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27THE COVERAGE OF THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS IN GHANA'S DAILY GRAPHIC NEWSPAPER: A CRITICAL EVALUATION
Gamel Nasser Adam
Department of Modern Languages Russian Section University of Ghana Legon - Accra, Ghana.
Abstract. Ghana's 'Daily Graphic' newspaper traces its origins to British colonial rule. Established by the London Daily Mirror Group in 1950, the paper enjoyed the patronage of British colonial officials and substantial support from British banks. In post-colonial Ghana, this umbilical connection to the colonial metropolis is yet to be severed. This explains why the 'Daily Graphic' habitually regurgitates the former colonial patron's media narrative of the Ukrainian conflict, which portrays the new government in Kiev as the victim of foreign-sponsored aggression and ignores the background circumstances that lie at the heart of the crisis. The problem, this paper argues, is therefore not the limited capacity of the 'Daily Graphic' to independently cover international event, but rather a dependency syndrome inherent in the history and orientation of the paper.
Key words: Ghana, colonialism, Daily Graphic, BBC, CNN, DW, Al-Jazeera, Royal Gold Coast Gazette, Daily Mirror, (USIA), Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, NATO.
ОСВЕЩЕНИЕ УКРАИНСКОГО КРИЗИСА В ЕЖЕДНЕВНОЙ ГАЗЕТЕ ГАНЫ «DAILY GRAPHIC». КРИТИЧЕСКАЯ ОЦЕНКА
Аннотация. Газета Ганы «Daily Graphic» своими корнями восходит к британским колониальным
традициям. Основанная
медиакорпорацией London Daily Mirror Group в 1950 г., газета находилась под патронатом британских колониальных
чиновников и также пользовалась значительной поддержкой со стороны британских банков. В
постколониальной Гане эту «пупочную связь» с колониальной метрополией еще только предстоит разорвать. Этим обстоятельством, в частности, объясняется, почему «Daily Graphic» обычно дублирует подход бывшего колониального покровителя к украинскому конфликту, который, в свою очередь, изображает новое правительство в Киеве как жертву агрессии, организованной извне, и игнорирует глубинные причины и обстоятельства, лежащие в основе кризиса. Таким образом, проблема, свойственная данному изданию, заключается не в недостаточной компетенции «Daily Graphic» в вопросах самостоятельного освещения международных событий, а, скорее, в синдроме зависимости, привитом историческим
ориентированием газеты на Британию.
Ключевые слова. Гана,
колониализм, Daily Graphic, BBC, CNN, DW, Al-Jazeera, Royal Gold Coast Gazette, Daily Mirror, (USIA), Россия, Украина, Крым, НАТО.
Introduction: The Daily Graphic in the History of the Newspaper in Ghana: A Brief Summary. The history of the newspaper in Ghana, documented in relative detail by Jones-Quartey 1975, begins in the early nineteenth century with the establishment in 1822 of a monthly newspaper the Royal Gold Coast Gazette by Charles McCarthy, Governor of what was then the British
colony of the Gold Coast. By its very nature and origins, the Royal Gold Coast Gazette was meant to be the organ of the colonial government, directing its message to European settlers, but also targeting a small group of educated native elite. But as this indigenous elite became increasingly politically conscious, they began questioning the legitimacy of colonial rule. The newspaper, therefore, became a major tool for fighting colonial exploitation and inequities associated with British imperialism in the mid nineteenth century. The newspapers which took various turns in agitating against colonial rule included The Accra Herald, Gold Coast Times, Western Echo, Gold Coast News, Gold Coast Aborigines, Gold Coast Chronicle, Gold Coast Independent, Gold Coast Express.
Some of these newspapers, run by of the indigenous elite, soon blossomed into organs of militant opposition to the colonial establishment, climaxing in 1948 with the establishment of The Accra Evening News, the mouthpiece of the political party which would eventually lead the country to independence. The paper's motto: 'We prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility' captures the mood of the moment and is an eloquent summary of the paper's political militancy and confrontational antipathy towards colonial rule.
Bucking the trend of this militancy was The Daily Graphic established in 1950 by the London Daily Mirror Group, with some claims to neutrality and professionalism. The paper received substantial support from British banks, as well as the patronage of British colonial officials, including the Governor [Anokwa 1997: 100]. The attachment of the paper to the colonial
establishment, both in the colony and in the metropolis, generated mistrust among the nationalist leaders who viewed it as a mouthpiece of British imperialism. The Daily Graphic has survived till today as the longest running newspaper in the country. It is also the most influential and most widely read in Ghana. But from a fundamental political perspective, it has not really severed its ideological umbilical cord from its former colonial mentor in terms of its political and ideological orientation, especially in the content of its foreign news coverage.
In fact, the BBC and CNN exercise virtual monopoly over the dissemination of news in the Daily Graphic concerning the crisis in Ukraine. This is to the exclusion of almost all other voices outside the mainstream international media, which normally provide alternative perspectives to the said crisis. This is especially critical since news is not neutral in the areas of coverage, thematic selection, use of language and other related nuances. And with specific reference to the coverage of the Ukraine crisis, the basic narratives are symptomatic of the differing political perspectives underlying deep cleavages in international power relations, especially about Russia and the West, and the United States in particular. Thus, by uncritically relaying the news from the sources alluded to above, the Daily Graphic, is ceding its autonomy and space to an interested party in the power politics at play in Ukraine. Worse still, by regurgitating the news from the mainstream international media, the Daily Graphic is amplifying the overt and subliminal ideological messages and biases of these outlets to the Ghanaian domestic audience.
An Appraisal of the Ghanaian Media's Sources of Foreign News.
