-> SNETNEWS Mailing List U.S. Tack: Demonize Enemy, Tightly Control Information By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 26, 1999; Page A13 Across the airwaves yesterday, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright continued the rhetorical assault on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, telling ABC's "Good Morning America" that he "does not care about his own people" and is responsible for a "humanitarian catastrophe." "He does not care about the Serbian people" and is responsible for "these very dreadful massacres," Albright said on NBC's "Today." "He was killing ethnic Albanians, having people slit their throats, murder innocent civilians," she said on "CBS This Morning." Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, who blitzed the networks Thursday, are doing more than pressing the administration's line in time of war. They are demonizing the opposition and carefully controlling the flow of information as part of the all-important battle for public opinion. And they are doing so in a relative news vacuum created by the Serbian expulsion of most Western journalists and the lack of television pictures from the Balkans war zone. "It's been effective in the short term," said Marlin Fitzwater, the Bush White House spokesman during the Persian Gulf War. "The problem is they didn't start the communications until the bombs started falling. That's not enough time to convince the nation of a course of action. But it's helpful because it convinces people to give the government the benefit of the doubt." War is "easier for people to understand if there's a face to the enemy," Fitzwater added, invoking such leaders as "Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic." But retired Gen. Perry Smith, a military analyst for NBC News and CBS radio, said the administration's rhetoric "is frankly overdone a bit. 'If we don't stop them now we'll have war with Greece' -- that sounds like the Vietnam domino theory. . . . Whenever we go to war, we tend to turn it into a moral crusade." Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's Pentagon correspondent, put it bluntly: "Everyone has tried to get the message out: Milosevic is the bad guy, we're the good guys." As for the choice of spokesmen, Albright and Cohen "have a high degree of credibility" because most Americans don't believe they would "do this for political reasons," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He said President Clinton, by contrast, is still "radioactive" because of Monica S. Lewinsky and the impeachment trial. During the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration conducted three briefings a day with such telegenic figures as Gen. Colin L. Powell and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Powell issued a famous threat against the Iraqi army -- "first we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it" -- that he later admitted had been carefully rehearsed. The campaign worked. Days before the war began, Fitzwater recalled, ABC interviewed a group of Kansans around a kitchen table and "every answer at that table reflected one of the reasons we had given for going in." For a nation accustomed to live battlefield reports from Vietnam and Kuwait, the lack of real-time footage from Yugoslavia and Kosovo has rendered this a more abstract war. Pictures have largely been limited to long-range shots of fires in areas hit by NATO warplanes and a mob storming the U.S. Embassy in Macedonia. (There were tentative signs yesterday that Western reporters might be allowed back into Belgrade.) Yugoslav officials have made occasional attempts to press their case on television. Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic told CNN yesterday that the NATO attacks are responsible for "a real humanitarian catastrophe in Yugoslavia. . . . They destroy schools, hospitals, roads. . . . What kind of military targets are hospitals?" Several Pentagon reporters expressed frustration at the paucity of information, noting that briefings by NATO and British officials have been more specific. At a briefing yesterday, Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon was asked about the use of attack aircraft. "I'm not going to get into details," he said. What was the target? "It was a target of opportunity." Could he elaborate on NATO's progress? "I don't think I'll get into the grading business at this stage." Cohen, asked Thursday about the impact of the bombings, told "Today": "We are satisfied that we are progressing as we had planned." David Martin, CBS's Pentagon correspondent, said that "the rationale for not telling you what's going to happen is hard to quarrel with. But they are getting more and more uptight about telling you what has happened." Initially, said NBC's Miklaszewski, "I don't fault them one bit for withholding specific target lists or bomb damage assessments." But if that stance continues for many days, he said, "there's a real credibility problem." Bacon said in an interview that "we are taking a very conservative approach. The reason for that is pure and simple: pilot safety. The less information we provide to our adversaries, the better. Information reverberates much more quickly around the world than it used to." Even with damage assessments, Bacon said, "we don't want to give away a sense of what we consider to be adequate or inadequate. That gives people clues as to whether we're likely to attack the same targets again." Tensions between the media and the military have flared periodically since the Gulf War. Smith, the retired general, said military officials feel "a mistrust and a distrust" toward journalists, some of whom they regard as "clueless." Even some high-ranking officials have not been privy to key information. "We'd love to tell our story," one Pentagon officer complained to the Wall Street Journal. The first cockpit footage of exploding bombs in Yugoslavia was released yesterday -- not at the Pentagon but by NATO officials in Brussels. "It's a simple political decision: We wanted to emphasize the extent to which this is a NATO operation," a senior State Department official said. The press was first "seduced" by a cockpit video of the 1986 airstrikes against Libya, Martin said, but later criticized such footage as overstating American success. He said Pentagon officials have grown concerned "about us coming back and saying: 'You exaggerated.' What they now try to do is minimize bomb damage assessment. They're sitting on it." � Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company ____________________________________________________________ New Dawn Magazine, GPO Box 3126FF, Melbourne, VIC 3001 AUSTRALIA http://www.newdawnmagazine.com.au -> Send "subscribe snetnews " to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -> Posted by: Support <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
