Media War on the Truth: Report on Serbian War

Douglas E. Cowan
Department of Sociology/Center for Religious Studies
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Originally published as an "Ideas" column in The Calgary Herald, June 12, 1999.

On May 29, the National Post newspaper devoted an entire section to the current Balkan
crisis. Post editors declared the 24-page collection of articles and pictures: "A full
account of the Kosovo conflict and the bombing of Yugoslavia." On the insert's first page
was a well known picture: a grim-faced man identified as a Serb soldier striding past a
burning shed. Below him, the introductory material told readers they could expect "an in-depth
look at the war in the Balkans—-its history, its weaponry, its strategies and its
tragedies."

On Page 1 of the newspaper, the headline read: "The most comprehensive, authoritative
package you'll read about the crisis in Kosovo." As the old joke goes, though, there was
good news and bad news in this. The good news is that, very likely, it was the "most
authoritative, comprehensive package" most Canadians will read in the mainstream
press.

That was also the bad news.

Despite its high-toned rhetoric, what the reader was given was little more than a classic
exercise in propaganda, which may be described as the careful management of
information in support of particular institutional goals. There are more technical
definitions available, but this will serve to demonstrate the concepts.

In this case, the institutional goal is Canadian support for our participation in the NATO
war against Yugoslavia. And, reflecting that goal, the Post special report managed
information about the conflict no differently than information has been organized,
framed, and presented since the "humanitarian intervention" began nearly twelve weeks
ago. That is, the agenda appeared not so much to explain how we got into a war against
Yugoslavia, as why getting into that war was the right thing to do.
“Propaganda Machine fuelled public acquiescence in war against Serbs”

There is often a colloquial understanding that propaganda is, by definition, information
which is utterly false, a rhetorical way of dismissing that with which we disagree. It is,
however, a much more complex phenomenon. More often than not, propaganda is less
the generation of untruths (although this certainly occurs), than it is the careful
manipulation of partial truths. It is the choice between information which is revealed and
that which is hidden. This manipulation draws on the beliefs and values of its target
audience and works to align those with whatever institutional goals it serves. The main
purpose of propaganda, then, is to tap the existing prejudices of its target audience and
thereby motivate the opinion and behavior of that audience in favor of those
institutional goals. Goals may be political, economic, commercial, religious or, as in this
case, military and interventionist.

In the case of Kosovo, the existing prejudice tapped into is our unwillingness to sit idly by
while humanitarian crises unfold before us. Notwithstanding that we do sit idly by as any
number of situations equal to (and in some instances considerably greater than) pre-bombing
Kosovo unfold, if there was a slogan for this war it was surely "We can't simply
stand by and do nothing!"

And this slogan appealed to our very best instincts as human beings—our extant
prejudice that we are honorable, moral, rational people. The management of
information renders the situation so simplistic, however, that we are led to believe the
only option in Kosovo was a massive military intervention, followed very possibly by a
ground war. In support of this main purpose, a wide variety of tools has been employed
to manage and manipulate information. These include, but are not limited to:

• Demonizing the official enemy in a given conflict (witness the April 19 Newsweek
cover declaring Slobodan Milosevic "The Face of Evil");
• Employing anecdotal atrocities to support institutional actors (i.e., the constant
allegations of Serbian barbarity);
• Carefully bounding the debate along clearly understood lines by consistently
highlighting certain kinds of information while omitting or suppressing data which
conflicts with institutional aims;
• Blatantly manufacturing information which supports those aims.

In the context of the Kosovo crisis, let us consider briefly the last two.

Bounding the debate ensures that only specific types of information are permissible; with
the exception of occasional "blue moon" op-ed pieces, all other questions regarding the
war are simply excluded from the discussion.

Reporting is reduced to how long the war will last, how effective the air assault has been,
the plight of the refugees, and whether ground troops will follow the bombardment.

Questions directed to NATO leaders about the fundamental morality or legality of the war
in the first place, or the measure to which the NATO bombing is responsible for that
flood of refugees, are rarely asked and even more rarely reported. This process allows for
very complex situations and circumstances to be rendered in terms which are simplistic,
reductionist, and, therefore, easily captured in a headline or a soundbite. Alexander
Rose, for example, a Post staff writer who has ostensibly "untangled the years of
diplomatic wrangling and political brinksmanship that led NATO to its first-ever
declaration of war," sets the agenda for this simplification in the first few paragraphs of
his long lead article in the Post insert.

