Behind the Headlines | Ukraine – changing how we bear witness to war

Recorded April 11, 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused immense human suffering, a refugee crisis, the renewed spectre of nuclear attack, and now, international outrage at evidence of war crimes. How is an international media reporting on these horrific developments? This panel discussion assesses the role of traditional war correspondents, citizen journalists, and open-source information, to ask how the ‘news’ stands witness to the atrocities in Ukraine. Paul Cunningham is the Political Correspondent (and former European Correspondent and Environmental Correspondent) for RTÉ News and Current Affairs. He has been reporting on the war in Ukraine, including live from the Medyka border crossing between Ukraine and Poland. Paul is an award-winning journalist and has covered conflict in a number of countries, including Bosnia, Lebanon, Kosovo, Algeria, Pakistan/Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nepal, Darfur, and Northern Ireland. Orysia Kulick is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Political Studies and German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba. She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, where she worked on an EU-funded research project exploring the cultural heritage of dissent in former socialist countries, and the University of Toronto. She was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Ukraine, where she researched civic mobilisation in the 2004 presidential elections. Orysia is currently working on a book provisionally title How Ukraine Ruled Russia: Regionalism and Party Politics after Stalin and a microhistory of the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora. Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications in DCU. She researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, internet freedom, and internet governance in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine and Russia. Ciaran O’Connor is a disinformation and extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, working in the Research and Policy unit, where he tracks and monitors disinformation, hate and extremism online. He specialises in researching extremist activity and communication across open and closed networks and platforms through the use of open source research methodologies. Mark Little is the Schuler Democracy Forum Media Fellow in the Trinity Long Room Hub and co-founder and CEO of Kinzen. Mark spent 20 years as a reporter and presenter for RTÉ and won the Irish TV Journalist of the Year award for his reporting from Afghanistan in 2001. He was the founder of Storyful, the world’s first social news agency, and the former Vice President for Media in Europe and Managing Director of Twitter International Headquarters. In 2017, Mark co-founded Kinzen, which combines editorial skills and artificial intelligence to protect online conversations and communities. The event is hosted by the Schuler Democracy Forum in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. It is part of the 'Behind the Headlines’ discussion series supported by the John Pollard Foundation. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/