Some military leader most of you had never heard of was marching with soldiers into Russia, seemingly en route to Moscow.
Then, the caravan just stopped and turned around.
For a few hours, we thought history was being made. And then we switched back over to golf.
Maybe that wasn’t your exact progression, but you get the point. Something unimaginable seemed to be happening, and then it just stopped, reversed and confused.
Where were you going to for information?
CNN. MSNBC. Fox. NPR. Network news.
At least CNN brought Wolf Blitzer in. Fox News went to Neil Cavuto. MSNBC mostly stuck with their weekend folks. I guess it wasn’t enough for some bigger names to helicopter off the Hamptons.
The one thing in common though: All had the same minuscule amount of information and bandied about the same conclusions. Putin may go down? Putin’s going down! Putin’s not going down. Putin’s not going down, but he’s still weakened. Putin’s not going down; he’s still weakened, and this is not over.
Over. And over. And over again.
They all kept saying the same thing. It was re-racked every hour, perhaps, with a few analysts intermixed.
“I think that NPR is unimaginative in looking at alternate explanations of events. It goes with the safe and standard explanation. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but they don’t recognize the chaos of war.
“That’s basically true of the major networks.”
That’s Matthew Schmidt. Professor Matthew Schmidt. University of New Haven’s Matthew Schmidt.
He does some national media, but not enough for you to know his name, most likely. He’s not Harvard or Yale, but he may be the best media voice there is when it comes to these stories from this section of the planet.
His career focus is on countries like Ukraine and Russia, on people like Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin.
His bona fides includes teaching to the folks at the U.S. Army War College. This is his life’s work, but even he studies and watches the media as stories like this one unfold.
“The way I would put it, (American mainstream media) reporting lacked the imagination to contemplate alternate theories of what they were seeing,” he told me. “It’s an insurrection. He’s trying to get Putin. He stopped because he was negotiating.
“It looked more like capitulation.”
Schmidt has sources on the ground in these countries and actually postulates that this whole sequence on the Ukraine-Russia border could actually empower Putin.
But you would not hear that on television. Anywhere.
But in pockets of social media, you will.
In this case, maybe Elon Musk Twitter hasn’t jumped the shark after all. The only place for the average-but-curious news consumer to find anything truly insightful was, yes, Twitter.
But where?
With Twitter, unless something gets massively liked or retweeted, you might not see it unless you follow it
Schmidt follows it – all of it.
And as a story like this progresses, he gave me a short-list cheat sheet for information, and much of the list will also help in the future with a slew of stories outside the United States.
Start with Bellingcat (@bellingcat). According to Schmidt, the Dutch-based group pioneered what is called open-sourced intelligence (OSINT).
“They basically developed the field,” he said. “They’ll scrape social media data and satellite imagery. They can tell about a specific battle, geo-locating things and using satellite images.”
If there’s media confirmation through geo-location, Schmidt says, “It’s either Bellingcat or someone they taught.”
For the Ukraine-Russia stuff, here are a few other suggested follows if you want closer-to-the-ground reporting:
Aric Toler (@AricToler). He works at Bellingcat, and I’ve been monitoring him for a while. He definitely gets primary source information, and definitely entertains alternative scenarios – but not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, if you know what I mean.
Illiaa Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) of the Kyiv Independent. Schmidt says, he’s strong with battlefield reporting.
Franz-Stefan Gady (@HoansSolo).
Some tried and true names are Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe), founder of Puck News, and Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) of the Atlantic.
In terms of television coverage, Schmidt says CNN International is the best. They do more on-the-ground reporting, and the network operate more like the newsgathering at parent CNN a generation ago. He points to Tim Lister (@TimListerCNN) as a good on-air reporter to keep an eye on.
During the lengthy conversation with Professor Schmidt that may or may not have bordered on overreaching on a weekend, I basically concluded that war correspondence is a bit of a lost art in the United States.
“I think that’s true – there’s better war journalism by non-Americans right now,” he replied.
So if you want real value-added information on something outside the U.S., go on Twitter and travel outside the country.
Brian Shactman is a weekly columnist for Barrett News Radio. In addition to writing for BNM, Brian can be heard weekday mornings in Hartford, CT on 1080 WTIC hosting the popular morning program ‘Brian & Company’. During his career, Brian has worked for ESPN, CNBC, MSNBC, and local TV channels in Connecticut and Massachusetts. You can find him on Twitter @bshactman.