Throughout the colonial period, the colonial powers had endeavored frenziedly to create conditions in the colonies that would perpetuate their political, economic, social and cultural domination, even after direct colonial disengagement. As part of the strategy to consolidate the emerging neocolonial arrangement, the departing colonial powers maneuvered to have monopoly over the dissemination of news and information in the newly independent countries, To this end, they demanded special privileges in the cultural field, and as Kwame Nkrumah, first President of independent Ghana indicated, one of such demands was that 'Western information services be exclusive; and that those from socialist countries be excluded. Clearly, the neocolonial powers were aware of the revolutionary potential of ideas and information that challenged the manufactured assumptions of the contemporary world order. This was especially so, if such alternative ideas were emanating from sources outside imperialism's sphere of control [Nkrumah 1965: 250].
The United States was later to replace Britain as the leading neocolonial power in the years following the end of the Second World War. Subsequent upon this, it proceeded to apply direct pressure on developing nations to occupy the information and propaganda high ground while ensuring that rival powers were denied the chance to operate. It did this mainly through what was then the USIA.
To ensure ... a complete monopoly in propaganda, for instance, many agreements for economic cooperation offered by the U.S. include a demand that Americans be granted preferential
rights to disseminate information. At the same time, in trying to close the new nations to other sources of information, it employs other pressures. For instance, after agreeing to set up USIA information centers in their countries, both Togo and Congo Leopoldville now the Democratic Republic of the Congo originally hoped to follow a non-aligned path and permit Russian information centers as a balance. But USA threatened to stop all aid, thereby forcing these two countries to renounce their plan [Nkrumah 1965: 250].
If in the past, gunboat diplomacy was what was required to keep the victim in harness, a new era had presented itself offering less clumsy and more cost-effective methods of maintaining the lopsided balance of power. Apart from economic pressure, there were other instruments such as American popular music, Hollywood motion pictures, publishing houses, and an impressive chain of outlets for the dissemination of news. Collectively, they have continued to create and maintain a global perceptual order which, most often, is at variance with reality. A consequence of this is the entrenchment of a culture of ignorance, which helps to perpetuate the prevailing relations of power, effectively blurring its exploitative nature.
For example, for the better part of last century, America's Hollywood motion pictures stereotyped Native Americans, referred to also as American Indians, as savage and mindlessly violent. Their wars against the European colonizers were thus depicted, not as legitimate resistance to foreign domination, but rather as a confrontation between cultured and civilized Western Europeans and uncivilized hordes of primitive tribes impervious to progress.
These films were widely circulated around the world, including Africa where Hollywood's manipulation of public perceptions proved particularly successful. For example, an informed African audience would have been outraged by the cinematic depiction of Native Americans as villains. This is largely because of the identical histories both sets of people share as victims of colonial usurpation and foreign domination. But instead of outrage, these motion pictures rather elicited exhilarative reactions from African audiences who were usually elated by the presumed bravado of the Western European, against what was portrayed as the savagery of the Native American. Commenting on the degree of success of this method of manipulation, [Nkrumah 1965: 246)]
One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood's heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. [Nkrumah 1965, 246]
The exuberant African reaction to the Hollywood depiction of the Native American is a measure of the degree of success of the perception management program. The suggestion, however, that the problem is rooted in illiteracy could be erroneous because it is doubtful whether rising literacy levels can be an antidote to these mind management programs. This would depend on the nature and character of those agencies responsible for wiping out illiteracy, and whether they have the capacity to neutralize the effects of the said
programs. Together with the full arsenal of the international mainstream media, these programs have continued to adapt to the exigencies of the moment, as societies transit from one level of sophistication to the other. The objective has always been to ensure that global perceptions and attitudes move in successful tandem with the dominant global cultural, political, economic, and social trends, as determined by international corporate interests. Their success in this endeavor is attributable largely to the feeble challenge to the global dominance of the international mainstream media which continue to maintain an almost full-spectrum control over the sources the global community relies on to form their opinions of the world and of events. Of course, there are alternative sources of news that routinely challenge the dominant narrative, but these lack the type of visibility and repetition necessary to make an enduring impact on public perceptions. Even then, gathering this alternative news is ordinarily beyond the capacity of less-endowed news outlets, especially in the developing world.
In this part of the world, media houses are generally too weak financially to expand internationally and independently gather the relevant news. This notwithstanding, they have always endeavored to provide some international news for their audiences, and because of the limitations alluded to above, they tend to rely almost entirely on European and American networks and news outlets. On the four major television networks in Ghana namely GTV, TV3, Metro TV and TV Africa, special time slots are allocated for the direct relay of news and other broadcasts by such networks as BBC television, CNN, DW and Al-Jazeera. The BBC and
Voice of America (VOA) also have local radio frequencies allocated to them for direct radio broadcasts of their programs to audiences in the capital Accra and beyond.
This pattern of dependency in the news media is consistent with the legacy of British colonial rule and its concomitant neocolonial residue permeating not only the political culture and economic system, but also the agencies of ideational creation of which the media are a critical component. And control over the media ensures access to the public mind, enabling the planting of ideas, or reinforcing existing ones. Past and comparative experiences demonstrate the superior reliability of eliciting acquiescence with the status quo through mind management, compared to the use of overtly coercive means to achieve the same objective. Commenting on how the media can be used to serve this purpose, Bagdikian (1983) contends that 'there is no greater force in shaping the public mind; even brute force triumphs only by creating an accepting attitude towards the brutes.' And 'for manipulation to be more effective', Schiller (1973) argues, 'evidence of its presence should be nonexistent,' and that 'it is essential ... that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.'
