When Russia was preparing to annex Crimea in the late winter of 2014, the newly-appointed head of the Russian agency that published our newspaper, the Moscow News, laid down some new rules. The age of disinterested, objective reporting was over. Our job, this Kremlin-picked patriotic zealot told staff, was to love the Motherland.

We all resigned. As a journalist, striving for disinterested objectivity was literally my job description – the values instilled in me when I trained in New York. Praising your Motherland for money can be called all sorts of things, just not love.

Instead, I went on to report on the start of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine for Western publications, and watched in dismay as the Kremlin began its crackdown on independent media. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, I left the country.

Dozhd immediately fired Korostelev, but this was not enough

But today, eight years later, the Kremlin firebrand’s words are proving prophetic, not just in Russia, but more than ever in Western democracies. The primary job of reporters, it seems, is no longer to inform and analyse the facts, but to validate the feelings of their audiences. Nowhere is this worrying trend more noticeable than in the increasingly polarised global coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This month, Dozhd TV, an opposition television station, whose staff were forced to flee Russia to escape draconian laws, found itself succumbing to government pressure from…Latvia. After fines and threats of deportation back to Russia (which would mean certain prison for much of the staff), Latvia’s media regulator revoked its broadcasting license, citing ‘threats to national security and social order’. In solidarity, Lithuania and Estonia followed suit and banned the channel’s broadcasts on their territory. Since then, pressure on the channel has only increased: Latvian authorities have indicated that unless Dozhd staff can prove they are employed, their work visas will be revoked.

The supposed ‘threat’, according to Latvia, was the fact that journalists referred to the Russian Armed Forces as ‘our army’. What sparked the pressure was an incautious comment made by Dozhd journalist Alexei Korostelev, who, as part of a story on the Kremlin’s botched mobilisation campaign and the untrained, unequipped men it was sending to die in Ukraine, said ‘we hope that we were able to help many soldiers with equipment and basic amenities at the front.’

It was clear what he meant: not that Dozhd was helping equip them, of course, but that this was an attempt to highlight the many ways the Kremlin was failing to live up to its promises to its troops. Some Ukrainian commentators weren’t convinced, though; Korostelev’s words were twisted to imply that Dozhd was supporting ‘genocide’. It was enough to get the authorities of Latvia, which has become Ukraine’s staunchest supporter, to launch a crackdown.

Dozhd immediately fired Korostelev, but this was not enough to appease Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council (NEPLP). Despite the fact there was no ambiguity that Dozhd opposes the war against Ukraine – and that Korostelev clearly misspoke in a separate story about Kremlin rights abuses – Latvian authorities went after the channel on other pretexts.

The Kremlin, whose top domestic propaganda narrative is that the West hates all Russians, was, of course, deeply pleased.

‘People think that they can be free somewhere, and that they aren’t free at home,’ president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists. ‘This is a prime example of that illusion.’

Dozhd TV, no stranger to surviving government repression, will hopefully find another home and stay on the air. They have seen an outpouring of support, and Latvia’s government is already rightly being called out for its xenophobia. But this is about more than just the anti-Russian populist hysteria raging in some quarters. The Dozhd incident is a sobering warning about how easy it has become for Western editors, policymakers and government regulators to succumb to the mob and play in to Putin’s hands.

Here in Washington DC, it is difficult to talk about anything other than the need to support Ukraine and punish Russia. In October, legislators were forced to retract a public letter to the Biden administration after a storm of criticism. The most controversial thing in the letter, apparently, was that in addition to continued military and financial support in Ukraine, the lawmakers called for a ‘protracted diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.’

This backlash is part of a wider trend, affecting both major parties in the US, of censorship and self-censorship. In April, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis revoked Disney’s special status in the state over its opposition to his ‘Don’t Say Gay’ legislation. More recently, the Twitter Files debacle revealed how officials at the social media network sought to block content that was seen as harmful to the Biden administration. The media, once a beacon of democracy, is now fighting over new ways to protect its audiences from any information that makes them uncomfortable.

For those writing about Russia and Ukraine, the result of this censorious climate is sterile redundancy. Researchers, scholars, and policymakers compete to find new ways to repeat the same lines ad nauseum: why Ukraine must be supported, why Putin is dangerous, and why he must be punished. The problem with this mantra is not that it’s wrong, of course, but that it’s obvious. When reporters, scholars and policymakers are muzzled from anything other than telling their readers what they already know, they deprive society of the very tools necessary to fight back against illiberal aggression.

Yes, journalists, like everyone, make mistakes. Reporters, analysts, policymakers and those struggling to make sense of Russia’s senseless invasion have biases and emotions. But therein lies the difference between an open society and a closed one, between a mature professional and an emotional child: rising above those emotions and recognising that, if we want a free press, we are going to encounter perspectives we don’t like.

The job of reporters and scholars is not to act as therapists for the victims of aggression. It is to uncover information, present different perspectives, and present facts so that policymakers, voters and governments have the tools necessary to actually deter the aggression, rather than stew and commiserate on it. To keep us from turning into anything like Putin’s Russia, we must take Dozhd’s courageous example: they stand up for their professional integrity even in the face of imprisonment. As for us, we need to stop being cowed into submission by people yelling at us on Twitter.

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