The study “Sourcing Dis/Information: How Swedish and Ukrainian Journalists Source, Verify, and Mediate Journalistic Truth During the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict” by Nina Springer and Gunnar Nygren from University of Stockholm, and Dariya Orlova and Daria Taradai from University of Kyiv-Mohyla academy, and Andreas Widholm from University of Stockholm looked at how journalists both on the ground and from distance source, verify, and narrate their journalistic truth to audiences.

It is more important than ever for journalists to be able to identify “problematic information” or disinformation, in the massive global information flows. According to previous studies, conflict reporting presents the greatest challenge for verification and sourcing. 

The study in question looked at the first European conflict since the advent of ubiquitous internet, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that started already in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea but escalated to a full-blown war in 2022.

Conflict reporting has similarities with legal proceedings in that the journalists, like judges, mostly deal with second hand information and must search for truth amidst conflicting narratives. There is a difference in that journalists must search for truth when the event is still unfolding, while courtroom work is forensic. 

The method for the study was a combination of searching for news stories and conducting content analysis on them and interviews. The news stories were from 2017 to 2019 – before the full-blown conflict. The material comprised 34 stories in Swedish media and 115 stories in Ukrainian media. Seven Swedish and eleven Ukrainian journalists, in turn, were interviewed.

The interviews revealed that sourcing and verification were mostly individualized practices. Verification protocols or specialized tools were not used much if at all. Transparency in sourcing was seen as problematic: there were concerns that it would jeopardize journalistic authority. 

Although pure fabrications are rare, the journalists nevertheless said that it was extremely difficult to know what was true and what not. Strategic political disinformation, however, was not the main concern. Rather, partisanship of sources and the fact that sources had their own agendas was identified as a main concern. 

In conclusion, the sourcing and verification practices were not particularly innovative regardless of where in the chain of information the journalists were located. Source trust was not static, but emerged through an ongoing process that related to a news event. Trust had no effect on whether sources were tapped into or not.

The study “Sourcing Dis/Information: How Swedish and Ukrainian Journalists Source, Verify, and Mediate Journalistic Truth During the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict” by Nina Springer, Gunnar Nygren, Dariya Orlova, Daria Taradai and Andreas Widholm is in Journalism Studies. (free abstract). 

Picture: Yalta, Crimean peninsula. By Dmitry Bogatyrev.

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