On October 2, Moscow hosted the RT MEDIA TALK conference “In the conflict zone: risks and responsibility of journalists”. She was dedicated to summing up the second Khaled Al-Khatib RT International Prize (Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards 2019). The award was established in memory of the deceased Syrian journalist Khaled al-Khatib, who collaborated with RT Arabic and died under IG * rocket fire in June 2017. In the same year, RT established a prize, which is awarded annually to military correspondents working in the world's hot spots.
- Khaled Al-Khatib
- © RT
The first presentation of the Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards took place in 2018. This year, journalists from Italy, India, the USA and Russia became laureates, in all, works from reporters from 25 countries were sent to the contest. The award for Best Work from the Conflict Zone: Short Video was awarded to the Italian journalist Fausto Biloslavo for his work The Battle Of Tripoli.
In the nomination “Best Work from the Conflict Zone: Long Video”, the Indian reporter Amitabh Revi received the award with the work “Palmyra Ravaged By Daesh, A Bid To Rise Like The Phoenix”. The film tells about the restoration of the Syrian Palmyra, destroyed during the period when the city was under the control of the Islamic State.
In the same nomination, the prize was received by Russian journalist Anton Stepanenko for the film “Racca. Life after the war ”(Raqqa. Life After War). The tape tells the story of the Syrian Raqqa, which temporarily became the "capital" of the Islamic State, and then almost completely destroyed by the bombing of the American coalition.
The award for the best text from the conflict zone was received by American reporter Kenneth Rosen for a series of articles about life in the border areas of Iraq and the ATS, separated by a wall built in 2018.
Risk price
The winners of the Khaled Alkhateb International Memorial Awards 2019 contest Fausto Biloslavo, Amitabh Revi and Anton Stepanenko took part in the first session of the MEDIA TALK conference “The profession of military commander: is the risk justified?” The discussion was also attended by the famous Russian war correspondent Alexander Kots, as moderator was Paul Slier, military commissar and head of the Middle East Bureau RT.
Colleagues began the conversation by discussing the acceptable risk line that a journalist can reach in his work. According to Alexander Kots, risk is an integral part of the work of a war correspondent.
“Without risk, there will be no good reporting,” he said.
- RT Arabic correspondent Sargon Hadaya (right) who came under fire in Syria
- RIA News
Answering a question from RT, Kotz noted that military commissars are subject to professional deformation - it manifests itself in the fact that a person begins to react less emotionally to some frightening things. However, emotions do not completely disappear, the journalist added.
“A military journalist does not become less emotional, because otherwise he ceases to be a journalist. You need to let someone else’s pain through yourself in order to bring it to your reader, viewer, and you won’t be able to convey it without personal participation, ”Kots emphasized.
A constant presence in combat conditions, of course, dulls the sense of self-preservation, a person may lose the vigilance necessary for such a situation. Therefore, any military commander periodically needs to take a break in a few months, Kotz explained.
As Anton Stepanenko noted in his speech, when he was just starting to work on television, the inscription “Press” on a bulletproof vest or helmet gave guarantees that the correspondent would not become a target for soldiers. But today, these rules are not always valid - one example is the conflict in the Donbass. Reporters even had to abandon the “Press” labeling and camouflage as much as possible during business trips to the region so as not to get hit by bullets.
Point of no return
Civil protests and street clashes between the opposition and law enforcement agencies can sometimes compete with hostilities. The second session of MEDIA TALK was dedicated specifically to the coverage of the protests. The discussion was attended by State Duma deputy, member of the Duma commission to investigate facts of foreign interference Natalya Poklonskaya, war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny, head of the RT France channel Ksenia Fedorova and deputy editor-in-chief of RT Anna Belkina. The session was moderated by Boiling Point: Media and Conflicts in Society, Anna Knishenko, war correspondent and host of RT Arabic.
- Demonstration of "yellow vests"
- © Benoit Tessier / Reuters
The interlocutors turned to the history of coverage of the protests of the "yellow vests" in France. As Ksenia Fedorova said, although in November last year millions of indignant people took to the streets, large French media initially ignored them, and then began to cover the protests, but they did it with extreme bias. It was RT correspondents from the very beginning in the thick of things who gave the floor to the protesters and were able to gain their trust.
However, sometimes a peaceful protest goes into a civil war - as happened in Ukraine. And the participants in the session also did not ignore these events. According to Yevgeny Poddubny, the point of no return, after which the protest inevitably goes into the armed phase, is the appearance of the first victims.
“The capacity of any conflict determines the amount of weapons abandoned in the conflict. And on the Maidan it appeared very quickly. Yes, people with beautiful faces and children stood on Maidan, but it was already clear that if the authorities didn’t take measures, the situation would turn into a civil war, ”Poddubny explained.
