A Controversial New Documentary Called Ukraine's War: The Other Side
It's accused of being little more than glorified Kremlin propaganda
If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.
Yesterday a new documentary was released called Ukraine's War: The Other Side. It's been described as a look at the current war in Ukraine from the point of view of the soldiers who are part of the invading Russian troops. As you can guess, Twitter/X has literally exploded with anger about this documentary.
This documentary is distributed by ABC News with some people, especially Americans, calling for a boycott of ABC and its parent company Disney. I'm going to say that boycotting ABC and Disney is not going to do any good because they have nothing to do with this.
The ABC that is responsible for that documentary is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This ABC is NOT owned by Disney. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is the national broadcaster of Australia that is funded by the Australian government. It is a publicly owned body that is politically independent. This ABC is the Australian equivalent of the BBC, CBC, and similar channels in other countries.
The ABC that is owned by the Walt Disney Company is the American Broadcasting Company. It is an American commercial broadcast television network that receives no funding from the US government.
In other words, it's useless to throw your Mickey Mouse collectibles in the trash or boycott any upcoming Disney movies or cancel your subscription to Disney+ to protest Ukraine's War: The Other Side because you would be targeting the wrong ABC.
For more information, you can check out the Wikipedia pages on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the American Broadcasting Company.
I admit that I haven't seen that documentary. It's now available for viewing on the ABC site but I can't access it because I'm in the United States.
As for the documentary itself, from what I've read online, it was made by a British filmmaker named Sean Langan who had embedded with a Russian army troop in an effort to provide a human perspective on life in the Russian frontline and it provides a rare insight into the lives of Russian soldiers during the war. It had aired the previous month on the UK's ITV just days after the death of dissident Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison, which led former Conservative Party Leader Ian Duncan Smith calling it a “mistake” from that network but airing it on Australian television had ignited all kinds of controversy online.
The biggest controversy is this: The documentary is told from the point of view of the side that is responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. It is the same side that has perpetrated all kinds of atrocities on Ukrainians including mass rapes of women and girls, torture of captives, kidnapping Ukrainian children and sending them to Russia, castration of male soldiers, and indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets like hospitals and schools. Here is a preview of that documentary that was shown on Sky News Australia along with a brief discussion of the controversy surrounding that documentary.
On the surface it seems like Ukraine's War: The Other Side is the latest example of this trend in journalism called both siderism. The idea of both siderism is that a responsible journalist should always get both sides of a story, especially if it's on a controversial topic. But there's a problem with both siderism. While trying to get both sides is great when doing a story about a proposed new law that has adherents on both sides so that the audience is more informed about that bill, there are limits to both siderism.
If an African American person gets hurt in a brutally racist attack that was perpetrated by a group of whites and it resulted in a protest by the local NAACP, is a reporter or news organization obligated to talk with a member of the Ku Klux Klan in order to get the white supremacist view on that attack? If a young boy gets sexually molested by a teacher, is a reporter or news organization obligated to get a statement on this incident from the National Man/Boy Love Association in the name of “fairness”?
If the answer is no to both scenarios then it should be just as unnecessary for a reporter to go to the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine to get the viewpoint of the invading Russians. Especially, according to what I've read online and seen in the above video, some of the soldiers profiled in that documentary had admitted to being in Bucha around the time of those horrendous atrocities the Russians perpetrated against the Ukrainians and the reporter didn't challenge or serously probed the soldiers who said that they were there.
Will it ever be okay to do a documentary about the war in Ukraine as told from the viewpoint of a Russian soldier? It depends on how it’s handled. If a reporter is capable of asking the hard questions, then I think it could be valuable to get a rare glimpse of the hardships that a soldier who is on the side of the aggressor goes through in wartime. If the documentary shows scenes of dead bodies or destroyed buildings, it could show the viewer the real horrors of war.
But if all the reporter does is to allow that soldier to talk without asking any probing questions, especially if the soldier is simply parroting the official Russian line as dictated by Vladimir Putin, or if it shows soldiers doing only nice things like giving candy to the local children but glosses over or skips the horrible aspects of war then that documentary will be little more than glorified Kremlin propaganda.
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