war crimes
The Balkan Wars: A Media-Driven Disaster
By Herbert Foerstel
Journalists have generally considered the Gulf War to be the worst-covered major conflict in American history. Unfortunately, the press coverage of the Balkan wars during the 1990s has set a new and shameful standard from which wartime journalism may never recover. The two major burdens that the press now wears around its neck are: 1) An unprecedented new system of Pentagon secrecy; and 2) The rise of a new journalistic virus called "The Journalism of Attachment."
As for the Pentagon, it has acknowledged that not only was government control of information during the Kosovo War tighter than in any previous American conflict, but that, in all likelihood, the press will never see a return to even the abominable standards of the Gulf War. The reasons for the Pentagon's disturbing new information controls were described on April 6, 1999 by Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Kenneth Bacon, himself a former newsman.
"We have adopted a more restrictive policy than in the past," said Bacon on the Lehrer Newshour. "And I think I should be very clear on that. The reason is that this battle in particular, and I think modern times in general, have changed the dynamics of information released for warfare."
Bacon gave four reasons for the new secrecy requirements. First, he claimed that an "alliance war" such as the Kosovo campaign made operational security more difficult to maintain. Second, he said, "We now live in an era where information is made available instantly to the enemy. We know that they watch television. We know that they are on the Internet. We know that they have cell phones. So we want to give the enemy as little information as we can in order to help them with their own defenses against the attacks." Third, he complained of the competitive media age that requires journalists to get on the air as soon as possible with details of the war. Finally, he said that the press is much less restrained in the use of operational information today than it used to be.
Military correspondent George Wilson asked Bacon how a post-audit of air strikes - what the bombs hit or didn't hit, who was involved, how many sorties were flown - could compromise security. Bacon responded, "We have different operational security restraints today than we used to have." Since the Yugoslav government can analyze media reports, said Bacon, "we've just decided to give them as little information as possible. That does mean being more tight with information we give to the press, but we've done this purely for operational reasons."
When Wilson asked how the press was to know that the Pentagon was giving out truthful information, Bacon answered simply, "That's good question." He provided no answer.
Bacon ascribes the new policy to General Shelton and Defense Secretary Cohen, who have said that "there ought to be less operational detail discussed in public and less...printed in public, and they have set out to try to make that happen." Bacon said the war against Yugoslav was "the biggest example of the new policy."
Bacon's claim that an "alliance war" required unprecedented press controls had a measure of truth to it. Information access in NATO's Kosovo campaign was reduced to its lowest common denominator, as the censorship proclivities of 19 NATO members were compounded to produce a news blackout of absurd proportions. In the absence of any real news footage from western sources, an increasing amount of American and European television images of the actual war began coming from Serbian TV, and since much of this included disturbing images of bombing damage in Belgrade, NATO announced an unusual policy.
At NATO's April 8, 1999 news conference, a BBC reporter asked NATO's military spokesman David Wilbey, "Can you confirm reports that NATO will now be striking television and radio transmitters, antennae, etc. [in Serbia]?"
"Serb radio and TV is as instrument of propaganda and repression," answered Wilbey. "It is therefore a legitimate target in this campaign. If President Milosevic would provide equal time for Western news broadcasts in its programmes without censorship three hours a day between noon and 1800 and three hours a day between 1800 and midnight, then his TV could become an acceptable instrument of public information."
The assembled journalists were dumbfounded. "Can we take it that that reply should be seen as either a threat or a promise that you will be bombing the television transmitters unless they allow three hours of Western television?" asked the BBC reporter.
"I think you can take it as a public statement, a public announcement," said Wilbey.
Indeed, NATO immediately began intensive bombing of all media facilities in Serbia. Broadcast studios were destroyed, killing numerous journalists in the process. The state radio and television network, RTS, was hit particularly hard, and an April 23 attack on RTS studios in Belgrade killed at least 11 people.
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea insisted, "RTS is not media. It's full of government employees who are paid to produce propaganda and lies. And therefore, we see that as a military target."
Outraged news organizations around the world protested the bombing of media targets as a violation of the Geneva convention and a threat to journalists of all nationalities. Robert Leavitt, associate director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media gave two reasons why NATO was not justified in targetting Serbian radio and television. "The first is that this is really a deliberate targetting of civilians, which is questionable in any circumstance," said Leavitt. "This is not a military target, no matter what NATO says. The second is that it really creates a very dangerous precedent with regard to freedom of the press. Once we start defining journalists as legitimate targets, it becomes very hard for us to criticize any other attacks on media....There are many governments around the world who are very happy now that NATO has said it's legitimate to target journalists. And they will be doing that in the future."
On May 7, 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, later blaming the attack on faulty maps. Among the twenty-four casualties were three deaths, all of them journalists.
When the killing of journalists and destruction of their facilities failed to silence the Yugoslav media, NATO did what it does best: economic blackmail. Eutelsat, a European satellite consortium largely controlled by NATO members, had been beaming Serbian television throughout the Balkans and beyond. In May 1999, after nearly two months of heavy pressure from NATO, Eutelsat voted to pull the plug on Serbian television. Once more, the western media were safe for Pentagon pronouncements and journalistic cheerleading.
