S4 E13 A Legacy of Finding the Humanity with Luca Steinmann

I feel like it's a good concept to reflect on these days, especially when so much is happening and what is that duty that we all have and how it relates, I wanted to ask you now, to the human cost of war, because obviously it's something you deal with very heavily in your work.

Do you think there's something from your work and how you see how the mainstream media is reporting maybe on the same wars or, you know, different conflicts? Is there something that you think is not emphasized enough or maybe not communicated enough regarding the human cause of war in the mainstream media? Something that the public, you know, if only the public understood better.

Like, is there something from your experience that, you know, that you would like to emphasize here?

Yes, I think that in recent years we have seen the trend of journalists and of media identifying too strongly on one side or on other side of wars, some wars especially, dehumanizing the enemy.

when you have always to differentiate between politicians and soldiers and civilians.

The war in Ukraine was very negative in this term.

Of course, it was a very strong emotional wave when Russian tanks entered Ukraine, but I saw in too many colleagues the tendance also of describing Russians or people leaving and accepting the Russians in their areas in Ukraine as orcs, as inhumans, you know, and also the Russian soldiers describing all of them as orcs, as, you know, terrible people.

And then, I mean, every war journalist should know that every large army, like the Russian one, but probably like the Ukrainian one or the Syrian one or the Israeli one, it's made by human.

So you may have there, and this is what I found in Russian soldiers, you know.

I found terrible people there among them and I found fantastic people among them.

I found motivated people and people that were forced to be there.

I found ideological people and people that were just poor and needed a salary.

So the risk of dehumanizing the people that your side is fighting against is very dangerous because this creates A deep rip between the two sides.

And this facilitates also the propaganda on the other side towards their own people.

Think of Russia again.

You know, when the Russian government is saying to their people, you know, in the West, they all hate you and they think that you're all animals.

And then actually there is someone portraying them as such people.

Are you making a favor for the free Russians or are you pushing them in the hands of the government, you say, of the regime you say you want to fight? And this can also be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

So many journalists in the first hours after October 7th being like, very, oh my God, there is a good on the one side, Israel, and there is a bad one on the other side, the Palestinian Hezbollah.

And then it turned upside down.

It's not so easy.

It's not so simple.

It's not black and white, you know, and I cannot judge people on the ground that see it black and white.

This is less widespread than we think, but there are, of course, people seeing it black and white.

But we as a journalist that don't come from that areas.