since a couple of months, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine captures a large part of the international news attention. The war accumulates that set of news that deserves to lead the news on radio and television, the digital editions of newspapers and the pages of newspapers. In addition, it gathers sufficient entity to feed the history books in the future, whose authors will find, on the internet and in newspaper archives, fundamental help in documenting all the points of view of the conflict, the personality of the main protagonists, the human drama and the role of the international community, in the same way that today we have an enormous information about the warlike confrontations of the 20th century. The greater the coverage, therefore, the greater the knowledge made available to society.
The press, they told us in the faculties of Journalism, is the second hand of History. By virtue of this assertion, as lapidary as it is close to reality, it must be understood that present and future researchers will have at their service an immense bibliography to accredit what is happening in the world. But what happens when the news focus hovers over a limited number of events and less attention is paid to apparently less relevant events?
Ryszard Kapuściński -it seems that one is not a journalist at all until one reads Kapuściński- he had the following to say about coverage of the 1990 Gulf War: “Two hundred television crews are concentrated in the same area. At that very moment, many important, even crucial, things are happening in other parts of the world. It doesn’t matter, no one will talk about them, everyone is in the Gulf (…) If then, immediately after, there is another big event, everyone moves in that direction, and everyone will stay there without time to cover other places.
The informative caliber of the war in Ukraine, in the global sphere, and news such as Pegasus eavesdropping, domestically, it is of such magnitude that it is sometimes surprising that radio and television talk shows discuss (much less than was done in a less belligerent context) the threat to the right to abortion in the US or the last woman murdered. As the commissioner Alberto Luceño said in the recordings of the mask case, some issues have gone from the front pages directly “to the sack”, where they will continue predictably until other storms subside.
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According to organizations from different public and private spheres, there are currently 53 active war conflicts on the planet, including the war in Ukraine. Assets means exchange of armed fire, death of civilians and soldiers, war crimes, rapes and cold-blooded murders that will hardly have a trial or punishment. Twenty-two of those conflicts are considered wars as you and I understand them. There is a war in Burma (about 7,000 deaths so far this year), there is a war in Yemen (about 5,000 deaths in 2022), there are wars in Mali, Syria and Somalia, to which we can add the never ending conflict in Afghanistan or the always active insurgency of Boko Haram in several African states, for not including the bleeding among the population caused by drug trafficking in Latin American countries, basically in Mexico, which this year accounts for half of the deaths in Yemen. Except for very few cases, the attention given to Ukraine, as before to Syria and previously to Afghanistan, has as a result -also in the words of Kapuścińnacute; “the way the average man gets an idea of the world situation”. I mean.
The historians of the future will have sufficient basis to describe the war in Ukraine from all prisms, both that of the victors and that of the vanquished. On the borders of Donbas, the idea that history is told by the first will come to an end. The exception -and they are not few- is that of all those conflicts where now there is hardly anyone to tell about it. And so we will have the historians of the future, digging through thousands of documents and web pages, trying to contrast the information that nobody told in their day -because they didn’t want to or couldn’t-, buried in thousands of terabytes of information and publishing hundreds of books and documentaries, at the end of which , future generations will not be very clear about which of those trees was the first with which the forest was planted.