War Stories: Brooke Gladstone and Fred Kaplan on the Media, War, and Ukraine

From the Crimean War of 1853 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year, journalists, reporters, and the media have shaped the public’s understanding of war. But do the stories we read and the photos we see provide an impartial picture of the wars they document? As the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah recently explained in Foreign Policy, certain aspects of American war coverage—reliance on government sources and incentives to simplify geopolitics as battles between good and evil—have long compelled news organizations to tilt toward military action.

In this special episode of None Of The Above, host of WNYC’s On The Media Brooke Gladstone and Slate’s “War Stories” columnist Fred Kaplan, are interviewed by Mark at the American Academy in Rome. Together, in these excerpts from that conversation, they unpack the media’s coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the biases which influence how the media understand and depict these conflicts.

To listen to previous episodes and learn more about None Of The Above, go to www.noneoftheabovepodcast.org. To learn more about the Eurasia Group Foundation, please visit www.egfound.org and subscribe to our newsletter.

Brooke Gladstone is a journalist and host of On the Media, a Peabody Award-winning podcast by WNYC Studios. Brooke is also the Rea S. Hederman Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and the author of The Influencing Machine (2011) and The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time (2017). 

Fred Kaplan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist for Slate, where he authors the “War Stories” column. Fred’s most recent book is The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (2020).