of Russian journalists to meet such a fate.

In the foreward to Politkovskaya’s book, Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic observed, “At the time of her murder … she was at the pinnacle of her influence. She was proof … that there is still nothing quite so powerful as the written word.”

For the past two weeks, we’ve seen Putin’s genocidal war on cable and nightly news as well as social media. We witnessed the pregnant woman being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol, or the Ukrainian family killed at an Irpin intersection, the work of New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario, herself dodging shells and bullets.

It prompted me to revisit the legacy of Hoosier war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who for three years documented America in World War II. Pyle was killed by a sniper a few weeks before World War II ended in August 1945.

In Fort Wayne native Dave Nichols’ book “Ernie’s War,” legendary Chicago journalist Studs Terkel wrote in the foreward, “Ernie Pyle covered World War II the way the way the infantry soldier fought it: On the ground and on the move, subject to fear, filth and the capricious fates that dealt death to one man, life to another. Pyle also explained (and decried) the moral changes the war forced upon its participants, the rapid conversion of the boy next door into a trained and enthusiastic killer.”

That applies to ordinary Ukrainian men and women. In February, they were leading normal lives; now many are dropping their kids off at the Polish border and returning to fight for freedom and democracy.

We are in for a riveting couple of months as Putin’s war decimates Ukraine and potentially his own regime, perhaps because of the brave audacity of people like Marina Ovsyannikova. There will be brave and dedicated journalists there, telling the stories of our time.
Brian Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find Howey on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol. Send comments to [email protected].