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BACK TO : The Kosovo conflict 1999
The Fog of War Reporting: How the Media Missed the Ground War in Kosovo by Trevor Butterworth 
The Fog of War Reporting: How the Media Missed the Ground War in Kosovo By Trevor Butterworth NewsWatch Associate Editor Reporters covering the Kosovo war must not talk to each other or read each other's articles -- even when they work on the same newspaper. The fog of war reporting may be the only explanation why nearly all of the media coverage analyzing last week's putative peace deal between NATO and Yugoslavia underplayed, and in many cases ignored, the key strategic event of last week: There was a ground war. Yugoslavia was not forced to the negotiating table by air power alone. The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter was one of the few reporters to grasp the significance of last week's Kosovo Liberation Army's (KLA) attack on Yugoslav forces: "A key moment in the Yugoslav military's disillusionment came this week," he wrote, "as thousands of troops, lured into the open by ethnic Albanian rebels near Mt. Pastric in western Kosovo, took their most concentrated pummelling from NATO warplanes since the air war began on March 24, said the [U.S.] officials who requested anonymity." And then Richter did what few journalists managed to do over the weekend. He explained clearly and concisely what actually happened: "A Yugoslav armored brigade, based in Prizren, emerged from camouflaged positions at the beginning of the week to block the rebels' advance with troops, tanks, personnel carriers and artillery. The Yugoslav troops needed to concentrate their forces to hold off the rebels' advance; yet because they were in the open, they gave NATO 'the best opportunity so far in the air campaign to hit Serb forces hard,' German Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz, a NATO spokesman, said in Brussels." But most of the media coverage focused on anything but the military battle, and its importance. One of the few exceptions was an article entitled "Shift in targets let NATO jets tip the balance" in The New York Times. Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt wrote that the joint KLA-NATO action inflicted "the first major damage to Serbian forces in the field." Their Times' article also quoted the top NATO commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, as saying that "the increasing destruction of Serb forces" (along with the accuracy of precision weapons and the avoidance of losses) were "what did the trick" in bringing Milosevic's regime to the negotiating table. However, Gordon and Schmitt cautioned that, "while NATO savors what some say is the first war won by air power alone, many current and former allied officers say it is vital that the alliance not take away the wrong lessons from the air campaign." It would seem that the first people to draw the wrong conclusions are other reporters on the Times. In a news analysis piece a mere two pages later, entitled "Surprising lesson: Bombing can work," Blaine Harden wrote: "Without one combat casualty, the American-led NATO alliance has proved Mr. Milosevic wrong. If the deal that Mr. Milosevic agreed to on Thursday holds up, his government has unwillingly become the first case study in how precision weaponry, overwhelming resources and a steely willingness to go on bombing can compel victory -- all without risking soldiers on the ground." Without risking American and NATO soldiers, that is. The ethnic Albanian rag-tag army suffered heavy casualties playing the bait that drew Serb forces out. This inattentiveness to NATO's unofficial army on the ground penetrated Serge Schmemann's analysis in the Times' "Week in Review" section on Sunday. The allied bombing "appears to have been a success, and more -- a refutation of the common wisdom that air power alone could never make a despot back down," he wrote. Dana Priest gave a brief mention to the KLA's collaborative role with NATO in The Washington Post on Saturday, noting that they "worked together to kill more troops and destroy more military equipment last week than in any other week of the war." But by Sunday, the KLA had been forgotten. In an article examining "military doctrine," Priest along with Post colleague Bradley Graham wrote: "For the Pentagon, the war against Yugoslavia demonstrated the enormous potency and precision of modern-day air power. But the way the airstrikes were applied -- incrementally and without the use of ground troops -- left even some of the most ardent air power advocates dissatisfied with results." This doesn't just contradict what Priest wrote the day before, it also contradicts what Post writer William Drozdiak wrote in his full-page Sunday article entitled "Diplomacy." "For weeks NATO warplanes had enjoyed air supremacy but had failed to dislodge Yugoslav forces who were hunkered down and scattered across Kosovo& but a new offensive by KLA forces& flushed out many Yugoslav forces," Drozdiak wrote. Over nearly seven pages of coverage, The Washington Post gave three paragraphs to the KLA's role in the victory. On CNN's "Reliable Sources," John Harris, who covers the White House for The Washington Post, offered the most insightful critique into what was wrong. "We've got a natural instinct to go for politics," he told Howard Kurtz. "When it comes to complicated, either domestic or foreign policy stories, many reporters are out of their element. And then I think there's also just some bad habits at work in our business. I once read a description of journalism& first simplify, then exaggerate. When you do that, you oftentimes present a somewhat distorted picture of reality, and I think a lot of our Kosovo coverage can be critiqued along those lines." The media "simplify and exaggerate" when they write that the Kosovo campaign was a triumph of air power alone. Though a few journalists wrote about the vital role the KLA played as NATO's surrogate ground force, the majority went for the politics. But imagine, for one moment, that American and NATO soldiers did what the KLA did, and then think about how different the coverage would have been -- along with all the "lessons" journalists are so quickly taking away from a conflict that is not quite yet over. Trevor Butterworth is NewsWatch Associate Editor ( )
Note: This article originally appeared on June 7, 1999 in News Watch. |