Because it came knocking on our doors, it resumed its ease in Europe, the International Journalism Festival (FIJ) of Couthures-sur-Garonne could not ignore the war. The war and its treatment by the media.
How do you show it without voyeurism? How do you photograph death or suffering without offering a degraded image of the victims? How to disentangle the true from the false when information is indeed a weapon of war? At the FIJ, visitors came with their questions, their misunderstandings too, hoping to find a bit of the underside of the cards and discuss the approach to this subject too serious to be left to the editorial conferences of the newspapers.
On Sunday, the propaganda historian David Colon was to discuss the manipulation of public opinion with Elena Voloshin, a reporter and filmmaker in her spare time. Because a war is first won by words. A saying that has been true every day since February 24 and the start of the bombings. While the communication of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and that of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, invite themselves more powerful than the most modern guns, it is difficult to find a better example to analyze…
Investigate the web too
In Couthures, on July 15, 16 and 17, the narration of the war did not stop at the work of the great field reporters. With Liselotte Mas, journalist at France Télévisions, festival-goers were able to follow as closely as possible what it means to “investigate online in times of war”. Uncovering unpublished testimonies, proof of wrongdoing or lies… The journalist, specialist in Osint – “open source intelligence”, which in French means “open source intelligence” – explains that open source intelligence consists of anything that “can be found on the Internet, available to everyone. Elements which, once verified, analyzed, cross-checked, can be used as information”. A new journalistic skill increasingly used and developed in newsrooms, real online investigative work carried out by dedicated journalists.
Digging behind to hear the unsaid, picking up weak signals, that’s the DNA of the job, according to Elena Volochine, France 24 correspondent for ten years in Russia. The journalist came to Couthures to explain that her departure from Moscow in February does not prevent her from continuing to “analyze propaganda, to deconstruct it”.
Like Denis Kataev, a Russian journalist who also left his native country at the same time because his job had become impossible there. Presenter of the television news on the independent Russian channel Dojd TV, he was forced to leave, took the last flight to Cyprus, then France, where he is now in residence at Radio France. Every week, on Dojd TV’s YouTube channel, Denis Kataev recreates a program to “continue to inform Russians about Russia, and fight official propaganda”, he says. If he still managed, until the start of the conflict, to “bend the rules and the laws” and could continue to inform freely – despite the formal ban, for example, on talking about certain organizations like that of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny – the law against freedom of expression adopted by Parliament at the start of the year put a definitive end to all freedom of speech in the media, as he reminded festival-goers at length. And, whether it is print or image, the same net has tightened on information in Russia in recent months.
“Responsible Subjectivity”
The photographer Guillaume Chauvin, he chose another bias. That of placing oneself on the side of Moscow. On the walls of the church of Couthures-sur-Garonne, his work, called “Thick War”, tells the Donbass war seen from the side of the pro-Russian separatists. Since 2015, this journalist has been documenting the war there and exposing it here. Original in the staging he proposes and in the “responsible subjectivity” he puts forward, his images from the field raise the question of the journalist’s objectivity. What position should he take? Can he accept being “embedded” (embedded with the army), as the Americans say, or must he remain outside, depriving himself of attending the clashes?
These hours of exchanges, lasting three days in Couthures, will not make it possible to decide on this subject, which undoubtedly does not have a single answer but a long argued list. The whole thing is to know where the journalist is talking about, where the reporter is photographing from.
