The columnist of Sheet André Liohn, a photographer who in recent months has been dedicated to documenting the Ukrainian War, reproduced, without citing the original reference, the text of a video on the American website Vox in his last column. Both the text and the video deal with the meaning of the letter Z, used by the Russian government as a symbol and propaganda in the conflict.
The material from Vox, a media platform that aims to explain topics in the news, was published on April 21 and has, as of Tuesday night (26), 1.9 million views on YouTube. Liohn’s column was published at 7 am this Tuesday on the newspaper’s website.
The text presents the same arguments, chains sentences in a similar way and uses literal translations of the American reportage. There is no substantial information in the column that is not in the script — a comparison indicates that, of the English original, about 65% of the content was translated and transcribed by Liohn.
In addition to listing the same examples and using a similar structure of ideas in relation to the channel’s video, the photographer uses quotes, without mentioning the source, from two researchers (Aglaia Snetkov and Kiril Avramov) who gave interviews to American journalists.
The similarity between Liohn’s text and Vox’s script was pointed out to the Sheet by a reader, who wrote to the ombudsman.
Sought this Tuesday, the photographer said he was wrong not to mention the original video and attributed the episode to an oversight that would have occurred due to lack of time to send the text to the newsroom. amid the coverage of the conflict.
Liohn has been in Ukraine practically since the beginning of the war — he took a break of about 20 days, during which he returned home, until he returned to the front last week. This time, he is not in the country to cover the conflict for Sheetas it was in March, but kept the periodicity of its column, published on Tuesdays on the newspaper’s website.
“I study various subjects related to the peculiarities of the conflict. One of them, which has interested me a lot and which has been the subject of other texts, is the issue of journalism and propaganda, as [Volodimir] Zelensky and [Vladimir] Putin demonstrate,” he said, adding that the symbology of the Z on the Russian side is part of these analyses.
The photographer is currently in Kharkiv, in the east of the country.
“This week, I didn’t have time to sit down and dedicate myself to the column, as I did in the others. From the so much research I did, I thought the video is interesting because it explains what is happening, so I used it, really”, he said. To exemplify that the case was an oversight, she recalled that she has already cited books and paintings in her columns.
Photojournalist specializing in war coverage and winner of the Robert Capa medal, Liohn had previously reported for Sheet before the Ukrainian War, about migration crises in Latin America and Africa and the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy.
