http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HER200512 29&articleId=1667
Z Magazine January 2006 Book Review Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting- Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia By Peter Brock Los Angeles: gmbooks.com, 2005 Review by Edward S. Herman This important and valuable book complements perfectly the superb volumes on Yugoslavia by Diana Johnstone (Fools' Crusade) and Michael Mandel (How America Gets Away With Murder). Johnstone provides essential history and context to the Balkan wars, analyzing the indigenous participants, their backgrounds, motivations and strategies, and the very important role played there by external interveners (the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim diaspora and PR firms, Austria, Germany, the United States, and the UN and Yugoslavia Tribunal [ICTY]). Mandel provides an outstanding study of the recent U.S. aggressions and the role and abuse of international law and the ICTY in facilitating those aggressions. Brock focuses on the role of the media, which like the NATO powers and ICTY were "co-belligerents," doing yeoman service in advancing the program of the individuals, groups and governments that wanted war. "Embedded" journalists did not start with the Iraq invasion-occupation; voluntary embeds were a dominant feature of the Western media in the Balkans conflicts. The huge irony that Brock reveals so clearly is that the media co-belligerents, pushing relentlessly for more aggressive action, supposedly in the interests of stopping ethnic cleansing and killing, played into the hands of parties with a political agenda that assured and produced far more ethnic cleansing and killing than might have taken place without their bellicosity and war propaganda service. The same irony is clear in Johnstone 's and Mandel's volumes that deal with the ends and means of the indigenous and external participants. The focus on "justice" as opposed to peace, and the demonizing of the Serbs and making them the unique group needing punishment, was the vehicle used by Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and his close associates, and Clinton/Albright and Kohl-Genscher and their associates, to prevent a peaceful settlement--most importantly in backing out of the 1992 Lisbon Agreement--and to work incessantly to get NATO to intervene militarily on behalf, first, of Izetbegovic and the Bosnian Muslims and then the Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo Albanians. Brock shows that the media served these pro-violence and anti-peace ends relentlessly and effectively. He argues convincingly that this was a model case of "pack journalism," and also of what has been called "advocacy journalism" or "the journalism of attachment." The journalists were quickly convinced that good was fighting evil, or that it was obligatory and less risky to take this as a given, and so they joined the pack and became advocates attached to the supposed good side and their victims. This was aided in the Balkans by the fact that most of the journalists didn't know the language or history of the area, and that, because of the threat of bodily harm in trying to do real journalism, they tended to congregate in protected areas-many of them, as one cynical observer noted, only reported what they saw "150 meters on either side of the Holiday Inn" (General Lewis MacKenzie). This made them dependent for "news" on one another and on the official sources happy to service their needs. As they stayed in the part of Sarajevo controlled by the Bosnian Muslims, they, along with U.S. officials, were the main sources of news, and as Brock notes they were hardly aware of the existence of a large Serb population in Sarajevo, some 50,000 of whose members left or were driven out of the city. The pack were even unaware of the exodus of the Jewish population of Sarajevo (pp. 131-3), quietly threatened by the dominant Muslims and recalling well (like the Serbs) the murderous behavior of the Muslims and Croats in the era of Nazi rule during World War II. The pack journalists in Sarajevo (and elsewhere in the Balkans) were thus highly manageable, knowing the broader truth in advance, dispensing with notions of substantive objectivity and balance, and on the hunt for stories that would both confirm the institutionalized bias--and therefore please their editors at home--and advance the cause that they advocated and for which they campaigned. Journalists like David Rieff, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy openly acknowledged that they were campaigners for more aggressive NATO intervention (i.e., war), and they were by no means alone. But this meant that they had ceased to be serious journalists who would check out the facts and claims of all sides and provide a full and fair picture of the complex events in the struggle. They would instead gravitate to stories that advanced the cause and would treat them with uncritical zeal. As another cynical observer described it, this meant that Izetbegovic "could play them like a Stradivarius," and in effect use them as agents of Bosnian Muslim propaganda and disinformation. (The more "balanced" Roy Gutman was played like a Stradivarius by the Croatian information service and U.S. Embassy as well as Muslim authorities.) This pack and bandwagon process fed on itself. As it focused only on the victimization of the Bosnian Muslims, featuring grim pictures and stories of their suffering, ignoring Serb victims and context, and aided by the parallel agenda and bias of the ICTY and Western political establishment, the party line of almost exclusively one-sided evil was steadily reinforced. (Former State Department official George Kenney's research disclosed, however, that "the percentage of each population base killed was roughly identical," and even an ICTY-sponsored study found Serb deaths not far below their proportion of the Bosnia-Herzegovina population--see Ewa Tabeau and Jacub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 19921995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results," European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie, June, 2005). Gullibility and the demand for more spectacular showings of evil encouraged increasingly irresponsible reporting and claims of victimization in "rape camps" and Auschwitz-like "death camps." The books of these journalists would be what Brock calls "victim epics," with politically correct selective victimization based largely on witness evidence supplied by partisan sources that was regrettably "unconfirmed." Brock has a detailed and convincing deconstruction of the claims of rape camps and rape as a Serb military tactic and exclusive (chapter 5). While certainly never denying Serb rapes, he shows that there is not the slightest evidence that Serb rapes were more numerous or organized than those of Bosnian Muslim or Croatian forces. He points out that the documentation of Serb rape victims is more extensive and of better quality than that of victims of Serbs, despite the sizable resources put into collecting evidence of the latter. The Serb data just never could attract the interest of the pack (and the same was true of the pack's treatment of Serb dossiers of war crimes and prison camps in which Serbs were victims). The bias confused the media-Paul Lewis writing in the New York Times on "Rape Was Weapon of the Serbs" (Oct. 20, 1993) noted that a UN report had identified "800 victims by name," but Lewis failed to mention that they were Serb women. The estimates of 50,000 or 20,000 rape victims of Serbs were based on no evidence whatsoever, and the belief that rape was a special Serb crime rested strictly on the overwhelming political bias of the pack and superior public relations and propaganda activity of the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. (A January 1994 UN report evaluating all the documentation on rapes, excluding evidence from the Serbs, listed 126 confirmed victims. This finding did not interest the media.) The media role in this hysterical propaganda barrage, with the best of the reports noting that the claims are "unconfirmed" (!), was a scandal, reflecting a media completely out of control and justifying UN official Aracelly Santana's comment that "I've never seen so much lack of professionalism and ethics in the press." The UN representatives and British officials dealing with the media in Sarajevo looked upon the pack with contempt as a destructive force, some of them even calling its members "the reptiles." Brock also has a very good discussion of the famous photo of Fikret Alic, taken at the Trnopolje transit camp in August 1992, another fine illustration of the quest for denigration of the enemy and the lack of scruple of Western reporters and media. He shows that the three British reporters, two from Independent Television News (ITN) and one from the Guardian, sought out the uniquely emaciated man among the camp residents, and carefully arranged for a photo that made it look as if Alic was enclosed in a fenced prison, the reporters having deliberately placed themselves behind four strands of rusted and sagging barbed wire, strung haphazardly between two posts, with a thin chicken wire mesh hanging beneath, with Alic on the other side. "The cameramen and layout editors cropped the photos of Alic so that the three or four strands of barbed wire were emphasized." There was no barbed wire fence around the camp, which was a transit facility and not even a prison encampment, and the refugees in the camp were even free to leave. (Click on the link for the rest of the article, or ask me to send you the complete text.) ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Clean water saves lives. 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