To start, I was struck by the mundane — and oftentimes comic — details that everyone from Katia (from “The Other Front Lines”) to Lindsey Hilsum (from “Letters from Ukraine”) mentioned in their narratives. These details are especially jarring while juxtaposed against everything else happening in Katia and Hilsum’s lives: Katia talks about simultaneously worrying over her dog peeing and tanks outside; Hilsum describes receiving tulips on International Women’s Day from soldiers risking their lives on the battlefield and having to think about sleeping and eating, even during war. Other details simply register as bleakly poignant: Hilsum spots a poster for the (now presumably canceled) Odesa Jazz and Oysters Festival.
Like other blog posts have mentioned, I recognize that the inclusion of these types of details are meant to humanize Ukrainians and show how they’re not so different from us — but why exactly do details like the Odesa Jazz and Oysters Festival make us feel poignant? The inclusion of certain details — without further explanation or exploration — invites us Western readers to feel a certain way (i.e. the Odesa Jazz and Oysters Festival signals how Odesa is a relatively wealthy place with Western(-ish) practices, so it’s tragic to us that the event was disrupted by war), but is this how Ukrainians actually feel? Are we implicitly making too large of an assumption here based off a single detail? Especially when it comes to longform/magazine journalism, I think writers tend to hunt for certain, “literary” details that they feel will act as a metaphor for a larger idea, but I just wonder whether this type of detail-hunting can go too far and distort a story too much (not saying that the Odesa Festival detail goes too far — but just an example).
Uma also mentioned the ethical quandaries that arise from international correspondents’ actions; I agree that some part of what foreign correspondents do — visit a war-torn country, interview traumatized people, then fly out in a few days to return to their cozy lives across the world — feels uneasily wrong. I have two things to add to her comments: First, as Uma mentions, in many parts of the world (I’m thinking especially of within authoritarian regimes), only journalists who hold Western passports and have the support of American/Western news organizations can safely report on sensitive topics without fearing for their personal safety. Even then, however, foreign correspondents’ work involves working with, and possibly endangering, local sources. For example, let’s say a dissident network in an authoritarian country is helping improve locals’ lives — do we as foreign reporters have an obligation to report on the network? To not report on it?
Second, the type of oral history that Katia (among others on “The Other Front Lines”) provides offers deep insights into life on the ground in a war zone without necessarily involving a foreign correspondent — it could indeed be a model for citizen journalism. But as Frank Langfitt mentioned last week, journalists have experience fact-checking everything — although journalists shouldn’t be relied upon to report objectively, good journalists should still be relied upon to report factually. Within a war zone, maintaining that standard of accuracy might still remain uniquely under the purview of professional reporters.
