The snowflakes of information war: How the New York Times sinned by honesty

It’s a platitude that war kills not only people but truth. And as all platitudes, the statement is true, boring, and misleading. Because it omits the real murderers: “War” does not, actually, kill truth; people kill truth. War just tempts them to do so as few other things – such as job applications or marriage – can. The flipside of that fact is that it is perfectly possible to stick to the truth – or at least make an honest effort to do so – in war, too.

That effort is different from “getting it right.” Think of, for example, George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, his unabashedly personal account of the Spanish Civil War. It was not even meant to be neutral because he sided with – indeed fought for – the underdog Trotskyists; historians, as always, feel they know better about the context and details; and – notwithstanding the sad mainstream sanctification Orwell has suffered posthumously at the hands of conformist mediocrities – ‘Homage to Catalonia’ is, of course, flawed. Saint Orwell was fallible. Duh.

But ‘Homage to Catalonia’ was an honest effort to find out and tell true things about a war and, importantly, from a war. How do we know that? Most of all by reading it, of course. But apart from that, there is another test: the manner in which it was received when it came out, namely badly.

Making no concessions to what his audience might want to read, Orwell had trouble getting ‘Homage to Catalonia’ published and rightly suspected that was due to its politics, which antagonized everyone: Orwell’s own tribe, the Left, no less than the Right. In the end – with the work, in Orwell’s words, “boycotted by the British press” – barely over a third of its modest first edition of 1,500 copies were sold. Homage to Catalonia is a modern classic now. But when it hit the shelves in 1938 and until Orwell died in 1950, it was a dud. That’s, in essence, because it was too honest.

Without stretching the comparison too far, it is fair to say that recently we have witnessed the same principle at work, when the New York Times published an article by photographer and reporter Nanna Heitmann.

Under the title ‘A Landscape of Death: What’s Left Where Ukraine Invaded Russia’, Heitmann’s sophisticated account is based on her own six-day visit to the Russian town of Sudzha and its surroundings. Sudzha is located in Kursk Region, which borders  Ukraine and where Kiev’s forces staged a large-scale incursion that brought great destruction, fierce fighting, and ended in a – predictable – fiasco for Ukraine.

As its title indicates, Heitmann’s article gives much room to the devastation and suffering wrought by the fighting. She also describes a surprise advance by Russia’s military through an empty gas pipeline. Throughout she lets individuals with different experiences and points of view speak, civilians and soldiers, and is careful to record official statements from both sides, Ukraine and Russia.

It is obvious to any fair reader that no favors are extended to Russia. Heitmann, for instance, dwells on local criticism of Russian evacuation efforts and the adverse health effects suffered by some of the ethnically Chechen fighters who carried out the pipeline operation. She ends her story by reporting both a local man’s hope for reconstruction and the skepticism of a woman who cannot see a future for herself in the region, whether reconstructed or not.

The reactions by high-ranking Ukrainian officials and media outlets in Ukraine to Heitmann’s article have been hostile. Georgy Tikhy, spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, tagged the New York Times in an X post accusing Heitmann of reproducing “Russian propaganda” and engaging in “Duranty-level manipulation.”

Walter Duranty was an American journalist who is now infamous for spreading Stalinist deceptions. Heitmann has done nothing remotely comparable. Tikhy’s wildly unfair comparison reveals his malicious intent, namely to smear Heitmann as badly as he can before the public in general and her employer in particular. Ironically though not surprisingly, it is not Heitmann but the Ukrainian government official who is conducting information war here, and in an especially dirty, personal way.

That Heitmann is being targeted by a systematic campaign is obvious from the involvement, as if on cue, of additional attackers:  The so-called Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) under the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine has joined in, also charging Heitmann with manipulation. In particular, the CCD is angry about the fact that Heitmann didn’t spend precious words on reiterating the Ukrainian and Western narrative about wicked Russia invading Ukraine.

Notwithstanding that every New York Times reader is certain to have had that story hammered into their consciousness for years already not only by that newspaper but every other Western mainstream news outlet, Heitmann, actually writing about a case in which Ukraine – proudly – invaded Russia, is faulted for not ritualistically restating that part of the Western narrative.

In the same spirit – and in an especially perverse but also revealing turn – the CCD even went as far as to explicitly impugn Heitmann’s “neutrality.” Being unbiased, so the message from the Ukrainian information warriors, is wrong in and of itself.

The Kiev regime, in other words, has a right to expect bias in its favor: mere honesty will not do. This is nothing less than an astonishingly aggressive and open demand for the Western media to be as submissive and streamlined as Ukraine’s is. It is testimony to the sense of entitlement that the West has long fostered among its political and media proxies in Kiev.

A “colleague” also hurried to put the boot in, denouncing Heitmann for “moral equivalency” – translation: honesty we do not like – and gaining access to Sudzha through soldiers from Russia’s Chechen Akhmat unit. That, in and of itself, is, we are to understand, an unforgivable sin.

Curiously enough, the same logic doesn’t seem to apply when Western journalists “embed” – a telling term – with Western forces conducting wars of aggression, regime change operations, and “counter-insurgency,” that is, dirty war campaigns of torture and assassination.

It also seems to make no difference to Heitmann’s denouncer from within the profession – how very Stalinist, really – that her article shows no favor to Akhmat. Regarding its soldiers, too, it is simply factual and calm. Clearly, though, hysterical condemnation is the least Kiev and its Western propagandists feel they have a right to expect.

In reality, Heitmann’s article is informative, well-written, and free of bias. What is really intriguing about the backlash against her work is not the work – which is simply good, conscientious reporting – but the backlash itself. The high-level and widespread hostile reaction to Heitmann’s piece reveals only one thing, and it is not anything about Heitmann and her work: Western and Ukrainian authorities and information warriors have had it far too easy for far too long. Pampered by years of easily feeding their bias to Western publics, while any dissent was repressed and marginalized, they react with allergic fury to even modest signs of unbiased, clear-eyed reporting breaking through into a mainstream outlet. How fragile they must feel.