The desire to exercise control over the commanding heights of these mind management programs was central to the creation of the neocolonial superstructure on the ruins of direct colonialism in Africa and elsewhere. In this endeavor, neocolonialism has largely been successful. This is visible in how Ghana's leading newspaper, the Daily Graphic reports on the crisis in Ukraine.
A Critical View of the Competing Narratives about the Nature of the Ukrainian Crisis. Concerning the crisis in Ukraine, the mainstream international media represented mainly by the BBC and CNN, presented it as a confrontation between Ukrainian patriots who were fighting for democracy and a kleptocratic government in Kiev headed by a pro-Russian president in the person of Viktor Yanukovych. As the crisis degenerated into a major and bloody conflict, the blame was put on the Kremlin, and especially on Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.
In an article published by the Atlantic Council on July 2, 2015 and reproduced by Newsweek on July 4, 2015 Alina Polyakova, has no doubt as to where to lay the blame.
The war in eastern Ukraine is a Kremlin-manufactured conflict. The arrival of "little green men" in Crimea in February 2014 transformed the conflict from a domestic altercation between citizens and their government to an international crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged . that he carefully planned and orchestrated the military takeover of the Crimean Peninsula.
This is a familiar narrative in the international mainstream media, which narrows the crisis down to an internal dispute which has gone out of control due to what is portrayed as Russian aggression. Embedded in this narrative is the argument that Vladimir Putin envisions the resuscitation of the Soviet Union, and that the incorporation of the Crimea into mainland Russia is just the beginning of a more grandiose project of taking over the whole of Ukraine, and most likely the other countries of Eastern Europe. In a news report titled 'We
won't let Russia drag us to the past' and attributed to the Defense Secretary of the United States, Ash Carter, the Daily Graphic parrots this alleged Russian ambition. 'The United States and its allies won't let Russia "drag us back to the past", U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has said in an address in Berlin as he accused Moscow of trying to recreate a Soviet-era sphere of influence. Russia is thus portrayed as an imperial power with a belligerent and violent temperament.
In a report lifted directly from CNN and posted on its website, the Daily Graphic reechoes this underlying message, with a subliminal message of invasion, in a news item under the title 'Russian soldiers in Ukraine'.
The ouster of pro-Moscow President Victor Yanukovych in February was followed by Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region in March and a declaration of independence by separatist leaders in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
This narrative pattern is repeated ad passim. 'The violence erupted when pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions declared independence from Kiev, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in March1.'
A further emotional reaction is often sought with the occasional inclusion of the heavy toll in human lives. 'Nearly 2,600 people have been killed since April ... when Russia's annexation of Crimea prompted the rebels to take control of large parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions2.
This version of the narrative of the Ukrainian crisis portrays a phenomenon Parenti 2001 calls 'suppression by
1 Daily Graphic, March 7, 2014.
2 Ibid.
omission', which 'sometimes ... includes not just vital details but the entire story itself, even ones of major import'. Hardly ever making any reference to the Russian side of the story, the Daily Graphic would regularly feature NATO's statements regarding the conflict as in the following example. 'NATO has accused Russia of a "blatant violation" of Ukraine's sovereignty and engaging in direct military operations to support pro-Russian rebels3. The following headline is another example. 'Russian troops deployed in Ukraine'. This headline was accompanied by the following report:
Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has accused Russia of deploying its troops in the east of his country. His remarks came as pro-Russian rebels opened a new front in the south by seizing the coastal town of Novoazovsk. NATO says it has detected a significant increase of Russian arms being supplied to the rebels over the past two weeks. NATO Brigadier General Niko Tak told the BBC that there had been a "significant escalation in the level and sophistication of Russia's military interference in Ukraine" over the past two weeks.
Russian authorities in Accra would sometimes have to make extra efforts to fill some of the gaps caused by the phenomenon of suppression by omission, and have their country's side of the story carried by the Daily Graphic, as was the case with the downing of Malaysian airlines Flight MH17 over the skies in Donetsk, and the subsequent release of a statement by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. A Daily Graphic headline to that effect and attributed to the Russian President read: 'Don't use Donetsk tragedy to pursue
political goals. The paper then distances itself from the statement by introducing a caveat, attributing the story to 'a statement made available to the Daily Graphic by the Russian Embassy in Accra1. The report was drawing the attention of its readers to the fact that the source of that particular report was a handout from the Russian authorities. This was clearly a subliminal caution to readers to treat the content of the report with caution. This approach is conspicuously absent in analogous reports sourced by the same paper from Western European and American news agencies. It could well be the Daily Graphic's way of reassuring its external political patrons and mentors. Even then, the report quotes President Putin directly in the following words: 'I want to reiterate Russia's position with regard to the current situation in Ukraine', but quite strangely, the paper does not proceed to carry the part of the statement that actually explains the Russian position President Putin refers to. In the absence of this elucidation, the reader is left unaware of Russia's side of the story.
The foregoing analyses corroborate the argument pointing to a pattern of dependency inherent in the character of the Daily Graphic, especially about its foreign news. Although this dependency is often elicited through the application of pressure both overt and covert, it is also sometimes a function of second nature about the newspaper's reporters and editors, who have learnt by habit and training to acquiesce with the neocolonial status quo. It is this second nature which explains why the Daily Graphic relies on the mainstream media, while it routinely ignores alternative
sources that provide different perspectives on the Ukrainian crisis. Even more curious is the fact that this alternative information is available and easily accessible by the click of a button from the desktop computer of the reporters and editors of the Daily Graphic. It is, therefore, not indolence, but rather neocolonial dependency which is the overarching determinant in this equation. It explains why the Daily Graphic habitually regurgitates the neocolonial patron's media narrative of the Ukrainian crisis, portraying the new government in Kiev as the victim of foreign-sponsored aggression. Clearly missing in this narrative is the role that new government played in provoking the crisis by pandering to the geopolitical ambitions of Russia's adversaries and, in the process, destabilized the ethnic balance in Ukraine and bringing about this self-inflicted turmoil.
