"Journalists are like birds sitting on a telephone wire. When one flies away, all the others follow and flock over to the next wire".
This statement by American ex-president Lyndon Johnson depicts precisely the way in which many Western media described the war in the Balkans. A few months ago, polemics on this issue were conducted in the Swiss Die Weltwoche magazine. Using that material and some new items, Klaus Bittermann made the collection "Serbia Must Die".
This title reflects the tone prevailing in the writings of many Western journalists. These "media crusaders", argues Obrad Kesic, have become "volunteers in the propaganda war of the Bosnian government". In the United States, it was primarily the liberals who believed they were fighting against a new Holocaust and a Western policy of compliance. In Germany and Austria, regardless of their political commitments, journalists were criticizing "Serbian tank communism". Mira Beham writes that Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Spiegel with their "clearly cut and seemingly argumented truth were holding the lead in this, backed by TV coverage exclusively focused on dramaticism". First of all, the publisher of FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, Johann Georg Reismuller "deliberately kept neglecting the genesis of the conflict": economic, political and social crisis, in which the elites on all sides replaced communist ideology with nationalism, in order to preserve their own power. German journalists, as put forward by Mira Beham, supported "one misanthropic nationalism in order to fight against another misanthropic nationalism".
Such reporting had fatal political consequences in terms of premature German recognition of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991. In certain instances, violence in the war was provoked only upon Western media reporting, writes Zeljko Vukovic, former correspondent of the Serbian opposition newspaper Borba from Sarajevo. False news on the alleged massacres provoked reprisals: "Much happened first in the media, and only after that in reality". There were many newspaper hoaxes, first of all because many journalists were constantly relying on one source only. In a media war this is intolerable negligence. Dorothea Razumovsky reports on television coverage showing a Serbian grandmother with an Orthodox cross at her grandson's funeral. The comment said: "A Bosnian child, a Bosnian woman, a typical Muslim funeral". Obrad Kesic recollects CNN's report "Sarajevo shelled by Serbian artillery" in July, 1992. The pictures, however, actually depicted the Croat shelling of Trebinje, a city controlled by the Serbs. Peter Brock criticizes Newsweek for publishing on the front page of its August 17 issue a picture of a starved man represented as a Muslim, while actually he was a Serb.
Brock had to publish a correction. In January, in his article in Die Weltwoche magazine, which initiated the polemics then, he also claimed that this was the headline of Time magazine. Brock's rather careless manner of expression has provoked many polemics. His persistent justification of last year's rejection of the Vance-Owen Plan by the Bosnian Serbs still remains problematic. Brock's contribution reflects a weakness characterizing the whole book. A pretentious subtitle "Truth and Lies in the Yugoslav Civil War" should also allow journalists on the Muslims' and Croats' side to take the floor. Only then would the polemics in Die Weltwoche magazine become authentic. Who holds a deed on truth? Instead of this, Wiglaf Droste can make accusations against his political journalistic opponents for "impotent, alternative - blood-thirsty jabbering and murderous intentions". Such judgments do not exactly testify to competence.
Still, this book impels one to think about the role of our media, which in
their ostensible diversity at times are alarmingly uniform - as in
Johnson's image about a flock of birds.