The Journalism of Attachment
During the Kosovo conflict, NATO and the Pentagon effectively made war on the media, at home and abroad, but press coverage of the conflict was further degraded by journalists themselves. Official secrecy was exacerbated by the spread of a journalistic virus that may be more dangerous than government censorship. The remnants of a once proud tradition of aggressive, objective war reporting has been replaced by a neo-liberal sentimentalism that is vulnerable to unbridled manipulation. The new approach to covering the news became evident in the early 1990s, but it was not given a name until 1997, when Martin Bell, a prominent television reporter, embraced the new style and endearingly labeled it the "journalism of attachment."
Mick Hume, editor of LM magazine, says, "The Journalism of Attachment uses other people's wars and crises as a twisted sort of therapy, through which foreign reporters can discover some sense of purpose - first for themselves and then for their audience back home. It turns the life and death struggles of others into private battlegrounds where journalists who have lost faith in the old values of their profession can fight for their souls."
In this process, says Hume, "the war reporter emerges not as journalist but as combatant, not as news broadcaster but as the news itself, a singularly moral figure on a self-appointed mission to save the world. But at what price for journalistic standards? Or for those unfortunate enough to be turned into cannon fodder for the media people's personal crusades?"
Hume contrasts the crusading journalists of the past, whose aim was to expose the faults in their own societies, with the new breed of "attached" journalists, who search for signs of evil in other people's back yards. "Wherever there is trouble these journalists demand more political and military intervention, on the grounds that `something must be done...,'" says Hume. "They are apparently oblivious to the lesson of history which the best of the old campaigning journalists had grasped; that whatever `something' the Great Powers do around the world, it is likely to be at the expense of freedom and justice."
Some very influential journalists have embraced the "journalism of attachment" in covering the Balkan wars, often merging their reporting with official government policies. CNN's Christiane Amanpour is a prominent example.
Amanpour makes no apology for ignoring the causes and complexities of the conficts she covers. "I am not a political reporter," she says. "I am not a diplomatic reporter. I do wars; I do crises. I don't do politics."
Some of Amanpour's colleagues have had trouble accepting her personalized journalism. "I have winced at some of what she's done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism," wrote Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times. "She was sitting in Belgrade when that market massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that." Indeed, a subsquent UN report blamed the Bosnian Muslims for the massacre.
Amanpour's cheerleading for the Clinton Administration's military intervention in the Balkans was noted with concern by her peers, but there was little public criticism until she joined the official family by marrying James Rubin, the State Department's high-profile spokesman.
Stella Jatras of the Washington Times said there was "something unhealthy" about having Amanpour and Rubin cover the same "breaking news" story. "Ms. Amanpour, who never ceased to present a one-sided CNN perspective throughout the Bosnian war, is now doing the same with her one-sided anti-Serb CNN perspective of the civil war now raging in Kosovo," wrote Jatras. "At the same time, Mr. Rubin is touting the anti-Serb position from the State Department....Is CNN running the State Department, or vice versa? There is clearly a conflict here."
Jatras called for Rubin to step down as State Department spokesman. "How can there be any semblance of journalistic impartiality with such a relationship between a `news' agency and the government?" she wrote.
A number of veteran journalists have recognized the pernicious effects of the "journalism of attachment." The BBC's Nik Gowing characterized the one-sided anti-Serb reporting in Bosnia as "a secret shame" for the journalistic community. "I think there is a cancer now which is affecting journalism," said Gowing. "[I]t is the unspoken issue of partiality and bias in foreign reporting. There is something rather taboo...to talk about this in media circles, partly because to do so would undermine the perceived integrity and objectivity of correspondents who report from battle zones."
Christopher Dunkley wrote, "The worrying thing about `the journalism of attachment' is that it is being preached - and worse, practised - by hard news reporters." Dunkley noted that the war in Bosnia "has done most to inspire the journalism of attachment, with one side demonised, the other sides sanctified, and the public in other countries often encouraged to believe that Serbs alone were responsible for atrocities and all other parties were blameless."
Dunkley was concerned with the growing tendency of reporters to reflect their emotional involvement in their reporting. "From there it is only a step," said Dunkley, "and perhaps not a conscious one, to the selection and manipulation of the facts to favour one side."
Dunkley cites a particular case of media coverage where the journalism of attachment may have produced outrageous disinformation that irreversibly distorted world opinion about the Bosnian war. After unconfirmed press reports of Serb-run "concentration camps" in Bosnia, a British team from Independent Television News (ITN) visited the Trnopolje refugee camps on August 5, 1992. A single shot from their footage, a closeup showing an emaciated Muslim behind barbed wire, was presented as "proof" of the existence of Nazi style concentration camps. The heavily cropped picture was shown in newspapers and television the following day, giving rise to the image of the Serbs as the new Nazis of the Balkans. Only years later, after the ITN pictures had precipitated U.S. military intervention in Bosnia, did the true story of Trnopolje emerge.