In addition to depriving readers of vital pieces of information, such omissions also rob them of the opportunity to understand the real connection between the overt and covert forces at play in the Ukrainian conflict. This has the effect of a sedative, impeding the development of the relevant public awareness that could challenge the dominant narrative in a more active way. In this regard, [Chomsky 1998]
1. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate [Barsamian 2001].
And the range of the debate should include those critical background details necessary to assist in a holistic appreciation of the contemporary Ukrainian scene. Such a holistic understanding must begin with an elucidation of the contemporary geopolitical realities of Ukraine and its role in the emerging world order in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine comprises four broad regions. They are the West, the Center -the core of which is Kiev and the Dnieper, the South including Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk and the East consisting mainly of the Donbass and Kharkov. Eastern Ukraine is mainly Russian-speaking and was a major political support base of the ousted president Victor Yanukovych.
While Yanukovych's government may have been corrupting, his portrayal as an object of aversion by the mainstream media must be viewed in the context of the efforts by the European Union, in 2013, to push through an economic association agreement with Ukraine. This was to involve an International Monetary Fund-sponsored austerity program with its hallmark social and economic dislocations habitually inflicted on the poor majority. When Russia offered Ukraine a more generous alternative package of US $15 billion, Yanukovych accepted it. What seemed to be quite a commonsensical choice, rather paradoxically, triggered an already simmering crisis. Opponents of Yanukovych rejected the Russian offer and insisted on closer ties with Western Europe. Clearly, therefore, there was more to this narrative than Ukraine merely seeking a future anchored in ties with Western Europe. The alternative facts have been deliberately obfuscated
by the mainstream headlines. The real story behind the headlines revolves around events following the end of the Cold War, and the general understanding among Western and Soviet leaders that NATO would not grow any larger, and that expanding eastwards would not happen.
Recently, questions have been raised about the nature and extent of the agreement to apply the brakes on NATO expansion1.
These disagreements
notwithstanding, NATO's relentless expansion towards Russian's borders raises legitimate questions about that alliance's motives. This largescale expansion started in 1999 with the incorporation of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, ignoring loud protests from Russia. This was followed in 2004 with the inclusion of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In 2009 Albania and Croatia were admitted into the Alliance.
Sakwa argues that what was pushing NATO's unrestrained enlargement to the very frontiers of Russia was hubris.
The West nurtured its own myth of the "end of history." While there have been serious attempts to downplay the triumphalist rhetoric and engage with Russia, this too often has been perceived as condescending if not derogatory. East-West relations have certainly not been an engagement between equals, for the simple reason that the West does not
1 Klufimann, U., Schepp, M., and Wiegrefe, K. (2009). NATO's eastward expansion: Did the West break its promise to Moscow? Spiegel online.http://www.spiegel.de/international/world /nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html
consider Russia an equal in political terms1.
Perhaps one of the most brazen examples of the West's indifference to the sensibilities of Russia was the idea mooted at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 to admit Georgia and Ukraine into the Alliance. is unequivocal in his defense of Russia's reaction to NATO's plans to incorporate Ukraine. Referring to historical antecedents where the region in and around Ukraine was used as a launch pad for the invasion of Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte, imperial and Nazi Germany, he argues forcefully that: Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow's mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.
He goes on to point out the outrage which would be caused in the United States by an analogous hypothetical situation in which 'China built an elaborate military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it2
If NATO is a military alliance whose main raison d'être had been to counter the then Soviet Union, then with the latter's evisceration and its replacement by a shrunken Russia, this inexorable NATO expansion should
1 Sakwa, R. (2015). The deep roots of the Ukraine crisis. The Nation. 15 April 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/deep-roots-ukraine-crisis/
2 Mearsheimer, J. J. (2014). Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions
That Provoked Putin. Retrieved from: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18
cause understandable consternation in Russia. This was expressed by the President of Russia Vladimir Putin in his remarks at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy.
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: "the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee". Where are these guarantees3?
Russia is understandably suspicious that Western overtures to Ukraine for economic cooperation under the Eastern Partnership initiative are a precursor to the country's admission into NATO. When Viktor Yanukovych opted for closer economic ties with Russia, his fate was sealed. The United States would not tolerate this type of defiance that threatened to upset its imperial geopolitical applecart. In remarks at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation Conference in Washington DC on December 13, 2013
3 Putin, V. (2007). Speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy. Retrieved http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/2 4034
Victoria Nuland, the United States Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs reiterated the commitment of the United States to 'take Ukraine into the future that it deserves'. She proceeded to confirm that:
Since Ukraine's independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We've invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.
Nuland's admission of the level of the involvement of the United States in the internal affairs of Ukraine coincided with an escalation of tensions and subsequent confrontations in that country. These left scores of deaths in their trail and paved the way for the exacerbation of the crisis.
