In his classic work, Public Opinion, Lippmann asserted that "news and truth are not the same thing." News signals an event, while truth requires the bringing to light the hidden facts related to that event. In his even more pessimistic book, The Phantom Public, Lippmann asserted, 'effective virtue, as Socrates pointed out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of the right and the wrong must wait upon a perception of the true and the false.'"
In that same letter, I noted that America's mainstream news media (specifically, Fox News) "reported that Ukrainian forces took out an ammunition railway connecting Kherson with Crimea. However, it did not report that Russian forces destroyed much of the 21st Battalion of Ukraine's 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, causing it to retreat from Pisky (Pesky), before suffering total destruction by its own artillery. Neither did it report that as many as 900 Ukrainian soldiers were killed or wounded on Aug. 2 alone."
As a student of Russia, who has been studying that country for more than fifty years, I've expended time and effort recently to understand events in Ukraine since Russia's invasion on February 24, 2022. Both the fog of war and the intentionally biased information warfare conducted by the principals, their proxies, and their mouthpieces have rendered problematic any accurate assessment of the military situation there. This article is devoted to flawed estimates of military casualties.
I read the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times every day and watch ABC World News virtually every evening; paying special attention to their reporting on the war in Ukraine. Thus, I've seen all of these news organizations routinely cherry-pick for positive pro-Ukrainian news and routinely exaggerate the significance of such news on days when news of Russian battlefield successes are overwhelming. The example of the destruction of the 21st Battalion of Ukraine's 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, mentioned above, is illustrative of such imbalance and pro-Ukrainian bias.
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