In the first weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a strange pattern emerged in Western media coverage. Headlines oscillated between confidence and confusion. Kyiv would fall within days, one story would claim, then another would argue that Ukraine was winning. Russian forces were described as incompetent, then as a terrifying existential threat to NATO.

Analysts spoke with certainty about strategy, morale and endgames, but often reversed themselves within weeks. To many news consumers, this felt like bias – either pro-Ukraine framing or anti-Russia narratives. Some commentators accused Western media outlets of cheerleading or propaganda.

But I’d argue that something more subtle was happening. The problem was not that journalists were biased. It was that journalism could not keep pace with the war’s informational structure. What looked like ideological bias was, more often, temporal lag.

I serve in the Navy as a war gamer. The most critical part of my job is identifying institutional failures. Trust is one of the most critical and, in this sense, the media is losing ground.

The gap between what people experience in real time and what journalism can responsibly publish has widened. This gap is partly where trust erodes. Social media collapses the distance between event, exposure and interpretation. Claims circulate before journalists can........

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