During the political turbulence, in early 2014 emissaries from the European Union facilitated a deal between the protesters and the Ukrainian government, affirming that the political process would be peaceful, and that Yanukovych would remain in power until new elections. The foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and France signed as guarantors of this agreement. By this time, the momentum had shifted decisively in favor of the protesters, and they would not let this advantage slip by. Ignoring the provisions of this earlier agreement, protesters occupied key government institutions tearing to shreds the agreement and effectively executing a coup d'état and forcing Yanukovych into exile. The participation of very highprofile American political figures such
as Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain in public demonstrations in Kiev represented an insolent display of support by the United States, for the opposition and by extension, for the coup. Direct evidence of American interference in the events in Ukraine is contained in a leaked telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland and United States Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt (Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked [Nuland-Pyatt call: 2014]. The two are heard discussing, among other things, their preferences regarding the distribution of various political portfolios among specific leaders of the Ukrainian opposition in a post-Yanukovych Ukraine.
The government which emerged in the aftermath of the overthrow of Yanukovych is fanatically pro-Western and overzealously anti-Russian, even though Eastern Ukraine is mainly Russian-speaking, as are most urban areas in the south. These sections of the Ukrainian population opposed the coup against Viktor Yanukovych. Disregarding the evidence of this ethnic arithmetic and the configuration of political forces, the new government immediately embarked on a direct assault on the culture and language of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, banning the use of Russian in schools and in the affairs of governance. Russian war memorials were destroyed, and Russian pages were taken down from government websites.
In reaction to this assault on their heritage, history and culture, Crimea, whose population is sixty percent ethnic Russian, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to leave Ukraine and reunite with Russia. Apart from the demographic statistics which tilted heavily in favor of the ethnic Russians,
the history of their incorporation into Ukraine constituted enough logical grounds for reuniting with Russia. In fact, it was it was only in 1954 that Crimea was handed to Ukraine when the latter was part of the then Soviet Union. Russia's open support for the events leading to the secession of Crimea from Ukraine and its almost immediate incorporation into Russia should be seen in the context of these facts. If Vladimir Putin gave full support to the reincorporation of Crimea into Russia, he did that because he had no doubts whatsoever in his mind about the threat to his country's only warm water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, home to Russia's Black Sea fleet, which the Russophobe political leadership in Kiev could easily have handed over to NATO, with the attendant strategic threat to Russia. It is also important to stress that Crimea's relationship and identity with Russia have always remained strong, and the overwhelming endorsement of the reunion with Russia in the referendum of 2014 was just a matter of course. As Swanson contends,
Crimea, an autonomous region of Ukraine, had its own parliament, had been part of Russia from 1783 until 1954, had publicly voted for close ties to Russia in 1991, 1994, and 2008, and its parliament had voted to rejoin Russia in 2008. On March 16, 2014, 82 percent of Crimeans took part in a referendum, and 96 percent of them voted to rejoin Russia. This nonviolent, bloodless, democratic and legal action, in no violation of a Ukrainian constitution that had been shredded by a violent coup, was immediately denounced in the West as a Russian "invasion" of Crimea.
Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, the Russian-speaking majority also felt disillusioned. The government in which
they had invested their hopes through democratic elections, had been overthrown in a coup they had no hand in. With their future uncertain in an increasingly hostile anti-Russian environment fueled by virulent rhetoric from the new government in Kiev, they agitated for autonomy. And when this agitation was met with violence, they took up arms and declared their independence of Kiev, with the tacit support of Russia. The simmering conflict soon exploded into a major and bloody confrontation.
These differing narratives of the events in Ukraine pit two perspectives against each other. One perspective is articulated by the international mainstream media, and the other by what is generally referred to as the alternative media. The former enjoys an overwhelming global presence, which allows it to channel international public opinion along predetermined perceptual tangents hostile to Russia. The main objective is to eliminate Russia as the main impediment to imperialism's agenda of unrivalled global domination. This is the background context in which the Ukrainian crisis should be situated. And as is often the case, as such orchestrated tragedies unfold, the drumbeat of the mainstream media reverberates in unquestioning tandem with the pulse of imperial bellicosity. It happened in the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the international mainstream media repeated, without questioning, the official narrative about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. This narrative was later exposed as a smokescreen to launch what turned out to be a bogged episode in an agenda to create a new world order. A major concern, however, is the seemingly
willing acquiescence of some periphery media, as in the example of Ghana's Daily Graphic, to amplify the force of this false narrative, this time about the situation in Ukraine.
Reinforcing the Narrative through Labelling and Stereotyping. While the mainstream media is silent on the fundamental causes of the Ukrainian crisis, it engages in selective labelling which creates and reinforces negative stereotypes about the ethnic Russians in Ukraine and about Russia itself. The labels most often repeated are 'rebels' and 'separatists'. If readers are unaware of the reasons why the ethnic Russians have taken up arms against the central government in Kiev, then their characterization as rebels reveling in impulsive violence seems plausible. Ghana's Daily Graphic would regurgitate these assumptions as in the following examples. One headline reads: 'Ukraine, rebels accuse each other of attacking refugees' convoy'1. Another report reads: 'Nineteen Ukrainian troops have died battling rebels in a strategic town east of Donetsk, the government says2. The inference here is that troops, representing a legitimate government which the reports refer to as 'Ukraine' and 'government', are fighting a rebellious armed group which is portrayed as a destructive force. This is suggested in the following headline: 'Rebels destroy bridges in Ukraine'. Occasionally, the labels 'terrorist' and 'militant' are used interchangeably: 'President Poroshenko said troops had "liberated Sloviansk from terrorists", and that it was the start of a turning point in the fight against the militants"'
Having muted the deeper background cause of the conflict, the
1 Daily Graphic, March 7, 2014.
2 Ibid.
reports proceed to question the independence of the ethnic Russians, just falling short of calling them puppets of Russia with the use of such labels as 'pro-Russian rebels' or 'pro-Russian separatists'. Examples of such abound in the Daily Graphic. 'More than 4,000 people have died since fighting erupted in April after pro-Russian separatists seized control in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk3. The same theme is repeated in the following report: 'Conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine last April, when the government in Kiev launched an operation to recapture areas seized by pro-Russian rebels. [Daily Graphic, 2014: 9] It should also be noted that the word 'seize' is intended to strip the ethnic Russians of any measure of sympathy because it evokes images of land grab. The expression 'take control' would have been more neutral unless, of course, the report was intended to elicit a negative reaction from the reader. The same can be said of the reports on the incorporation of Crimea into Russia. While the mainstream media repeatedly referred to it as annexation, others outside the control of the international corporate interests report it differently as this report from the Iranian network Press TV demonstrates.