The town of Trnopolje had been taken by Serbian units in May 1992. Many Muslim inhabitants had been driven out and were seeking refuge in a school building, a community center and the open area behind both buildings in Trnopolje. There the reporters shot the pictures that would have worldwide impact. The most striking was that of an emaciated man, Fikret Alic, standing shirtless in a group of Muslims behind what appeared to be a barbed wire fence.
The image of Alic behind barbed wire told its own story. In England, , the August 7 Daily Mail headlined the picture "The Proof" and the Daily Mirror captioned the photograph "Belsen '92'". Some newspapers actually added concentration camp watchtowers to the picture to make sure that the implication was clear. In the United States, ABC-TV News introduced a report about the camps with the comment: "Faces and bodies that hint at atrocities of the past. But this is not history, this is Bosnia. Pictures from the camps: A glimpse into Genocide."
In an article entitled, "How Media Misinformation Led to Bosnian Intervention," George Kenney, former State Department desk officer for Yugoslavia, told how ITN's pictures of the Trnopolje camp precipitated war. "The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of Western troops," said Kenney, "coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was widely assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje refugee collection center in August 1992."
Kenney explained that ITN's coverage produced a wave of sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs from international organizations, followed by the threat of military force. Roused by the barbed wire picture, the British government made 1,800 soldiers available for deployment in Bosnia, and Bill Clinton requested military action against the Serbs during his electoral campaign.
The ITN report at Trnopolje was the perfect example of the Journalism of Attachment, as video journalists sought to enlist the public's support for one side of a civil war. Four and a half years after the famous ITN pictures were shot, Thomas Deichman, a journalist for the German magazine LM, discovered serious problems with the ITN report.
"The simple problem is that the image of the barbed wire itself in Trnopolje was misleading," wrote Deichman. "The reality is that Alic was not encircled by a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding the Trnopolje camp. The barbed wire was only around a small compound next to the camp. It had been erected before the war to protect agricultural material from thieves. The ITN team got its pictures by filming the camp and the Muslims from inside this compound, taking pictures through the compound fence. Thus, the Bosnian Muslims were actually standing outside the area encircled by barbed wire. The unedited ITN rushes that I acquired clearly reveal the location from which the famous pictures were taken. Also, the Tribunal in The Hague and the ICRC confirmed that there was no barbed wire around the camp."
In viewing the recently released unedited video footage from local TV crews who accompanied the ITN crew during its visit to Trnopolje one notices immediately that the "barbed wire" through which the ITN pictures were taken was in fact thin chicken wire, with only a strand of barbed wire at the very top. It is also clear that the assembled Muslims are not confined behind wire of any kind. It is the camera crew that has located itself behind a short stretch of wire fence in order to shoot pictures of the Muslims in the open field beyond. The film shows that ITN journalist Penny Marshall did not just walk up to the fence and meet the emaciated Fikret Alic. Instead, she first inquired whether anyone in the group of refugees spoke English. A man stepped forward, and Marshall asked his name. "My name is Mehmet," he answered. The following conversation transpired.
Marshall: How did you come to be here?
Mehmet: I think it's very quiet. Nothing wrong, but very hot.
Marshall: Do you sleep outside?
Mehmet: No, no, inside. [Points to building in background]
Marshall: Do they treat you badly?
Mehmet: No, no, very kind.
Marshall: Very kind?
Mehmet: Very kind, very kind.
Marshall: How did you come here? Are you a fighter?
Mehmet: In a bus. With the bus.
Marshall: Are you a fighter?
Mehmet: No, no.
Marshall: They came to your house and took you. [A statement, not a question.]
Mehmet: Yes, yes.
Marshall: Do you feel safe here?
Mehmet: I think it's very safe, but it's very hot. Other things are fine.
Marshall: This man is very thin. [Motions to a thin Muslim man.]
Mehmet: I think all people are not the same.
[A male questioner off camera intervenes and asks if Mehmet is a prisoner of war.]
Mehmet: No, no. We are in a refugee camp, not prisoners.
[The male questioner asks if Mehmet could get on a bus and go to Banja Luka.]
Mehmet: It depends on the civil government.
Marshall: You cannot leave here?
Mehmet: Not now, not now.
Marshall: Where are the women and children?
Mehmet: In their homes.
[Male voice off camera asks again whether Mehmet is a prisoner.]
Mehmet: It's not a prison. It's a refugee camp.
Clearly, neither the function of the Trnopolje camp nor the events surrounding the appearance of the ematiated Muslim were accurately presented in the media. Journalists around the world had manipulated the ITN footage to mislead the public about the nature of a Balkan civil war. What came to be known as "The Picture the Fooled the World" precipitated a disasterous escalation of military conflict in the Balkans that proceeds apace.
Jounalist Thomas Deichman writes, "There is a trend in which journalists take sides in conflicts and adopt a moral mission, rather than doing their traditional job as war reporters. This trend has brought forward a new professional code of conduct about what can and can not be said. The moral agenda of journalists has created an orthodoxy that allows no challenge to their stories, even when the facts are in error. If you question the basis for such crusades, you risk becoming a target of smear campaigns, and, more important, you are silenced.
Commission of Inquiry
c/o International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
