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Ukraine.

Remember that? Country in Eastern Europe, 40 million citizens. Has been invaded by Vladimir Putin, a war criminal, who has been murdering thousands of Ukrainian men, women and children since Feb. 22.

It was in all the papers, Putin’s Ukrainian war. Everyone, everywhere, was paying attention to it.

And then … many of us just stopped paying attention.

Instead, many of us have pointed our clickers in the direction of the vomitous Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Or the vainglorious Elon Musk buying Twitter. Or housing prices. Or an election in Ontario. Or the weather.

But the Russian slaughter in Ukraine? Not as many are paying as much attention to that one anymore. And — given that Putin’s criminality is getting dramatically worse at this precise moment — that is a problem.

A big problem, because Putin has been counting on us moving on from his campaign of wholesale slaughter against the Ukrainian people. Like the Nazis before him, the Russian autocrat knows that genocide is always much more efficient in the dark.

Many of us, this writer included, are guilty of turning away from what is happening in Ukraine. And, indirectly, aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin as we do so.

Children pose for a photo on the pedestal of the Soviet monument to Ukraine-Russia friendship dismantled by workers in Kyiv on April 26, 2022, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

Children pose for a photo on the pedestal of the Soviet monument to Ukraine-Russia friendship dismantled by workers in Kyiv on April 26, 2022, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

In politics, the successful players know all about this tendency. When a scandal breaks, for instance, they know that if they hunker down and stay quiet, the mob will usually move on. They’ll carry their pitchforks and torches to protest the next outrage.

In the political war rooms I’ve run, I will therefore often say this to the assembled youngsters: “We have a national memory of seven minutes.”

In politics, that can be good news or bad news. If you are grappling with some bad news (see scandals above), you can be reasonably confident it’ll “blow over” soon enough. But if you’ve got a good story to tell — as Doug Ford, Steven del Duca and Andrea Horwath will all be labouring to do on the Ontario campaign trail over the next few weeks — short attention spans are pretty unhelpful, too.

It’s not that voters and/or citizens are in any way dumb, I tell my war room charges. They’re smart and intuitive and highly attuned to their own self-interest. It’s just that they are also very, very busy. Getting the kids to hockey or soccer practice, getting to and from work, making ends meet, worrying about the rent or a mortgage payment, catching up on sleep. They’re busy.

So, says Democratic Party thinker David Shenk, an overabundance of news and information — about everything from Johnny Depp to a genocidal war — becomes “data smog.” There’s too much of it, so Joe and Jane Frontporch just tune it all out.

In the era of smartphones — which are neither smart nor phones, anymore — that’s a simple survival mechanism. To remain sane, a lot of us disconnect to avoid information overload.

A picture taken on April 23, 2022 shows a child living in a large underground parking lot in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images)
A picture taken on April 23, 2022 shows a child living in a large underground parking lot in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by SERGEY BOBOK/AFP via Getty Images)
Which, as noted, is what Vladimir Putin is counting on. He needs us to turn our attention away from Ukraine.

If we all care less about Ukraine, so too will governments. Here in little old Canada, our national government — surprisingly, happily — has been doing a pretty good job supporting the heroic efforts of Ukrainians in this war. But, if the Trudeau government senses that our collective focus on the war has diminished, so will their efforts. That’s how politics works.

So, turn off Johnny and Amber. Turn off Elon Musk. Turn off all of the other things that, at the present time, just aren’t as important.

Ukraine, and the valiant Ukrainian people, need more than our ammunition and armaments and aid.

They need our attention, too.

Now, and until the end.

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The great Calgary Herald writer Howard Solomon arched an eyebrow.

“Owners of media properties,” said Howard, “should be seen and not heard.”

There was general agreement about that, in the Herald newsroom, and we all soberly nodded our heads.

Except, even as a lowly summer Herald student and general assignment reporter, I knew that the media world Howard Solomon described wasn’t actually the media world we all lived in. And besides, as I learned much later, having an owner — of a newspaper, of a radio or TV station, of a social media platform — was much more preferable than having no owner at all.

And, really, the issue isn’t having an owner of a media enterprise. The issue is having the right owner.

Which leads us, in a circuitous fashion, to Elon Musk and Twitter. Is the former the right owner for the latter?

You’ve heard of Musk, of course. He went to Queen’s University for a couple years and is now the world’s richest man — Tesla, Starlink, etcetera. Twitter, meanwhile, is a social network platform that offers “micro-blogging” in the form of “tweets.”

On Monday, it was announced that Musk had reached an agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Immediately thereafter, forests were felled to print thumb-sucker analyses of what Musk Twitter would mean for free speech, politics and Donald Trump.

Some conservatives, who believe that Musk is one of them, think it’ll be a brave new world. Some progressives, who are suspicious of Musk, were encouraged by his (typically) amorphous promise to start “authenticating all humans” — which, they thought, possibly meant eliminating bots and trolls and fraudsters on Twitter. Who, most agree, have rendered Twitter a cyber-sewer.

Me, I’m not so sure either side is right. At any media company I’ve worked for, all of us ink-stained wretches always feared the arrival of new owners. We’d fret about whether they would try to censor and control what we write. We’d wonder if they’d make us walk the plank.

But, almost inevitably, the new owners would stay on their side of the newsroom, preoccupied only with the bottom line, not the black lines. (Which has always been my experience at the newspaper you clutch in your sweaty maulers, by the way: Not once — not once, ever — have the owners tried to control what I write.)

Musk, I suspect, is about to learn some of the same media lessons. If he messes with Twitter overmuch, he’ll wreck it. And then someone else will come along and start something new, and everyone will go over there.

For Musk, Twitter is potentially problematic for another reason: It is wildly popular among the two constituencies who can have a measurable impact on his various enterprises — politicians and journalists. Both politicos and hacks love Twitter because it resembles a Rorschach pattern of our tiny craniums: It flits all over the place, it’s bit-sized, and it’s nasty.

If Musk takes a hacksaw to Twitter, politicians and journalists will start sniping at him even more than they already do. Journalists, as a collective, can maul Musk’s reputation in and out of the market — and the politicians, acting at the behest of the journalists, have the regulatory power to make life complicated for Internet-based companies like his.

There are other problems: Personally, I think Musk is possibly insane to spend that much money on a social media platform that — unlike Facebook and Instagram — has never really figured out how to make money. And, whether he likes it or not, civil and criminal speech laws will still have the final say over what he puts online.

But, for me, I think the pearl-clutching about Elon Musk Twitter is — like Musk himself — a bit overblown. If he can do just one thing — eliminate anonymous accounts whose bile have made Twitter a perfectly awful place for many, women in particular — he will have improved people’s lives.

In the meantime, however, some of us will remember Howard Solomon’s wise words about media owners.

And we will comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the media universe, like the Internet universe, is simply too big for one person to control.

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