Relations between Russia and NATO specially soured after Crimea separated from Ukraine and re-joined the Russian Federation following a referendum in March 2014.4 The word 're-join' seems closer to reality since it is anchored on the historical fact that Crimea was part of Russian territory and
3 Ibid.
4 Russian Federation following a referendum in March 2014 http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/04/16/4610 23/Poland-Russia-NATO-Daesh-ISIL-Foreign-Minister-Wiltold-Waszczykowski-Globsec-Bratislava/
was only ceded to Ukraine in 1954, as alluded to earlier.
Whereas the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are routinely referred to as 'pro-Russian' the new government is Kiev, despite the actual circumstances of its ascension to power and its underlining political agenda, is never labelled as pro-Western, which it is. Likewise, while the ethnic Russians are referred to variously as 'separatists', 'rebels' and 'terrorists', the news reports are silent on the character and composition of the new government in Kiev. The new cabinet which was formed in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Yanukovych contained elements of neo-Nazi political groupings such as Svaboda and Right Sector. These two have been put in virtual control of national security in the new Ukraine, including the military and police. As Chossudovsky 1 points out,
The Western media has casually avoided to analyze the composition and ideological underpinnings of the government coalition. The word "NeoNazi" is a taboo. It has been excluded from the dictionary of mainstream media commentary. It will not appear in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post or The Independent. Journalists have been instructed not to use the term "Neo-Nazi" to designate Svoboda and the Right Sector.
Indeed, the one who was appointed deputy Prime Minister following the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, Oleksandr Sych, is a member of Svoboda, a party
which openly touts its Nazi credentials as 2Hughes 2014 argues:
The Svoboda party has tapped into Nazi symbolism including the "wolf's angel" rune, which resembles a swastika and was worn by members of the Waffen-SS, a panzer division that was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg.
In fact, elements of this neo-Nazi tendency fight alongside the regular Ukrainian army, and occasionally are euphemistically referred to as 'volunteers' as in the following example from the Daily Graphic. 'Ukraine's National Guard has sent extra mortars and anti-tank weapons to the volunteers fighting the pro-Russian separatists in Ilovaisk, officials say.'
In an earlier article in The Guardian newspaper of Wednesday 29 January 2014, Milne Seumas asserts in the title of the said article: 'In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis.' A subheading of the article further makes the point that 'the story we're told about the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest relationship with reality.' In the main article itself Milne makes the following argument which strikes at the very heart of the grotesque confluence of domestic and foreign forces driving the Ukrainian crisis.
You'd never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the hard-right antisemitic Svoboda,
1 Chossudovsky, M. (2016). Two years ago. Global Research, 4 March 2016. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-u-s-has-installed-a-neo-nazi-government-in-ukraine/5371554
2 Hughes, M. (2014). The Neo-Nazi Question in Ukraine. Retrieved from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/the-neo-nazi-question-in b 4938747.html
whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. But US senator John McCain was happy to share a platform with him in Kiev last month. The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews. [Milne: 2014].1
If, as Milne asserts, the news coverage of the Ukraine crisis by the mainstream media has little to do with the realities on the ground, and that fascists and oligarchs have joined in a NATO program of military expansion the target of which is Russia, then this raises serious concerns about scruples and international security and morality. Even more ominous are the relentless efforts directed at massaging global public opinion in support of what could be described as irrationality. This is what is happening when the mainstream media continue to submerge the reality of the Ukraine crisis under a barrage of diversionary media headlines and skewed coverage in a pursuit of an end which as dubious as the means. What is worrying is the relative success of the mainstream media in squeezing much of the global public into a perceptual straitjacket and sleepwalking it into uncharted waters.
The Maidan Killings: Challenging the Dominant Narrative. On February 20, 2014 a massacre of scores of
1 Milne, S. (2014). In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis'. The Guardian. Wednesday 29 January 2014. Retrieved from:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/201 4/jan/29/ukraine-fascists-oligarchs-eu-nato-expansion
protesters took place at the Maidan square, in Kiev, the focal point of months of protests. The events at the square, which culminated in the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, were portrayed as a confrontation between peaceful anti-government protesters advocating closer ties with Western Europe on one hand, and regime police on the other. The latter were later to be blamed for reacting with disproportionate force, resulting in the said massacre. It was this incident which tipped the moral balance decisively against Yanukovych, stripping him of what was left of his legitimacy and of the government he represented. At face value, his ouster was therefore a moral imperative. The protest organizers who now constitute Ukraine's government put the blame on the Berkut riot police of the Yanukovych government, and this narrative has been given almost universal currency by the mainstream international media. The Daily Graphic has been part of this chorus. A feature article of March 7 2014 echoed this particular version of events in a matter-of-fact manner. '82 protesters were shot dead by government snipers from roof tops'2.
