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Foreword by David Binder, former
Washington/Balkan Correspondent for the New York
Times.
Five years in exhaustive preparation
and writing, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting - Journalism and
Tragedy in Yugoslavia, is the blockbuster book by American
journalist Peter Brock that exposes the shocking record of the
Western media’s war reporting in the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
This is
THE story that the pack journalists, correspondents and editors
would not, and will not write.
Here
are the documented contradictions, the profession-wide errors,
admissions, confessions and suppression by the reporters and
correspondents who were co-participants in the deliberate
dismantling of a sovereign nation, inflaming governments and the
United Nations, politicians and manipulating public
opinion.
This is
the book that was feared by the mainstream American and European
press since 1993 when "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press" was
published by this author in Foreign Policy, the journal of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington, D.C.). It
reverberated throughout Western capitals, shattering the media's
self-illusions about impartiality, objectivity, fairness and truth
and provoked an unprecedented reaction and backlash from media
organizations, journalistic societies, academics and government
leaders, leading to street protests in Europe, and even a "press
trial"!
Media Cleansing…, adapted from the outcry of
"ethnic cleansing" that drove the decade-long civil wars, shows how
Western journalism became THE essential war propaganda. Invasion,
occupation, repression, and selective prosecution of war criminals
resulted from the media hysteria over so-called "rape camps,"
"concentration camps," and deliberate policies of atrocity, mass
murder and chemical warfare being re-introduced to mainland Europe.
Hundreds of thousands were brutally evicted from homelands occupied
for centuries by their ancestors. Horrific economic sanctions were
deliberately inflicted, causing generation-wide disease, birth
defects and chronic maladies unseen since medieval times - and that
will persevere for decades! Agricultural lands are laced with
radioactive debris from depleted uranium and toxic chemicals.
Widespread air and water pollution contaminate not only former areas
of conflict in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo but adjacent
Balkan nations, as riparian ecosystems in the lower 600 miles of the
Danube River watershed are disrupted if not destroyed forever.
Uncounted land mines, explosives, live ammunition - including
undetonated NATO missile warheads and cluster bomb components – are
unaccounted for.
TODAY,
the national and regional economies in “former Yugoslavia” are being
further decimated. Ranks of unemployed expand exponentially. And
worse, presidential assassination and the failure of caricature
Balkan elections accompany the alarming rise of ultra-nationalism as
factions in the region are increasingly volatile. The extremist
scourge that ruined Yugoslavia only a decade ago is reviving rapidly
to re-ignite and destabilize the whole of Europe – again!
Media Cleansing… traces the pathology of
media complicity that consumed and obsessed trusted international
news organizations and news professionals. Scores of interviews with
examinations and analyses of the published record compelled the
correspondents and their editors to confront their negligence,
co-belligerence and admitted collusion that deceived the
world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
![]() Mr. Brock's career as a
newspaper journalist for more than 30 years is highlighted by 17
professional awards - including being named a finalist for the 1989
Pulitzer Prize competition in Public Service.
Recognized as a political and environmental writer and
investigative reporter, Mr. Brock holds the Southern Journalism
Award for Investigative Reporting (Duke University), the Thomas L.
Stokes Award for Environmental Reporting of the Washington
Journalism Center, and other distinctions.
He has
widely traveled the Balkans, Western Central Europe, the former
Soviet Union, the Middle East and other regions since
1976.
A
specialist in the role of the Western media in the Balkan wars, Mr.
Brock's controversial articles and reports were reprinted in major
newspapers worldwide. He appeared on nationally-televised panel
discussions that focused on the Yugoslav wars, and he was
interviewed by numerous domestic and international newspapers,
television and radio.
He
began his newspaper career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, served for
20 years with The El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post, and
wrote/reported/edited for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado and
Washington, D.C.
ENDORSEMENTS:
Peter Brock has done a masterful job — through patient and
unbiased documentation and cool, logical reporting — of highlighting
the great failure of the media in fairly and accurately covering the
break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars in its
constituent parts. As someone intimately involved in covering the
wars of the 1990s in the Balkans, I can attest that Brock’s writing
is restrained and, if anything, understated, and the indictment of
the media for its bias and the resultant contribution to the start
and ongoing conduct of the war is valid. That there were genuine
initial misunderstandings on the part of the world’s media with
regard to the Balkan situation is clear. But the fact that the media
— on whose judgments governments made policies — allowed itself to
be duped by propagandists, and that editors then refused to recant
when their errors became obvious: there lies the essence of Brock’s
indictment. The free press of the world fought to be recognized as
the guardian of truth and as a pillar of good governance. It cannot
now deny culpability and reject criticism, or avoid the growing
sentiment that it — as with all aspects of public life — requires
constant review, and reform. It is evident from Brock’s vital and
eminently readable book that for freedom to perish, all it takes is
for the media to exempt itself from its ethical responsibility
toward impartiality. If Watergate was the modern starting point for
agenda-based reporting, then the Balkan wars showed that, unchecked,
the media could, without accountability, bring about the downfall of
nations. The resultant emergence of terrorist coordinating centers
in the Balkans, intimately involved in the 9/11, Madrid, and London
attacks, can be laid directly at the door of the editors who allowed
bias to rule their coverage of the Balkan wars. We have yet to see
the full consequences of the media’s shameful unprofessionalism in
the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But to start to remedy the problem it
is essential that Brock’s Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting be widely
read, and its message taken to heart. Peter Brock’s book should be
the basis for both Congressional and independent media enquiries.
— Gregory R. Copley, President of the International Strategic
Studies Association, and Editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs
publications. |
