How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like
Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”
… so what is it like?
Some ways a reader could respond include:
More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore Russia should win asap to minimise bloodshed
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore arm Ukraine to punish Russia for starting it
If you turn up the prior belief of collusion between the NYT and a military-industrial-political complex, you can imagine a “pragmatic” situation where the West arms Ukraine enough to keep Russia embroiled in a war of attrition, thereby pouring Russia’s armed forces into a meatgrinder for, from Western accountings, pennies on the dollar, and this might be pragmatic, or even hard to improve on (because arming Ukraine too much could provoke nuclear response from Russia), but, damn it all, it doesn’t feel very heroic. So, NYT is left waving the banners and playing the trumpets?
If you mistakenly assume that all Ukrainian soldiers in this war are volunteers, it would mean that X people oppose the Russian invasion so much that they are literally willing to risk their lives to stop it. When you learn that actually most Ukrainian soldiers are drafted, you should decrease your estimate of X. (Yes, some of those soldiers really want to defend their homeland; and some of them kinda want their homeland to remain independent, but would prefer to increase the chances of their own survival; and finally some of them actually want to become a part of Russia, but are forced against their will to fight against.) Ukraine being a “hybrid regime” and Zelensky being not very popular right before the war is indirect evidence that many people might oppose the official policy of resisting Russia, and that Ukraine might be the kind of country that would send them to die by thousands regardless.
For an American reader, assuming that all Ukrainian soldiers are either professionals or volunteers would be an easy mistake to make. NYT is lying by omission by not mentioning this fact (frequently enough).
The expected reaction of a reader is probably something like: “I assumed, based on the number of soldiers, that opposing Russia is very popular among the Ukrainians… but now I realize that those soldiers were literally forced at gunpoint to go fighting, so this is actually not evidence of a popular support… now I have no strong evidence either way, and maybe the fact that NYT was manipulating me in a certain direction should make me update in the opposite direction… so the conclusion is somewhere between ‘Russia is right’ and ‘we actually don’t know who is right’, and in either case we should stop interfering.”
.
This of course works better if the reader has no other information about Russia and Ukraine. Then again, that might actually be the case for a typical NYT reader.
How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like
Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”
… so what is it like?
Some ways a reader could respond include:
More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore Russia should win asap to minimise bloodshed
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore arm Ukraine to punish Russia for starting it
If you turn up the prior belief of collusion between the NYT and a military-industrial-political complex, you can imagine a “pragmatic” situation where the West arms Ukraine enough to keep Russia embroiled in a war of attrition, thereby pouring Russia’s armed forces into a meatgrinder for, from Western accountings, pennies on the dollar, and this might be pragmatic, or even hard to improve on (because arming Ukraine too much could provoke nuclear response from Russia), but, damn it all, it doesn’t feel very heroic. So, NYT is left waving the banners and playing the trumpets?
Steelman:
If you mistakenly assume that all Ukrainian soldiers in this war are volunteers, it would mean that X people oppose the Russian invasion so much that they are literally willing to risk their lives to stop it. When you learn that actually most Ukrainian soldiers are drafted, you should decrease your estimate of X. (Yes, some of those soldiers really want to defend their homeland; and some of them kinda want their homeland to remain independent, but would prefer to increase the chances of their own survival; and finally some of them actually want to become a part of Russia, but are forced against their will to fight against.) Ukraine being a “hybrid regime” and Zelensky being not very popular right before the war is indirect evidence that many people might oppose the official policy of resisting Russia, and that Ukraine might be the kind of country that would send them to die by thousands regardless.
For an American reader, assuming that all Ukrainian soldiers are either professionals or volunteers would be an easy mistake to make. NYT is lying by omission by not mentioning this fact (frequently enough).
The expected reaction of a reader is probably something like: “I assumed, based on the number of soldiers, that opposing Russia is very popular among the Ukrainians… but now I realize that those soldiers were literally forced at gunpoint to go fighting, so this is actually not evidence of a popular support… now I have no strong evidence either way, and maybe the fact that NYT was manipulating me in a certain direction should make me update in the opposite direction… so the conclusion is somewhere between ‘Russia is right’ and ‘we actually don’t know who is right’, and in either case we should stop interfering.”
.
This of course works better if the reader has no other information about Russia and Ukraine. Then again, that might actually be the case for a typical NYT reader.