Without a voice loud enough to challenge this narrative, international public opinion tilted angrily against the regime. An alternative account of events, which radically contradicted the version presented by the mainstream media hardly made the headlines. This alternative narrative was provided by a group of researchers from the University of Ottawa in Canada. The data the researchers used included: publicly available but unreported, suppressed, or misrepresented videos and photos of suspected shooters, live statements by the Maidan announcers, radio intercepts
of the Maidan"snipers,"and snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), ballistic trajectories, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special unit commanders, public statements by both former and current government officials, bullets and weapons used, types of wounds among both protesters and the police, and the track record of politically motivated misrepresentations by the Maidan politicians of other cases of violence during and after the Euromaidan and historical conflicts. This study examines about 30 gigabytes of intercepted radio exchanges of the Security Service of Ukraine Alfa unit, Berkut, the Internal Troops, Omega, and other government agencies during the entire Maidan protests. [Katchanovski 2014: 3]
After analyzing this extensive amount of data, the study is in no doubt as to who was responsible for the massacre. Its conclusion was that certain elements of the opposition to Yanukovych, including its neo-Nazi and extremist far right wing, were involved in the massacre, and that this was done in order to seize power. The study contends that the subsequent falsification of the investigations was designed to hide this fact.
The study provides some very critical pieces of the Ukrainian jigsaw, which should help those who follow the crisis, not only to connect some essential dots in the narrative, but also to move closer towards a clearer understanding of the real forces at play in the conflict. And such understanding should not be merely an exercise in intellectual gratification. It is very important to expose the wider international public to all sides of the story in equal measure. Anything short of this is fraught with
serious consequences, as the perceptions generated from selective exposure could translate into support for misguided policies. This brings the discussion to the next stage, which highlights the practical impact a narrow-spectrum exposure to the news on the Ukrainian crisis can have on public perceptions.
The Pew Research Centre Survey on Russia's Global Image: Explaining the Issues behind the Statistics. In July 2014 the Washington-based American think tank, the Pew Research Centre, released the results of a survey titled 'Russia's Global Image Negative amid Crisis in Ukraine'. The survey was conducted using telephone and face-to-face interviews in forty-four countries including Ghana and was matched against a similar poll in 2013 involving 36 countries. In the totality of forty-four countries in the 2014 survey, an average of forty-three (43) percent of respondents had negative opinions of Russia, while thirty-four percent had favorable opinions. When the surveys of 2013 and 2014 are compared, twenty of the countries surveyed in both years registered significant increases in negative ratings, six had decreased negative ratings while the rest of the ten maintained relatively similar ratings for both years. Of the six African countries surveyed in 2013, all except South Africa, registered higher percentages of positive opinion of Russia than negative. And once again except for South Africa, all the other seven African countries surveyed in 2014 registered higher percentages of positive opinions of Russia than negative, though there were reductions in the percentages recorded for the positive ratings when compared with the 2013 survey. With specific reference to Ghana, in the survey of 2013, 49% of respondents had a
favorable view of Russia while 26% had an unfavorable view. In the 2014 survey, the figure for those with a favorable opinion decreased to 42% while that of those with an unfavorable opinion rose to 31%. These details derive from the table below.
Europeans, Americans More Negative toward Russia
Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of Russia?
2013 Fav Unfa Y 2014 Fav Unfav 13-14 Change unfavorable
% % % %
U.S. 37 43 19 72 +29
Poland 36 54 12 31 +27
UK 36 39 25 63 +24
Spain 33 51 16 74 +23
Germany 32 60 19 79 +19
Italy 31 56 20 74 +16
France 36 64 26 73 +9
Greece 63 33 61 35 +2
Russia 63 14 92 6 S
Ukraine - - 35 60 -
Turkev 19 66 16 73 +7
Egypt 30 64 24 71 +7
Jordan 25 70 22 75 +3
Lebanon 46 53 45 54 +1
Tunisia 35 37 35 36 +1
Israel 21 77 30 63 -9
Palest, ter. 29 57 41 46 -11
Malaysia 47 22 34 36 +16
South Korea 53 33 43 43 +15
Indonesia 43 33 36 43 +10
Japan 27 64 23 69 +3
Pakistan 19 32 11 29 -3
India 45 23 39 16 -7
Philippines 35 52 46 43 -9
China 49 39 66 23 -16
Bangladesh - - 60 33 -
Thailand - - 46 29 -
Vietnam - - 75 14 -
Venezuela 40 41 36 51 +10
Argentina 26 29 19 37 +3
Brazil 34 52 24 59 +7
Chile 39 36 34 45 +7
El Salvador 27 29 23 36 +7
Mexico 26 36 21 44 +6
Colombia - - 24 37 -
Peru - - 34 35 -
Nicaragua - - 45 27 -
Uganda 26 22 34 31 +9
Senegal 42 21 39 30 +9
Ghana 49 26 42 31 +3
Kenya 47 27 49 32 +3
South Africa 26 53 25 51 -2
Nigeria 36 30 41 27 -3
Tanzania - - 49 25 -
Note: India data from Winter 2013-2014survey. Source: Spring2014 Global Attitudes survey. Q15e PEW RESEARCH CENTER
At first glance the statistics seem to confirm the view of the Pew Research center that Russia is broadly unpopular in many countries around the world. But instead of accepting the results of the survey at face value, it would be
important to interrogate the background environment against which the perceptions were molded. The background environment here refers to the totality of factors, both overt and latent, that are responsible for shaping public perceptions. From this perspective, it is important to stress the fact that the perceptions that the public forms about things and happenings do not come about instantaneously. They involve a gradual buildup. As Bagdikian 1983: argues,
Our picture of reality ... accumulates day by day and year by year in mostly unspectacular fragments from the world scene, produced mainly by the mass media. Our view of the real world is dynamic, cumulative, and self-correcting as long as there is a pattern of even-handedness in deciding which fragments are important. But when one fragment is filtered out, or included only vaguely, our view of the social-political world is deficient. The ultimate human intelligence - discernment of cause and effect - becomes damaged because it depends on knowledge of events in the order and significance in which they occur. When part of the linkage between cause and effect becomes obscure, the sources of our weakness and of our strength become uncertain.
