Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
Where the media went wrong covering Kosovo by Jeff Cohen Author: Jeff Cohen Publisher/Date: Swans (US) Title: Where the media went wrong covering Kosovo Original location:  #
WHERE THE MEDIA WENT WRONG COVERING KOSOVO The first problem with the war coverage is that many mainstream media outlets, especially network TV, are loathe to even call it a war. It reminds me of the first day of the Panama invasion before the government had signaled to the media that it was ok to call it an invasion. So you had mainstream media calling it a military action, an intervention, an operation, an expedition, a military affair. One TV anchor even referred to it as an insertion. I think that a more accurate explanation might be the most unusual and violent drug bust in human history, but no one put that heading on it. So look at today. What are the logos? CNN: 'Strike against Yugoslavia.' Fox News: 'Conflict in Kosovo.' The consensus winner used at CBS, NBC, and ABC: 'Crisis in Kosovo.' I would argue that there had been a crisis in Kosovo. It went on throughout the year 1998, but no one in any of these networks could find time for even a one hour special on what was then a crisis in Kosovo. That's because that was the year devoted to all Monica, all the time. So when there was just a 'crisis in Kosovo,' TV didn't cover it. Now that it's a war, TV won't acknowledge it's a war. The White House and the State Department will not use the word 'war' and when the media adopt the euphemisms from the government, they're acting more as a fourth branch of government than they are as a fourth estate, and it is very dangerous. We need only think back to the early years of the 1960s when U.S. government officials would refer to Vietnam as a 'police action.' At best it was the 'Vietnam conflict.' And in the early years of the 1960s many mainstream media followed the government lie and did not call it a war until many American soldiers began dying. So words matter. Then we have the problem with this war of who the enemy is. As usual in our mainstream media, the U.S. is not making a war against a country, Yugoslavia, but against one individual. His name is Slobadan Milosevic. On TV the air war is not something that's terrorizing lots of people in what were once modern cities. It's basically a personalized soap opera. You had Catherine Crier on Fox News on May 5, seemingly with a broad smile on her face, saying "The bombing intensifies. Just how much can Slobadan stand?" Anchors talk to military experts about how badly Milosevic has been hurt, how badly he has been humiliated. You'll hear an anchor say to a military expert, "How much have we punished Milosevic," and you think that the anchor might get up from behind the anchor desk and show that they're wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform, but they're not. They're using the term 'we' as if they're an adjunct to the military. We heard the same thing during the Iraq war. "How much are we punishing, and humiliating, and hurting Saddam Hussein?" We know now that probably one of the only people in all of Iraq who was assured of a safe place to sleep and three square meals a day, and a warm home, was Saddam Hussein. And similarly, Milosevic may well be one of the most safe and secure people in Yugoslavia today. Now the understandable goal of the White House and the State Department and their propaganda is to demonize Milosevic. Propaganda simplifies issues as it tries to mobilize action. But journalism is supposed to be about covering a story in all its complexity. On that score, journalism has largely failed. You'll remember the Newsweek cover photograph, the picture of Milosevic and the headline: "The Face of Evil." Then you had the Time magazine writer who writes about Milosevic almost as a sub-human. They described him as the man with, "reddish, piggy eyes set in a big, round, head." Now assumably, Milosevic had the "reddish, piggy eyes set in a big, round, head" going back many, many years. But it's only when the American war machine goes into war mode that this particular writer at Time magazine goes into war propaganda mode. The good news with the end of the Lewinsky story is it ended the wall-to-wall parade of attorneys. The bad news, with the beginning of this war, is we've begun the wall-to-wall parade of military analysts. On March 24th, for example, Margaret Warner introduced her PBS Newshour panel with, "We get four perspectives now on NATO's mission and options from four retired military leaders." Now, the problem with retired generals is that they're rarely independent experts. They have this tendency to become overly enthusiastic about how smart and accurate our weapons are. You remember all the false hype from the military experts during the Gulf War about the Patriot missile, a missile that was an abject failure during that war. And you'll remember NBC News did a glowing report about the Patriot, and Tom Brokaw said it was the missile that "put the Iraqi Scud in its place." Completely false. Brokaw neglected to mention that his boss, General Electric, made parts for the Patriot missile, as it makes engines for many of the aircraft like the Apache helicopters that are in the Balkans right now. Military experts don't remember that it was only last summer when a cruise missile aimed at an alleged terrorist training camp in Afghanistan went four hundred miles off course into the wrong country, the country of Pakistan. If we think about it, in the last nine months, the United States has bombed four countries intentionally. It's also important to remember that we have bombed an equal number of countries by mistake. Military experts know a lot about aircraft technologies, they know a lot about bomb yields, but they don't know much about the politics or history of a region. What's needed more in the mainstream media are experts on Yugoslavia and the Balkans. And what we need is a real debate about the war. Because of the split in the politicians here in Washington, there's been slightly more debate over this war, than, for example, the Gulf War. That's not really saying a lot. Our organization, FAIR, has posted on our website ( ) a full study of the two real prestigious TV news shows and the range of debate or non-debate that they had on the first two weeks of this war. I'm talking about PBS' Newshour and ABC's Nightline. If you look at that study, you'll see that in the first two weeks of this war, opposition to the bombing war was virtually inaudible and when it was heard, it was mostly expressed by Yugoslav government officials with thick accents or Serbian Americans. On Nightline there was only one panelist who was critical of the bombing, and that was a Yugoslav government official.
There's not been enough attention paid in the mainstream media to the environmental damage in the region from U.S. bombs striking chloride factories and petrochemical factories and fertilizer facilities and oil refineries. There has not been enough attention in the mainstream media paid to NATO's targeting of civilian infrastructure. Whether, for example, the bombing of the broadcast stations, which is a clear violation of the Geneva convention, was really aimed at keeping video of NATO's civilian victims off the television sets in the western countries. I have a hunch that was its real motive. Not enough mainstream media attention has been paid to the use, or possible use, by the United States of radioactive depleted uranium rounds. Not enough attention has been paid to NATO's propaganda and a steady stream of claims that have turned out to be false. The Independent newspaper, based in London, on April 6 published an article collecting about eight of these falsehoods, and I would argue that from our monitoring of the mainstream media in Europe, they have been far more independent and are more skeptical in their coverage of this war. And there has not been enough attention paid to the events immediately before the war. The best estimate of how many people had died in Kosovo in all of 1998 was 2000 people. That's a serious human rights crisis. It's also less than the number of people who died in homicides in New York City in 1992. We need to look at the events that immediately led up to this war. Jeff Cohen is a columnist, commentator and founder of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting ( ). His essay is transcribed from testimony given at Kosovo Teach In #4, Media Coverage of the Kosovo Conflict
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