He compares the two sides in the conflict as "a venerable military alliance composed of
the world's mightiest states, equipped with modern weaponry and fortified by moral
affirmation of its cause" (i.e., NATO) and "a small, poor Balkan country." The rhetorical
agenda is clear: NATO is venerable—-that is, revered, dignified, and honorable; NATO is
modern; NATO has the moral high ground. By contrast, Yugoslavia is small, poor, and,
by implication, it lacks the qualities brought to the conflict by the U.S. and its
confederates.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this kind of restriction in NATO's war against
Yugoslavia, has been the ongoing omission of information which might taint public
support for that war. These omissions maintained the illusion that the war was
proceeding according to plan. For example, early on, the target list for NATO was made
very clear: military and paramilitary targets only would be attacked with precision guided
munitions. Clean, exact—-in a word, surgical.

Yet, when civilian targets have been hit, these have been completely unreported or have
been so underreported as to have no impact. Where there has been public NATO
admission of responsibility in a few of these instances—-the train at Grdelica, the refugee
column on the road between Prizren and Djakovica, the Chinese embassy, or the village
of Korisa—-reporting of the incidents has virtually disappeared within a day or two,
replaced in almost every instance with more stories about Kosovar refugees and further
statements of principle from NATO leaders.

If they are raised at all, questions about the fundamental nature of the bombing
campaign—- e.g., that it is demonstrably not "surgical" and not "precise"—-are answered
with vague NATO assertions about "legitimate military targets" and "imprecise
intelligence." While one might wonder about the former, of the latter there seems little
doubt.

Photographic coverage of the war as it has appeared in both the Calgary Herald and the
National Post follows this same profile. This coverage has been limited, by and large, to
the plight of the Kosovar refugees—-those the bombs we drop are intended to help.

Not nearly as much visual material exists of other events in the war. For example, in
Herald editions from April 12 to June 4, nearly 65 per cent of all related photos
(excluding portraits of key players) depicted refugees in one way or another; the other 35
per cent was split between what we might call target and casualty photos (20 per cent),
weaponry (four per cent), and miscellaneous other (11 per cent).

Clearly, the photographic record of the war against Yugoslavia has been weighted in
favor of the refugee situation, which serves the institutional agenda very nicely. In the
National Post, the situation is somewhat more balanced: slightly more than 40 per cent of
all photos are refugee-related; weaponry is more in evidence with 14 per cent; and
targets/other is evenly split at 23 per cent each.

Again, though, refugee-related photographs dominate. While there were one or two
photos each of the "accidents" noted above, there are none of other NATO "mistakes": the
Belgrade post office and two downtown banks; hospitals and health centers in Belgrade,
Rakovica, Nis, Leskovac, Valjevo and others; monasteries at Gracanica, Rakovica, Zemun,
Pancevo and others; the agricultural complexes at Dulac, Kursumlija, and Kula; a dairy
farm in Pester.

Of the last, a Greek brief on NATO war crimes to the International Criminal Tribunal
wonders: "By what stretch of the imagination can 220 milk cows . . . be deemed
‘legitimate military targets?'"

There are also the stories about which we have heard little or nothing:

NATO's use of conventional, unguided gravity bombs, which are, by definition, less
discriminating in their targeting, and which make up as much as 30 per cent of the NATO
munitions. Among these so-called "dumb bombs" are the notorious "cluster bombs"—-
larger "mother bombs" which release hundreds of smaller "bomblets" over a wide area.
Often mistaken for toys by children, these are completely indiscriminate antipersonnel
munitions.

Nothing has been said about the use of depleted uranium ammunition in the Balkans.
Almost twice as dense as lead, depleted uranium is used in the ammunition supplied to
antitank aircraft such as the A-10 "Warthog." It is considered by many to be low-intensity
nuclear warfare, and has been linked to stillbirths, birth defects, childhood leukemia, and
other forms of cancer. In addition, DU residue has been linked to the condition called
"Gulf War Syndrome" which has affected close to 100,000 U.S. and British service people
since the end of 1991.

On May 2, the Herald reported (with photo) on the hundreds of people who marched in
London to protest neo-Nazi violence. This article shares the page with much of that day's
Kosovo news, yet there is no mention of the 5000 people who marched in Vancouver the
day before shouting "Stop the bombing–negotiate peace!" This rally, the largest since the
APEC summit eighteen months ago, "capped a month of activities against the war." There
was no coverage of this.

Likewise, there has been no mention in the mainstream media that reporters may have
known about a U.S. plan to create a pretext for a war against Yugoslavia, that reporters
were sworn to "deep background confidentiality" about the fact that the U.S. "intentionally
set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that's what
they're going to get."

The official pretext for the war has always been Serbian intransigence in the face of
Western offers of peace; that there may have been other circumstances and other
agendas, and that reporters knew of these but did not speak out, suggests, as media
commentator Norman Solomon has noted, that news reporting has chosen to serve "a
function more akin to stenography than journalism." In addition to the omission of
information, there is also its blatant manufacture. This is the "big lie" of propaganda. In
the Gulf War it was the putative "testimony" of Nayirah Al-Sabah, the daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. who posed as a nurse from Kuwait City and regaled
Congress with lurid tales of Iraqi soldiers spilling babies out of incubators in order to
ship the equipment back to Iraq. These stories were later found to have been scripted by
an American public relations firm retained by the Kuwaiti royal family to build support
for a military intervention in the Gulf.