About the media coverage of the 1Ukrainian crisis, it is clear that there hasn't been a pattern of evenhandedness. By deliberately obfuscating the linkage between cause and effect and presenting the crisis in fragments that ignore the bigger picture and the wider context, the mainstream corporate media creates the environment which, naturally, would generate negative opinion of Russia. The
1 Ukraine Crisis. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/16/explaini ng-the-ukraine-crisis/?print=pdf
results of the survey, however, don't seem to match the amount of effort expended by the mainstream international media and directed at creating a climate of resentment towards Russia. It is indeed remarkable that despite the unrestrained exposure of the audiences in the target countries to the relentless and negative coverage of Russia's involvement in Ukraine, Russia still manages to garner some relatively high percentages of positive evaluation, averaging thirty-four (34) percent in the 44 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Centre in 2014. It is even more remarkable that majority of people in the African nations that were surveyed, have favorable views of Russia.
Beyond the facts surrounding the statistics, the results of the survey raise wider and fundamental questions about democracy and its institutions. If for instance democracy requires the informed consent of the people, then Walter Cronkite, the well decorated retired veteran anchorperson for America's CBS television, asks whether democracy is 'possible when people can't get enough information to intelligently vote on the future?" [Marguerite 1980: 5]. Cronkite further points to the paradox of technology inundating 'us with facts about everything, and yet I'm not sure we're getting at the truth of anything. How viable is democracy as we know it in this kind of environment?' (Marguerite 1980: 4] And Cronkite's concerns should be taken seriously because of the overwhelming trust his very large audiences reposed in him at the height of his career, during which he repeatedly topped the polls as 'the most trusted and influential American' [Marguerite 1980]. In one such poll in 1973 he left his
nearest contender far behind by as much as 16 percent.
Continuing the discussion from the perspective of Cronkite's argument, to intelligently vote on the future, it is necessary for the citizenry to be exposed to different strands of the news. This is a requirement if the vote is to be based on informed consent. From this perspective, therefore, the results of the Pew survey are fundamentally deficient because they are based on opinions derived from information not only lacking in diversity, breadth and depth, but also deliberately skewed to elicit a predetermined political response.
Conclusion: Reiterating the Urgency of a Countervailing International Alternative Media. This discussion has been an attempt to demonstrate the complicity of Ghana's leading newspaper, the Daily Graphic, in the misrepresentation of the Ukrainian crisis. In doing this, the paper raises its subordinate relationship with the international mainstream media to new heights. This, of course, has its roots in the paper's historical origins in the colonial metropolis as well as the country's colonial history. In Ghana, and in other former colonies, the neocolonial arrangement which replaced direct colonial rule is still very much inherent in the fabric of the institutions of state at the political, economic and socio-cultural levels. And a country is said to be a neo-colony when it is nominally independent, but in reality, its economy is dependent on, and controlled by an outside power who applies economic and financial pressures to ensure political control over the captive country, rendering its political independence meaningless. In other words, the neocolonial power can always resort to economic and other pressures to
influence the overall economic and political direction of the dependent country. In Ghana, and in the so-called Third World, the very successful neocolonial control of the agencies of ideational creation often renders overt pressures unnecessary, because a neocolonial mentality has been programmed into the mindset of the victim at the very fundamental level. The resultant culture of dependency has been maintained over the years through a system of patronage. In the media, this takes many forms including the continual corporate-sponsored training and retraining programs for local media staff, especially in the executive echelons. Ghana's Daily Graphic fits into this profile, and this explains the paper's readiness to regurgitate the political biases of it neocolonial patrons.
Finally, it is possible to conclude that the overall strategy to mobilize international public opinion against Russia, especially about the crisis in Ukraine, has had limited success especially in Africa. This is attested to even by the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, despite its superficiality. Even more instructive is the fact that readers' comments on websites of news sources outside the control of the corporate media are awash with opinions supportive of Russia's policy actions in relation to the conflict in Ukraine, and equally critical of the conduct of the United States. With technology acting as a double-edged sword, making it possible for the international mainstream media to have limitless global reach, it also affords alternative sources of information that challenge the status quo, the opportunity to reach out to the same international audience. What is urgently required is more visibility and presence of these
alternative sources of news and information. In fact, the future of the world would most likely depend on the outcome of this competition for the minds of the global community. An informed global public with their combined democratic pressure and numbers can put some brakes on the destructive impulses of the forces behind the mainstream media that revel in creating political bogeymen and stampeding the rest of the world in the direction of hatred towards these manufactured myths.
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2. Barsamian D. (2001). Propaganda and the public mind: Conversations with Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press.
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4. Chossudovsky M. (2016). Two years ago. Global Research, 4 March 2016.
5. Marguerite, M. (1980). Walter wants the news to say a lot more. Parade. March 23, 1980. p. 5.
6. Katchanovski I. (2014). The "Snipers' Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine. Paper
presented at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies Seminar. University of Ottawa, Ottawa. October 1, 2014.
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About the author. Gamel Nasser Adam. Department of Modern Languages. Russian Section University of Ghana. Legon - Accra, Ghana ([email protected]).
