Comment by anavat

Comment by anavat 2 days ago

3 replies

Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know.

There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.

There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all).

And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.

Aeolun 15 hours ago

> Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know

I'm not inclined to believe that, but even so Russia would scream it off the rooftops if there were the slightest chance that it would affect anything. Unfortunately it'd be lost in the flood of lies that they spout daily. At least western media seems to be mostly silent on things they can't be at least marginally truthful on (presumably because they have no need to be, I guess media in Ukraine is a bit more biased).

DecoySalamander 2 days ago

Why would that specific video be up-voted into the skies? It's just another piece of misery porn and we had at least 2 years of that on almost daily basis at that point.

aguaviva 2 days ago

The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.

Except it doesn't. Stuff like this gets reported all the time (for exactly what it is), also when Ukrainians do it. Like the EW-intercepted drone that hit that apartment outside Moscow, killing (according to local reports) someone inside. Even RFE/RL reported it.

Not every single incident of course -- but they do get reported, very frequently.

People tend not to dwell on it, of course -- because they know these things are bound to happen to some degree (and anyone with more than a completely casual understanding of WW II knows that inadvertent civilian casualties, even in allied countries, were extremely high). And that there are far too many perfectly deliberate atrocities happening, and at far greater scale (and except for a few isolated cases, all coming not so coincidentally from one side). And because they understand the far bigger point, which is that at the end of the day, the war (and all the suffering that will be required to end it) is Putin's fault anyway.

But that's very different from the simple matter of these events being "silenced". Because plainly they're not. The reason they don't get more column inches or newsroom chatter is because, by any level-headed analysis -- they just don't deserve any.

And attempting to describe the state of affairs that way, when clearly it isn't, is well -- manipulative.