In Kosovo, the three most prominent examples of manufactured information appear to be
the alleged January massacre at Racak, the reported presence of mass graves in Kosovo,
and the ostensible conversion of a Pristina sports stadium into a concentration camp
holding up to 100,000 Kosovar Albanians. Consider the first.

The National Post insert describes Racak, a small village twenty kilometers southwest of
Pristina, as "the turning point," the event which "focused the world's attention" and
"spurred NATO into action."

The headline reads: "Evil visited Racak, extinguishing life." Juliette Terzieff, a freelance
journalist based in Bulgaria and reportedly one of the first on the scene, is the author of
the article.

She describes what is now the official NATO story of events at Racak: "bodies stretched
out in a blood-filled gully" (apparently she almost missed the appearance of William
Walker, the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's
verification team, "so preoccupied was I with not stepping on any outstretched limbs or
congealed blood"); shell casings "littered everywhere"; and Walker's words, a "crime
against humanity."

In the West, this became the accepted version of events—-as Post writer Rose notes in
his lead piece, one of the war's "memorable images." The problem with this image is that
it may be simply that—an image. Less than a week after the incident, serious questions
were being raised about whether a "massacre" had occurred at all. It is not contested that
there was a Serbian security operation in Racak on January 15; the Serbs informed a
camera team from Associated Press TV and invited them to film the action and
journalists reported that a battle took place between the security forces and elements of
the UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army) which were dug in on the hillsides.

After several hours, a police report to Pristina indicated that fifteen UCK "terrorists" had
been killed at Racak, and a cache of weapons seized. Following the Serbians, the
television crew left the village at 3:30 p.m. An hour later, a French journalist met
representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation there "chatting calmly
with three middle-aged Albanians in civilian clothes." They told the journalist that they
were "unable to evaluate the battle toll." It was not until 9 o'clock the next morning that
the "memorable image" of corpses lined up in the ditch was discovered. According to
Renaud Girard, a reporter for Le Figaro, when questioned all the Albanian witnesses in
Racak provided identical evidence: about midday on the 15th, Serbian police forced their
way into homes and separated the men from the women. The men were led to a hilltop
and executed. The next morning, when Racak was under UCK control once more, the
Organization for Security and Co-operation was invited in and led to the massacre site.

Acknowledging that Walker's condemnation of the "atrocity" was "total, irrevocable,"
Christophe Chatelot, another French journalist writing in Le Monde, raised several
questions about Racak.

"How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward
the execution site while they were constantly under fire from [KLA] fighters? How could
the ditch located on the edge of Racak have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar
with the surroundings who were present before nightfall? Or by the observers who were
present for over two hours in this tiny village?"

Contradicting Terzieff's report, Chatelot wonders, "Why so few cartridges around the
corpses, so little blood in the hollow road where twenty-three people are supposed to
have been shot at close range with several bullets in the head?
Rather, weren't the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police gathered
into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect on
public opinion?"

That there were dead in Racak is not at issue. How those people died, where and under
what circumstances is. According to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee,
Racak became the "trigger" for a NATO military intervention. Yet the facts of the
"massacre" are highly questionable.

Why should we care that the information presented to us in the media is managed in
these ways? There are a number of reasons, but consider these. Because we are not in
possession of all the relevant data (or as much of the relevant data as possible), full
discussion of the issue and an effective range of decision-making around it are not
possible. Since it is widely regarded as the trigger for the war against Yugoslavia, the
question, "was there really a massacre in Racak?" is one to which we might reasonably
expect an accurate answer.

But, since hard data supporting the assertion that there was has not been supplied—-we
have accepted the "fact" of the massacre merely through continual reiteration—-how can
we be expected to come to informed decisions about our role in the war? We can't. And
so we lose the ability to participate meaningfully, thereby abdicating our responsibility in
the situation. In many ways, the ideological management of a society (however large or
small the society) represents the "dumbing" of that society, the gradual erosion of a
people's fundamental ability to make rational judgments based on a reasonable range
of data and options.

This is particularly important when the populace so identifies with the propaganda that it
ceases to be regarded as propaganda at all. In this case, the audience has come to
believe that the particular management of information with which it has been presented
actually represents that broader range of data and options.

According to the introduction to the National Post's special section on the war against
Yugoslavia, more than a dozen journalists worked for more than two months to produce
"the most comprehensive, authoritative examination of the crisis in Kosovo yet to appear
in any newspaper."

Once again, however, as the old joke goes . . .

Douglas E. Cowan
University of Missouri-Kansas City
©1999