When covering civil protests, the issue of emotional involvement of reporters is just as relevant as in the case of hostilities. As RT Poddubny said in an interview, it is very individual and depends on the country and the situation.
“Personally for me, Ukraine is a native country, and how one could remain neutral, I don’t understand. I never understood how the Ukrainian people are different from the Russian people. There I could not keep my impartiality. When it comes to what is not close to you personally, maybe, yes, it is possible, ”the reporter explained.
According to Poddubny, talking about the complete impartiality of journalists is cunning, because in any case, a person internally takes the side that is morally and ethically closer to him. However, the media should still be guided by a sense of balance and justice, being a filter in the way of the information that the consumer receives, the journalist said.
- Commander Yevgeny Poddubny - on the emotional involvement of journalists in the events covered
Verification and Feycification
The current abundance of information distribution channels, such as social networks and video hosting, highlights the problem of the reliability of news, including from hot spots. The session “Truth or fake: how to verify information from hot spots” was dedicated to this topic, in which Tatyana Chernigovskaya, professor, specialist in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and consciousness theory, Dmitry Peskov, special representative of the Russian president for digital and technological development, attended a session Alexey Samoletov and the head of the international video agency RUPTLY Dinara Toktosunova. The moderator was the director of communications and public relations at MIA Russia Today Peter Lidov-Petrovsky.
As the head of RUPTLY said, most often hotspots are located in hard-to-reach places, but with the development of citizen journalism and social networks, the speed of transmission from the place of events has increased - while the film crew of a large TV channel gets to the place of events, the on-site stringer can quickly upload a video what happened. However, such information needs to be carefully checked - RUPTLY has a whole department that deals with video verification.
“Although this slows down a bit (work. - RT ), but we are confident that we will give the right information to people,” Toktosunova explained.
Today, the creators of fake news can actively resort to the latest IT-development, the panelists noted. For example, an algorithm for creating dipfakes can be used for this - this is a synthesized video with images superimposed on each other. According to Dmitry Peskov, it will be impossible to limit the distribution of such fake videos in the foreseeable future. However, it is possible to develop technologies for their recognition - technologies of neural networks and artificial intelligence can help in this again.
New reality
The final session of the conference was called “The Fourth Power: The Role of the Media in International Conflicts”. The editor-in-chief of RT and MIA Russia Today Margarita Simonyan, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zakharova, and the editor-in-chief of the Moscow Talking radio station Roman Babayan took part in it. The host of the session was Irada Zeynalova.
One of the topics of discussion was the workshop solidarity of journalists from various publications - its level has fallen significantly in recent years. If previously journalists from the media, who were on opposite ideological platforms, helped each other in emergency situations, in the conditions of hostilities, now the level of this mutual support has greatly decreased.
Margarita Simonyan turned to the military reporters in the hall with a request to share her impressions of how interaction is now with foreign colleagues during field work.
“I just briefly summarize that over the years that we do not work“ in the field ”, now you guys are working, it has changed dramatically and virtually disappeared that we had a natural guild solidarity. How am I listening to you and understand that this is no longer there, ”she summed up.
According to Irada Zeynalova, in recent years journalism has become very politicized, and at the same time, the public’s demand for politicized information has grown.
The conference participants also touched upon the topic of international journalism, in which there was almost no room for averaged and neutral opinions. A typical example was the story of a Syrian boy, Hassan Diab, whom the White Helmets presented as a victim of a fictitious chemical attack in the Syrian Duma. As Margarita Simonyan noted, after RT managed to prove that the video was staged, not one of those television channels that made this boy a symbol of resistance to Assad did not apologize.
“We live in a world where we need to choose the side of good or evil. What you see depends on where you are standing. The famous biblical principle that they taught us: he who is for some a terrorist, for someone a defender of freedom. But the Air Force is not the first to follow its principle and are ready to hang up labels, ”Simonyan emphasized.
As Maria Zakharova explained in an interview with RT, it is not necessary to say that the fabrication of fake news is a new phenomenon, since the media were used in the interests of those in power from the very moment of their appearance. But today there is an important difference: before the advent of the Internet, digitalization, the audience did not have the opportunity to verify the reliability of media reports.
- Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Fake News
“Today you can get any information, today you can find out any historical fact one way or another. Digitalization of archives, online libraries, subscription to news agencies, but at the same time, unfortunately, dominance or an attempt to dominate with the manipulation of information still continues. This is the nonsense of what is happening. When everyone understands everything, but still the truth does not triumph, ”Maria Zakharova summed up.
* “Islamic State” (ISIS, ISIS) - the organization was recognized as terrorist by decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of December 29, 2014.