You can't see 80km from the ground, and it's on the other side of a closed international border and the war itself. Residents of Belgorod can have little to no idea what's happening in Kharkiv other than the news. Well, that and the gigantic explosion of the local oil depot.
Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.
I've heard explosions similarly far away (although it was at the coast and in an unusually quiet place). Explosions in the air travel really far. And every time I heard explosions so far I looked at the news/social media.
In one of these incidents the news article seemed like it might be a coverup to me so I looked up user forums in case someone leaked the real information.
Do you remember what explosion it was that you heard 80km away? Because I seriously doubt any of the weaponry Russia has dropped so far can be heard anywhere close to that far.
Not OP, but I remember reports of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire explosion which wikipedia claims "Because of an inversion layer, the explosions were heard up to 125 miles (200 km) away".
Imagine an alternate universe where Canada and USA went to war. Do you really think that people in Seattle would have to depend on German social media apps to figure out what goes on in Vancouver while it's being bombed? Seriously?
Think about North v. South Korea: neither side really has the slightest clue how the other lives. If there were a famine or coup in North Korea no-one would have a clue except through the reports of spies.
There aren't any global German social media apps, and the US has a very different media landscape, so like all "what if the situation was completely different" hypotheticals, it would be completely different.
Picking a random story from the BBC front page, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-61002096 , what do you think is inaccurate about it? Do you think the MD has not resigned? That there have not been queues? That they have mistaken the names of people involved? That Manchester does not in fact exist and is a liberal conspiracy?
(The main problem with political news is disproportionate coverage, double standards of scandal, and the selection of who gets quoted - as well as a vast area of "op-ed" which is not technically news but is on the same websites.
As well as reporting on "future" or "possible" events, which by definition are difficult to be accurate about)
shower thought: could we improve things if we set up new rules for media so that we more clearly demarcate "descriptions of what happened" from "opinions and interpretations" and "projections and speculation"?
I intentionally didn't call "descriptions of what happened" as "facts", because that would sidetrack the discussion on how to determine what's true or not etc. Just force media to clearly separate "here's what our reporters saw" from "here's what they think it means"
If, in this alternate universe, Americans have no free press and live in fear of men with guns showing up on their doorstep and hauling them away, then - sure? Where else would they get news?
I understand maybe I exaggerated. It seems that in the US tv is clearly more free than in Russia tv. But it has many people and opinions that you don't see on tv. representatives of other parties (The Green party, even maybe communist party USA (yes, there are such :)) with the exception of Democrats and Republicans. You rarely see Richard Stallman on TV, Trump is banned in many sources, of course there were reasons for this, I take into account his eccentricity, but I am still for freedom of information...
It's not a question of "depending on" Tik Tok. The Russians on the other side of the boarder can definitely go online and search for news they want to read.
But that requires an active desire to go find the truth. Such people already know the truth of the war.
But plenty of Russian citizens are just following the state propaganda right now, and are consuming zero information outside of it. If such people saw the reality of the war while casually scrolling through Tik Tok, that might make it harder for such people to deny what's going on.
I understand that Russian ban of foreign media is not good, but some west countries banned Russian media too and created special difficulties for them early...
Generally I don’t support limiting free speech or even banning Russia TV channels in this case. But let’s not pretend that quasi independent government propaganda department are equivalent to western media companies.
As a Russian that make me sad that our media uses such a very hacky work strategy, sometimes add fakes some times try to color clearly events in the beneficial side. But I think that it's clearly in Russian media and Russian political view point has some clear truths that Western media not always want to show and our media could have represented their point of view much better. But I saw fakes in western media too, and quite often, although perhaps in smaller quantities... I even know one News TV presenter on Russian central channel it's strange, but it seems to me that he never say fakes, does not try to embellish events in one direction or another, but it only airs on Saturday evenings news and then not every time.
Comedy Central. Technically not an article, but Jon Stewart (also technically not a journalist, but imho he was better at being one than actual journalists) was pretty open about opposing the Iraq war. I assume in Russia he’d already be serving his 15+ year sentence?
Yes the US has problems. But Russia is just on another level considering that being a free and independent media source is literally illegal there.
You're joking, right? US media has published plenty of anti-war articles where the US was the perpetrator.
Even forgetting the Pentagon Papers already mentioned, papers have published the abuses in Guantanamo and the Iraq War Logs. Plenty of articles have documented killings of civilians by US drones. And plenty of editorial boards have written articles calling on the US to end whatever current war it's fighting.
Sure, big media probably kowtows more to the government than we'd like, but they absolutely are free criticize the wartime actions of the government.
Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.